20/9/22: The BBC’s executive complaints unit (ECU) has said the use of female pronouns for a murder suspect who had only recently begun to identify as a woman fell below the corporation’s standards for accuracy.
The BBC online story of 14 March, headlined “Pensioner arrested after dismembered body found”, said Harvey Marcelin, who previously served more than 50 years in prison for killing two women in the US, had been charged with a murder carried out since her release. The BBC received complaints that the article did not make clear Marcelin had only recently begun to identify as female and had identified as male at the time of the previous killings.
The BBC’s ECU has now said “the omission of this information may have given readers an incomplete understanding of the murderer and their crimes (particularly because gender had been cited as a factor in an earlier parole board hearing) and fell below the BBC’s standards of accuracy”.
However it added that it was satisfied with the addition post-publication of a reference in the 11th paragraph that Marcelin “recently identified as a woman” and that the complaint was therefore resolved.
The BBC previously responded publicly to complaints by stating the use of female pronouns had been within its style guide, which says the term and pronoun “preferred by the person in question” should be used, and that it “may also be appropriate to refer to a transition to make sense of some stories”.
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