The Press Council has considered whether its Standards of Practice were breached by the publication of an article headed “THURSDAY CHATTERBOX” by The Daily Telegraph on 2 May 2019 online. The article described a “case of a US teacher fired due to a trans violation” and said a teacher in America was fired after a “split second decision to call a trans student ‘her’”. It said: “The student was reportedly about to walk into a wall when the teacher instinctively said ‘stop her’. And so his ridiculous fight to keep his job began. That’s it … ‘stop her’, and a man’s livelihood is under fire. Those split-second safety calls are always problematic”.
The article included a thumbnail to a video on YouTube with the words “look out faggot” appearing twice, once in prominent capital letters. The video playable in the thumbnail was of a scene from a television sitcom in which a man sees a piano about to fall on another man walking down a pavement and yells “look out faggot” in an apparent attempt to save the other man while quickly moving to push the man out of its path, narrowly saving him from injury.
The Council noted that the word “faggot” is most used as a pejorative term to describe gay men. The Council considered that, notwithstanding the satirical nature of the article, the inclusion of the word in the thumbnail and in the video itself could be read as demeaning and mocking of gay men and, as the article referred to a “trans violation”, to others with diverse sexual orientation, gender identity and sex characteristics. The Council concluded that the publication failed to take reasonable steps to avoid causing substantial offence, distress or prejudice, and there was no sufficient public interest in doing so. Accordingly, General Principle 6 was breached in this respect.