Former journalist tells tribunal she faced discrimination at paper because she is trans

John Witherow, editor of the Times, has rejected allegations his newspaper publishes inaccurate, biased articles that are hostile to trans men and women.

Witherow was giving evidence at an employment tribunal in Edinburgh brought by Katherine O’Donnell, a former night editor of the Scottish edition of the Times, who claims she was overlooked for promotion and discriminated against because she is a trans woman.

O’Donnell’s barrister, Robin White, accused Witherow of failing to follow the editors’ code, a voluntary industry-wide code of conduct on standards, which warns against inaccurate, misleading and prejudiced reporting including about a person’s sex or gender identity.

O’Donnell had written to Witherow and another Times executive in August 2017 to complain about the paper’s intolerant reporting on trans people and its damaging impact on her wellbeing.

White likened one satirical Christmas feature by Giles Coren to the controversy over a tweet last week about the royal baby by the broadcaster Danny Baker, which led to Baker’s sacking.

Coren’s piece, There came three wise people of non-binary gender, referred to a mother identifying her new baby “as male without consulting it” and referred to someone “who could easily have been a woman or something in between”.

Reminding the Times editor the code warns against pejorative language, White, a specialist employment lawyer who is also a trans woman, asked Witherow why an apparent joke about ethnicity was unacceptable but one about gender identity was fine.

Witherow said he did not think the Baker case was comparable but said he would have edited out Coren’s “something in between” line. “Not a very good joke, is it?” he said.

Witherow admitted he would also have rejected one story from a Times Scotland reporter about an apparent row over allowing trans men and women to share single gender cabins on the overnight sleeper from London to Scotland. The piece was based on a tweet and a comment on Mumsnet website.

“I don’t think this is the finest journalism,” Witherow said. “If I had seen it, you know what I would have done? I would have spiked it.”

Witherow added, however, that those two cases were very rare. He said the paper published 60,000 articles a year and was proud of its high standards of accuracy, and the seriousness with which it treated errors of fact.

Denying that there was any anti-transgender bias in the Times, Witherow insisted that the organisation was “very sympathetic”, adding that the magazine had run a number of positive articles and that an offer had been made to a “trans lobby group” within the past year to write for the paper, although this had not been taken up.

“We are doing our best to cover what is a very acrimonious debate as best we can. There have been some aberrations I acknowledge but I think that is inevitable when producing so much copy at short notice.”

O’Donnell is suing News UK, the publishers of the Times, for unfair dismissal and discrimination on the grounds of her gender reassignment.

She has accused colleagues of showing discriminatory attitudes but has also singled out a long series of news and comment articles which she says were critical of or hostile to trans people.

O’Donnell, who was made redundant in January 2018, argues that those articles made the Times a discriminatory workplace for her as a trans journalist. White believes that if the tribunal upholds that argument, it could affect all news organisations’ wider output in the UK.

At the conclusion of his evidence, Witherow said: “The paper produces so much copy that to highlight a few articles can be misleading about what we do.”

He acknowledged numerous times he could not substantiate many of the facts and details of some articles on trans issues and admitted he did not know the detailed legal differences between the Equalities Act and gender discrimination legislation. He insisted, however, that many comment pieces attacked by White demonstrated a columnist’s opinions and interpretations.