The BBC’s strange obsession with boys in dresses

Even for someone who has closely followed the gender wars over the past decade, it is hard to fully appreciate just how much barely disguised sexualised content about boys dressed as girls has been placed at the centre of sympathetic and celebratory BBC programming in that time.

What is striking is not simply the huge number of programmes and articles involved. It is the way in which some of these children were presented as attractive, glamorous, desirable or sexually mature figures, while the adults surrounding them were almost never challenged about the obvious safeguarding questions.

Recently, I stumbled across an entry on the BBC website for ‘Sweet Sixteen: A Transgender Story’, which it describes as an ‘intimate coming-of-age film [that] follows a Welsh transgender teenager as she turns 16’.

The 39-minute documentary, which was shown on BBC One in 2017, is no longer on iPlayer, but it remains on YouTube. Watching it is remarkable now, as it includes numerous red flags.

It contains a particularly extraordinary sequence in which Llyr, who was 15 for part of the film, attends a transgender beauty pageant. Cross-dressing adult men judge and rank young male contestants who are dressed and presented as girls.

The question that immediately arises is one that the programme itself fails to ask: why is a public-service broadcaster filming and broadcasting a competition in which adult men are assessing the appearance of children who are being presented in a sexualised, adult-coded context?

The programme has since been uploaded to YouTube by numerous third parties. Beneath several copies are comments from adult men telling the teenage participant that he is “so pretty”, saying they have messaged him on Facebook and describing him as their “dream wife”.

The BBC cannot be held responsible for material uploaded or comments posted by strangers years after its broadcast. But their existence shows precisely why the original programme demanded far more searching safeguarding questions than it received.

It turned out this was just one of three documentaries the BBC made about this boy. The first was broadcast more than a year earlier, and the third in 2020, when he went by the name Lily.

It is remarkable how much the BBC has done this. This is just a tiny fraction of the videos and articles it has published in recent years about children who ‘perform’ drag.

Still on the BBC website today is the video ‘The 11-year-old doing drag’. It is a feature about the cross-dressing boy ‘Desmond is Amazing’, an 11-year-old boy dancing for money from adults in gay bars. Famously, Tom O’Carroll, the former chairman of the Paedophile Information Exchange (PIE), described him as “hot”.

Also in 2019, BBC News produced a video and an article about a 12-year-old boy from Corby who ‘performs’ as a drag queen at Pride events and was named a prom queen. The BBC was so impressed by this that it then created a section on cross-dressing boys who become prom queens for BBC Bitesize, its online study resource for schoolchildren.

Between 2018 and 2019, BBC News ran at least three separate stories, and at least one video, about a 14-year-old boy who got to ‘perform’ at Drag World after his school said his alter ego was not appropriate.

Again in 2019, the BBC produced a film that argued for young children to be exposed more to drag queens.

The BBC produced a video about a 12-year-old boy who was described as a “totally and utterly incredible human being” simply because he does drag.

An hour-long documentary about a 16-year-old drag queen, which was first broadcast in 2011, appeared on BBC One again in 2019.

In 2022, the BBC published the article ‘Cherry West: From schoolboy Sam to drag teen’, about a boy called ‘Cherry’ who did private online shows for men from the age of 13 onwards.

The same year, BBC News ran a story and video about a 16-year-old boy who became a hit ‘performing’ as a drag queen at Pride events around the country.

In April 2025, BBC News and BBC Radio Berkshire interviewed Jacob Franklin, a 14-year-old from Windsor making his directorial debut. His film, Dragged Through Time, was described as exploring 1,000 years of gay history and contemporary LGBTQ+ life. Franklin said its dream sequences would include drag queens played by him. Sir Ian McKellen agreed to appear in the film as “Great Uncle Peter”, a semi-closeted older relative of its protagonist. 

BBC Radio Berkshire and BBC News decided to promote the boy beneath a photograph of McKellen sitting next to him on a sofa. Introduced as ‘openly gay’, the interviewer talked to the child about homosexuality in Ancient Greece. The BBC interviewer even makes it clear to the boy that he is gay as well.

There have also been numerous BBC News videos about young people with disabilities, typically Down’s syndrome, who ‘perform’ as drag queens. There have also been feature videos on one drag queen with cystic fibrosis, one with dyspraxia and one with diabetes.

And that is just children who do drag. It is, of course, ‘trans children’ like Llyr, later Lily, that the BBC has been most obsessed with. There are simply far too many features to showcase here, but, for example, the Victoria Derbyshire programme alone ran at least three segments about the same two ‘trans children’, friends Lily and Jessica, aged six and eight.

The obvious issue here is the pattern of editorial choices. Again and again, the BBC did more than simply report that these children existed. It celebrated them, promoted them, described them in terms normally associated with adult performers, gave them prominent platforms and, in some cases, placed them in environments in which adult sexual attention was an entirely foreseeable consequence.

The significance of these programmes is not that the BBC once made a documentary about a transgender teenager, or that it once interviewed a boy who performed in drag. A broadcaster with a public-service remit is inevitably going to report on controversial and unfamiliar aspects of modern life.

What is difficult to explain is the sheer consistency of the editorial approach. Over a period of years, the BBC repeatedly presented boys dressed as girls, children performing as drag queens and children identifying as transgender not simply as subjects of reporting, but as figures to be celebrated, admired and promoted.

The safeguarding questions that should have accompanied this coverage were strikingly absent. How old is the child? Who is watching? How are adults interacting with them? What happens when a child’s image is placed online? Is a child being encouraged into an adult performance culture that he or she is too young to understand? And what responsibility does the broadcaster have for the foreseeable consequences of giving that child a national platform?

Those questions become particularly difficult to ignore when the material involves adult audiences, beauty competitions, online performances for adults commenting sexually on images of minors.

The BBC may argue that it was reflecting social change. But public-service broadcasting is not supposed to be a passive mirror. Its journalists and editors make choices about what to film, what to commission, what to celebrate and how to frame it.

The question, therefore, is not simply why the BBC made so many programmes about gender and drag. It is why, when the subjects were children, the corporation so often seemed more interested in affirmation and spectacle than in asking the awkward questions safeguarding demanded.

A decade on from when this began in earnest, those editorial choices deserve considerably more scrutiny than they have ever received.