The Trans Advocacy and Complaints Collective (TACC) is proud to announce the launch of our new Media Complaints Collector (MCC) browser extension, now available for both Firefox and Chrome.
The MCC is a grassroots tool designed to empower the public to log, track, and share complaints about transphobic media coverage, especially from outlets that have a long and well-documented history of anti-trans bias. It gives the public a way to push back, together, against a coordinated and accelerating campaign of disinformation, moral panic, and targeted hostility in the UK media.
Many in the trans community and beyond have long suspected what we set out to confirm: that the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) News and Current Affairs suffers from institutional transphobia. To test this assumption, TACC submitted a series of Freedom of Information (FOI) requests to the BBC, specifically asking how many complaints they had received about transphobic content. Each request was denied, citing technicalities, exemptions, or, in the final rejection, the assertion that we were seeking the data for journalistic purposes.
This lack of transparency is no small thing. The BBC is a publicly funded broadcaster. If trans people can’t access information about how often audiences challenge its coverage—or how it responds to such complaints—then it becomes nearly impossible to hold it accountable for biased, harmful narratives.
This is especially troubling given the BBC’s legal and ethical obligation to impartiality. As a publicly funded institution, the BBC is required under its Royal Charter and Ofcom regulations to remain fair, balanced, and non-partisan in its reporting. This includes giving due weight to a range of perspectives and avoiding undue prominence to any one viewpoint, requirements that are clearly not being met in the context of its reporting on trans issues. The BBC’s failure to uphold these standards undermines public trust and violates the core principles that justify its unique funding model.
With only a limited and heavily curated subset of audience complaints ever being made public, we developed the MCC to do what these institutions won’t: track and monitor media accountability. This tool allows us to capture logged formal complaints and document how those complaints are handled, or more often, dismissed.
While building the MCC, we also reviewed the Independent Press Standards Organisation (IPSO) rulings records, the UK’s largest press regulator. What we found was alarming: in over a decade of operation, IPSO has adjudicated on only 132 articles related to trans issues, and the overwhelming majority of those rulings have favoured the publications. That’s 132 decisions in ten years, despite a press landscape that has published thousands of trans-related stories annually, especially in recent years. A vast proportion of those stories—estimates indicate, over 90%—are transphobic.
These institutions are failing. They are either unwilling or structurally incapable of addressing the scale and severity of anti-trans media coverage in the UK.
The MCC is our response. It’s a tool designed not just for individual action, but for collective documentation and accountability. It arms users with the ability to capture and track the complaints process in real time, build a clearer picture of media misconduct, and challenge the systems that obscure and excuse it.
If they won’t count our complaints, we will.
If they won’t stop publishing transphobic misinformation, we’ll start keeping receipts.
Download the MCC today, and join us in demanding the transparency, accountability, and justice that trans people deserve.