Rob Burley, who previously served as the BBC's Director of Political Programmes, has spoken to GB News about how trans lobby groups deployed intimidation as a deliberate strategy to shut down discussion.
According to Mr Burley, anyone who dared raise even minor questions about transgender issues was immediately branded as "transphobic" or "hateful".
He told GB News contributor Will Kingston: "It's a very powerful thing to do, to call people those names and they would rather not get involved, rather step back from it and avoid that than go into a situation where they might be exposed to it, and that was the modus operandi."
The former BBC executive acknowledged that this approach left people "genuinely intimidated," adding that he understood why they felt that way.
Mr Burley recounted his own experience attending a gender-critical feminist gathering in the early stages of the debate, where organisers were forced to announce the venue at the last possible moment due to fears of disruption.
He recalled: "By the time when I got there that evening, there was the most intimidating, brutal, vicious crowd of people shouting obscenities, smashing on the windows."
The women inside had simply gathered to discuss safe spaces and the potential impact of proposed policies, yet faced what Mr Burley described as "a very aggressive lobby."
He explained that this climate of fear extended throughout the media industry, with people "scared by it all over the place, including inside the BBC and other broadcasters".
Ex-BBC editor Rob Burley told GB News how the broadcaster was 'captured' by 'woke ideology'
|GB NEWS
Mr Burley also highlighted the pressure placed on journalists to make statements they believed to be false, referencing someone who said it was "the only part of my job that I'm actually asked to lie."
He explained: "People say, why do you get so why people get so worked up about it? Well, that's the reason to get worked up about it.
"And the other reason, it's a more abstract reason, but it's important is and there's someone quoted in the piece who says 'it's the only part of my job that I'm actually asked to lie'. I'm asked to say something I know isn't true."
Mr Burley added: "And when I realised that in order to accommodate this, these people who walked out of Newsnight that night, the only way to accommodate that viewpoint was to say something that I knew not to be true.
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Mr Burley told GB News that women's concerns were 'thrown under the bus'
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"That's when you smell a rat. Like that is when you think, this is not something we can have track with because that is what it required."
Mr Burley also took aim at the Conservative Party's handling of the issue, which he described as "kind of crazy".
He argued that Tories were so haunted by their historical stance on gay rights that they rushed to demonstrate progressive credentials on transgender matters without proper consideration.
He noted: "You have people like Penny Mordaunt coming to the despatch box and shouting, trans women are women and trans men are men."
The former BBC director pointed to Theresa May's announcement of self-ID policies as Prime Minister, made "without any thought, apparently" and purely to show the party was no longer regressive.
Mr Burley said women's concerns were "thrown under the bus" from the outset, with warnings that blurring these boundaries would enable men to access women's spaces and commit abuse going unheeded.
He expressed bewilderment at how the aggressive campaigning over the past decade had ultimately damaged the very community it claimed to represent, noting that public support for trans people has "collapsed" as a result.
Mr Burley observed: "People don't want them to have certificates saying they've changed their legal gender anymore. They used to be widely supportive."
The warnings from women about the dangers of self-ID had proven accurate, he said, with cases of men gaining access to women and committing sexual assaults.