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UK journalist Louise Tickle wrote an open letter to the editor of the Guardian after seeing that news article. Her entire letter is too long to post here, but here main arguments are (bold mine):

Sometimes people suggest that the anger around this kind of factually inaccurate reporting is overblown, performative, unkind, or petty. It is not. Reporting the opposite of the truth as though it was fact has extremely serious repercussions. Though I would have hoped not to have to spell them out, it is so shocking to me that this piece was published in the Guardian that I feel I must. The following list is non-exhaustive:

- News reporters should only report facts, and newspapers should only publish facts in their news sections. To do this, reporters, editors and news management need to be able to recognise what a fact is, and how to distinguish facts from beliefs. If they can't, this is not the job for them, as they will actively deceive their readers, diminish trust in the media, and undermine the ability of journalists who do strive for accuracy to be trusted to report on serious crime and hold power to account.

- The public record is of vital importance in any democratic society (perhaps even more so when democracy and society are under strain). Falsifying the public record because of certain people's beliefs is opposite of the role of a news organisation, and destructive to the public interest.

- This kind of reporting encourages the wrong perception that women are suddenly more aggressive, and increasingly responsible for violent, male-perpetrated crimes. The opposite is the truth, and it is particularly disrespectful and upsetting when women suffer shocking levels of male violence and sexual assault for them to be so blatantly traduced.

- Many news organisations ran the same PA generated story: I think however that only the Guardian did not use the word "transgender" (in the article's first iteration), and from what I could see only the Guardian used the word 'woman' in its original headline. If beliefs are presented as facts — for instance, by the police in press releases, or by PA, in wire copy — it is journalists' job to challenge that, and report the facts along with the response received to their challenge, so that the public understands the reality of what is happening in society.

- Accurate crime statistics are vital for the development of public policy, for victim support and funding, for prevention of future crimes and the protection of future victims. If we cannot accurately report the sex of violent perpetrators, then journalism has failed victims, and will fail future victims. Changing the facts is not just unethical in principle — it has the real world consequence of making risk assessments and safeguarding meaningless.

- Men carry out 90% of all homicides. Violence against women and girls is overwhelmingly perpetrated by men. Violence against men, as in the murder described in this article, is also overwhelmingly perpetrated by men. Sexual crimes against women and men are also primarily perpetrated by men. It is hugely disrespectful of all victims of male violence to write an article that so wrongly describes the perpetrator of their attack — in this case, the person who ended the victim's life. It was a man who committed this murder. Not a woman.