Beloved BBC radio broadcaster and host of Woman's Hour is in the doodoo with some remarks about the issue of transgender women:
Jenni Murray: trans women shouldn't call themselves 'real women'
The report goes on to say:
Murray, writing in the Sunday Times magazine, said that she was “not transphobic or anti-trans” and called for respect and protection from bullying and violence equally for “transsexuals, transvestites, gays, lesbians and those of us who hold to the sex and sexual preference assumed at birth”.
However, the piece appeared under the less nuanced heading: “Jenni Murray: Be trans, be proud – but don’t call yourself a ‘real woman’.
The rest of the Graun story repeats Murray's actual argument. As an example:
In the piece Murray wrote of her anger over some trans women who had spoken on the issue, including the late Rev Carol Stone: “Her primary concerns, she told me, were finding the most suitable dress in which to meet her parishioners in her new persona and deciding if she should wear makeup or not.”
“I wondered when Carol would experience what so many newly ordained women had heard from fellow priests as they passed through the vestry. ‘Pulpit pussy’, they told me, was the favoured insult, and they found it demeaning, disgusting and it hurt.
“It was news to Carol that life as a woman, especially a middle-aged woman, stepping into male territory in which she was unwelcome would be extremely tough. I prayed Carol would not find it so hard. Experience told me otherwise. It wasn’t going to be all about frocks and makeup. It was about sexual politics and feminism – ideas of which she seemed woefully unaware.”
So is the Graun eating its fellow dog with this story, blaming the Sunday Times for misleading journalism? If so, how ironic is that? The irony is compounded by the Garuniad repeating the approach with its own story and shouty headline, of course.
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