This was Jenny Murray's article in the Times last year for which she was publically rebuked by the BBC:
(extracts)
"The first time I felt anger when a man claimed to have become a woman was in December 2000, when the Rev Peter Stone announced he had undergone the radical surgery to transition from male to female and was now called Carol. 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 make-up or not.
Her transition had taken place a mere six years after the Church of England ordained the first 32 women priests, at a time when the idea of a female bishop was still regarded as impossible and when parishes were allowed to refuse a female vicar if there were objections.
I remember asking Carol what she owed those women who had struggled for so long to have their calling to the priesthood acted upon. His calling, as a man, had never been questioned. I had nothing but a blank look and more concerns about clothing. “I know it sounds silly,” she said. “But I’ve nothing to wear.”
Too right it sounded silly. I thought of all those women who had spent years and years challenging what being female had meant as they sat in the pews on a Sunday morning: 2,000 years of institutionalised patriarchy; no woman but a virgin mother and a handful of tortured saints to look up to; women only good for refreshing the flowers, raising the kids and making tea for the vicar."
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 make-up. It was about sexual politics and feminism — ideas of which she seemed woefully unaware."
"The fury that a male-to-female transsexual could be so ignorant of the politics that have preoccupied women for centuries hit me again last year — 16 years after I had met Carol. This time I was speaking to another trans woman, India Willoughby, who had hit the headlines after appearing on the ITV programme Loose Women.
India held firmly to her belief that she was a “real woman”, ignoring the fact that she had spent all of her life before her transition enjoying the privileged position in our society generally accorded to a man. In a discussion about the Dorchester hotel’s demands that its female staff should always wear make-up, have a manicure and wear stockings over shaved legs, she was perfectly happy to go along with such requirements. There wasn’t a hint of understanding that she was simply playing into the stereotype — a man’s idea of what a woman should be.
She described hairy legs on a woman as “dirty”. But hairy legs are not considered dirty in a man. Did she not know that the question of whether a woman should shave her legs or her a rmpits had been a topic of debate among women for an awfully long time? And that to describe a woman who chose not to shave as dirty was insulting and again suggested an ignorance of sexual politics?
Unsurprisingly, my polite and informed line of questioning exposed me to a barrage of criticism on social media. I was a Terf and didn’t understand what Simone de Beauvoir, the author of one of the great feminist tracts, The Second Sex, meant when she wrote: “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.”
As a matter of fact, I have understood perfectly what de Beauvoir meant ever since I read her as a teenage girl. Her subject was that “second sex”. She used the word sex advisedly.
Your sex, male or female, is what you’re born with and determines whether you’ll provide the sperm or the eggs in the reproductive process. What de Beauvoir was analysing was gendered socialisation." (continues)
"Ah yes, the male brain. How often do we hear about the male or female brain and the oft-repeated mantra, applied to males and females alike, “I was born into the wrong body”. Research carried out by the distinguished scientists Cordelia Fine and Lise Eliot can find no evidence for such claims. They hold to the fact that all children are born with the potential to develop their own unique characteristics of behaviour, talent and personality, regardless of biological sex. They say that the idea that the brain and the body are split, meaning it is possible to have the brain of one sex and the body of the opposite, is very recent and is not supported by credible scientific evidence.
So what brings about the desire to switch gender? There are plenty of examples of boys dressing as girls and vice versa. I spent most of my childhood in dungarees because, even then, I could see boys had more freedom and I refused my mother’s exhortations to keep my knees together when I sat. The actor Rupert Everett told The Sunday Times Magazine last year how he dressed exclusively as a girl as a child. “Thank God the world of now wasn’t then because I’d be on hormones and I’d be a woman,” he said. “After 15 I never wanted to be a woman again. It’s nice to be able to express yourself, but the hormone thing, very young, is a big step.”
There’s a lot of fear, though. Numerous professionals in the field refused to talk to me, often quoting the experience of Kenneth Zucker, a Canadian psychologist who specialised in helping children and their families make their decisions about whether the child should transition or not. He was accused of employing the therapeutic tactics once used to persuade gay men that they were not homosexual. He has denied that this was the case. Nevertheless, he lost his job.
The British Medical Association now recommends that its employees do not refer to “expectant mothers”, but instead use the term “pregnant people” so as not to offend transgender people. Meanwhile the more radical trans activists want breast cancer and breastfeeding to be renamed “chest cancer” and “feeding”. Sorry, but I breastfed my kids and it was my breast that was cut off when I had cancer. No debate." (continues)
www.thetimes.co.uk/article/be-trans-be-proud-but-dont-call-yourself-a-real-woman-frtld7q5c