Telling girls they smell fishy as an insult thrown at girls by boys is right back there for me, c1980, much like India Willoughby's comment on Woman's Hour last year that women having hairy legs was dirty.
Is that what's going on here, 1980's boys' insults?
March 2017 Jenni Murray : Jenni Murray: Be trans, be proud — but don’t call yourself a “real woman”
Can someone who has lived as a man, with all the privilege that entails, really lay claim to womanhood? It takes more than a sex change and make-up'
(extract)
"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.
We are taught as boys that assertiveness and aggression are good things. There’s a danger, even now, that I’ll act as a man. In a group of women I can become dominant
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." (continues)
www.thetimes.co.uk/article/be-trans-be-proud-but-dont-call-yourself-a-real-woman-frtld7q5c
this was the article which led to Jenni Murray being publically rebuked by the BBC