Jenny Murray Sunday Times article March 2017:
'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 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.
Even after women’s ordination had been allowed, the discrimination continued to rage. In 2000, the Rev Vivienne Faull became provost of Leicester Cathedral, the most senior woman in the Church of England at the time. She told me then that the church was awash with believers who thought a woman’s place was in the home or in a pew, wearing a hat. She had to contend with a canon who refused to celebrate services with her and would not receive holy communion from her hand.
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 make-up. It was about sexual politics and feminism — ideas of which she seemed woefully unaware." (continues)
www.thetimes.co.uk/article/be-trans-be-proud-but-dont-call-yourself-a-real-woman-frtld7q5c