Jenni Murray "Changing sex can't make a real woman"

[Freddorika]

'Those who have lived as men, with all the privileges that entails, do not have the shared experience of growing up female.'

Brave and interesting article in the Times.

Link here behind pay wall I think

Sarah Vine "How BBC cowards betrayed Jenni Murray". The TRA's are going to be busy! I think the tide has turned as it's main stream now, Jenni has over whelming support on every story/discussion I've seen. Will the hand maidens start to jump ship, I think they will start.

We can talk about this now in the open without fear. The crime watch story was the icing on the cake. People that shut us down will quite rightly be seen as the bigots not us. Long live free speech dailym.ai/2mgYdaN

Here's an article which could be useful to share if your Facebook feed is full of liberal feminists and you'vw been criticised for sharing Jenni Murray's article and/or viewpoint. It's about interesectionality and global exploitation of women and dismisses identity politics barely mentioning gender.

"For example. I am a Muslim. But I am not religious. I call myself a Muslim for the same reason I call myself a woman – not because I identify with these labels as such but because my experience of life has been largely dictated by being born in this body – what we call a "woman's body" – in an Arab/Muslim culture, and then transplanted to a western culture on the other side of the world.

The oppression I have experienced and may yet be subjected to is based on my body and where I was born. This cannot be erased by something like lack of faith, religious scepticism or gender"

www.smh.com.au/lifestyle/news-and-views/opinion/this-international-womens-day-a-reminder-that-intersectionality-is-not-a-brand-20170307-gut3ha.html

Apologies if I've used wrong terminology or mis-represented the article. I'm new to some of this.

what i worry about is when extreme religious types/bigots/rightwing americans [usually male] etc hijack the feminist concerns and voice on this for their own hateful and intolerant agenda. I've seen that happen several times too. And then of course the feminists get lumped in with the bigots.

it is good that Sarah Vine is writing about it I guess, but the DM - an ants nest of hate and anxiety about anything 'other'.

I agree that it's a pity it's the DM, but at least it's getting out in the mainstream. So many people don't know this is happening or understand the implications.

It pains me to agree with Sarah Vine about anything, but she's 100% right on this.

Libby Purves in The Times doesn't get it. Thinks we should welcome everyone in to womanhood.

"Of all the pointless arguments thrown up by the neurotic first-world culture in which we flail, the one raging between Jenni Murray, her supporters, the handwringing BBC and the transgender community is one of the silliest. Jenni, in a piece that made numerous prudent curtseys to transgender rights, opined that nonetheless those who have changed are not, whatever they may feel, “real” women. This is because they previously had the “privileges” of manhood and didn’t suffer the centuries of discrimination besetting us on the “cisgender” team.

Backing her up, the columnist Angela Epstein writes that unless you have undergone the horrors of female puberty, PMT and the “hot roar” of the menopause, you simply have no right to the title of Woman. She lards on still more nonsense, saying that only biologically born women “can know what it is to howl with despair when the hurt runs so deep. Only they can understand the disappointment when he doesn’t phone. Or play the mind games when he does. Enjoy the solidarity of sisterhood or endure the ferocity of female machinations.”

Good grief. This get-orf-my-land attitude is enough to make any sane female rush for the testosterone patches and get the hell out of such a stifling, perfumed, paranoid, ladies-only safe space. Any identity that depends entirely on persecution — real, imagined or just empathetic — is a road to madness. Jenni Murray has been a powerful senior BBC presenter and journalist for decades: does that disqualify her? Come to that, if suffering discrimination is the main qualification, is the Queen not a woman? And how about all those men who also howl with lovesick despair — girls, are they?

Modern gender-fluid thinking does throw up absurdities, of course. But it also frees and validates the minority of serious transgender people, and just as significantly it allows for individual style and behaviour, whether in some superannuated tomboy like me, or in Grayson Perry. It also reinforces the vital message, which feminism should celebrate, that the differences between genders are not extreme, or even absolute, except in reproductive feasibility.

At 24, reading Jan Morris’s classic memoir of change, Conundrum, I was thrilled to think that this alpha-male foreign correspondent, who ran from Everest base camp with the news of its conquest on Coronation day, wanted to join my gang as a sister. To sniff and bar the door would have felt mad. Which it is. Fight the real wars: FGM, inequality, honour crime..."

Libby Pieces wrote a sympathetic novel from the viewpoint of a transgender individual a few years ago. It's a nice book. But I agree that she's missed the point here. Women are not 'defining themselves by their oppression' (wtf?) but by the fact of female biology, which has consequences that you can't just identify out of.

Oh god, just read her final sentence (inadequate scrolling before). That's the whole bloody pint, Libby, that it's being female, not identifying female, that brings about these horrors.

This get-orf-my-land attitude is enough to make any sane female rush for the testosterone patches and get the hell out of such a stifling, perfumed, paranoid, ladies-only safe space. Any identity that depends entirely on persecution — real, imagined or just empathetic — is a road to madness

Fuck off.

Extremely disappointed by the Libby Purves column - which of course won't lead to any reprimand from the BBC. She seems to be missing the problem of the conflation of gender and sex, and is unaware that the TRA agenda seems either hostile or apathetic towards addressing the real issues such as FGM.

'Gender fluidity' shouldn't really be a problem to anyone - 'gender' can be whatever the heck you want, or completely irrelevant. That's not what this is about. She mentions Grayson Perry of all people - who has stated clearly that 'I am just a bloke in a dress'. I hope he has a bit of a word with her.

Well Libby is protecting her Midweek slot isn't she?

FGM, honour killings, rape as a weapon of war are exclusively things that men do to women.

They don't do them to transwomen.

I don't understand why you can't wish to clarify certain things about biology and the politics/language of sexual oppression, without being called a transphobe. Women are being silenced everywhere.

I actually feel quite sorry for Andrea Daling, who wrote that paper. It looks like someone else has wrote the headline and intro about Craig Hauxwell then have added her paper on.

I expect most articles are heavily edited by a string of editors to fit the newspaper in many ways. My feeling is that some editor somewhere has picked this article up, stuck the crimewatch bit on to make it into current news. The juxtaposition of the real female criminals and the male one, making people throw their hands up and say 'but that is a man', may or may not be deliberate in the light of the coming gender wotsit bill. The writer of the original ironically is a woman

" Fight the real wars: FGM, inequality, honour crime..."

Tush tush. Fight FGM? How trans-exclusive, how unfair, how othering - doesn't she know that some wonen don't have clitorises and mentioning FGM, let alone centering FGM, is literal violence toward sour trans sisters?

Someone should send Libby Purves this link: www.reddit.com/r/SRSDiscussion/comments/28dex9/is_there_a_less_cissexist_way_of_referring_to_fgm/

I thought i'd dreamt it but paris lees is off telling women how they are doing feminism wrong here twitter.com/parislees/status/839192899216687104

oh god.

Excellent response

Brytie - thank you. That was an amazing article.

At 24, reading Jan Morris’s classic memoir of change, Conundrum, I was thrilled to think that this alpha-male foreign correspondent, who ran from Everest base camp with the news of its conquest on Coronation day, wanted to join my gang as a sister. To sniff and bar the door would have felt mad.

Libby Purves' attitude is common among women and explains why liberal feminists have been so eager to welcome transwomen as 'women'. It betrays a kind of Stockholm Syndrome, whereby many women find it irresistibly flattering that men want to join us 'down here' in the lowly female sex-caste.

This sense of flattery so overwhelms their common sense that they never think to ask why some males claim to 'feel female' or what this 'feeling' consists of (hint: often it's because they find it sexually exciting to imagine themselves in the objectified, submissive feminine sex role). They don't notice that most transwomen remain resolutely uninterested in the non-sexualised parts of femininity (putting others' needs and feelings before your own, housework, child care, elder care), while talking about how clothes and lipstick mean they can finally express their 'true selves'.

This attitude also underlies the liberal feminist claim that defining 'woman' as an adult human female 'reduces women to their biology'. The implication seems to be that there is something demeaning about having female biology, and the category of 'woman' needs to be ennobled and enriched by expanding it to include males.

Well obviously Libby's feelings about individual transitioning males should be decisive on the matter.
Will the BBC be reprimanding her for intervening on a matter of controversy as they did with JM?

Hmm. Why is Libby not wondering how to continue to open up the world so that more 'alpha-females' get a shot at being the thrilling foreign correspondents who report from base camp?

Libby Purves' article may be well-meaning but it's essentially bollocks. There is no question that trans women should be afforded respect, support and rights. They can identify as whatever they wish.

The debate rages nonsensically as all this is agreed.

The only matter which isn't agreed is the precise definition of "woman". If we stick to the scientific facts, a "woman" can only be someone who is genetically, biologically female. You can't choose to identify (or not) as that. You are, or you aren't.

Contorting the definition of "women" to encompass those who identify as women and present as women is a nonsense. We're it harmlessly so, perhaps the debate wouldn't be as bitter. But the fact is it is harmful to do this as it impacts on the rights of women. Many examples have been given: unfair competition in sports, distorted crime figures, potential discrimination against women in the workplace, distortion of medical research and treatments etc

It is not "transphobic" to raise these concerns. I am not a "terf" for daring to question a contorted nonsensical definition of "woman". This can be debated quite separately from the question of respect for and rights of trans women which I hope we all agree are a no-brainer.

Let's keep the debate simple: "what IS a woman?". That's what it all boils down to.