The reasons that Jenni Murray wrote this book are important:
"Dame Jenni's talk is a polite yet passionate fingers up to history’s attempts to silence women, on the very week Millicent Fawcett’s statue was unveiled on parliament square.
Jenni began writing her a book ‘A History of Britain in 21 Women’ in 2015 after learning that the women’s movement might be erased from the A level history curriculum.
Her lecture is a whirlwind tour of some of the books more colourful characters – from Boadicea to the Iron Lady, Elizabeth I to Ethel Smith, featuring personal anecdotes (interviewing Thatcher after her deposition) and offering fascinating insight into some of suffrage’s lesser known stories (suffragette cricket lessons for more accomplished brick throwing).'
lecture accompanying her book:
Yet this week some Oxford students have harrassed her and her lecture there has been cancelled:
Today's articles:
Times
www.thetimes.co.uk/article/woman-s-hour-host-accused-of-transphobia-pulls-out-of-oxford-talk-k58pmbcgb?shareToken=05dedf9ff8b21cf1eaa21b75da46fbbd
Spectator:
blogs.spectator.co.uk/2018/11/even-oxford-university-cant-save-jenni-murray-from-the-transgender-activist-mob/
Telegraph:
www.telegraph.co.uk/education/2018/11/07/jenni-murray-pulls-oxford-talk-students-try-no-platform-transphobic/amp/?__twitter_impression=true
thread:
www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/3416980-Oxford-students-going-after-Jenni-Murray-again
This was Jenni Murray's article written for the Sunday Times last year for which following protest, the BBC publically rebuked her:
'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'
"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.
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.
In other words, the girl who grows into a woman goes through a lifetime of pressure to become the socially constructed idea of what a woman should be, regardless of her innate talents, abilities or ambitions. It’s what feminism has sought to challenge. She did not mean that an individual born into the male sex, socialised into the expectations of the masculine gender, can simply decide to take hormones and maybe have surgery and “become a woman”." (continues)
www.thetimes.co.uk/article/be-trans-be-proud-but-dont-call-yourself-a-real-woman-frtld7q5c
www.thetimes.co.uk/article/be-trans-be-proud-but-dont-call-yourself-a-real-woman-frtld7q5c