mary I don’t think I can paste the whole thing under the site rules, but here are some extracts:
“And then finally, for her closing remarks, Murray chose to give a subtle nod to perhaps the most divisive issue in contemporary feminism: the interaction between sex and gender identity.
“If you do a programme like Woman’s Hour,” she said, “you have to consistently remind yourself that women are a vast range. There are many, many, many different stereotypes that fit our gender. So there is no one stereotypical woman. But our sex, we share.”
This was a careful and clever choice of words. It’s rumoured that one of the reasons Murray finally decided to leave the programme was that she had been muzzled from talking about the debate over the relationship between sex and gender identity.
Murray has not presented a programme tackling gender identity since 2017, when she wrote a long and meticulously argued article for The Times...In it, Murray firmly differentiated trans women from, in her words, “real women”.
For that, there was an outcry...and since then...it has been Jane Garvey, and not Jenni Murray, who has always been the presenter to navigate the choppy waters of gender identity. With that silence in mind, we can draw our own conclusions about the significance of Murray’s final remark. Was it the sound of a feminist putting her foot down?”