Jane Garvey on leaving Woman's Hour and trans rights

[nickymanchester]

In yesterday's Daily Telegraph, in the Review section, there was an interview with Jane Garvey looking back at her time at Woman's Hour and also trailing a new series she's doing on Radio 4 called "Life Changing".

It was actually really interesting finding out more about her life. But the reason I've posted this is that the paper asked her about her reasons for leaving and her attitudes towards the trans rights debate.

Her reply was as interesting for what it did not say as much as what it did say. Although it does seem that being a Radio 4 presenter certainly doesn't prevent you from having to deal with extremely woke teenage DDs in the same way as many posters mentioned in the "I had the most awful row with my teenagers yesterday" thread.

Here is an extract from the interview on page 4:-

Garvey and her co-presenter Jenni Murray departed within months of each other, though Garvey says that she genuinely can't remember who decided to leave first.

I want to ask about Woman's Hour's coverage of gender identity, as Murray has said, since leaving, that she had been stifled on this thorny issue at the BBC. It's here that Garvey is at her most guarded.

The programme has remained firmly neutral, often to the point of seeming uncharacteristically tentative. Did Woman's Hour get it right?

"Around the trans debate", says Garvey, "I was accused of being anti-feminist and anti-trans. Which, I suppose, means that I was probably somewhere in the middle, trying... my biggest concern was, how do I make this comprehensible to our audience? What I hated, was that so many important conversations end up being conducted in a way and in a language that alienates so many people."

Was there a difference of opinion in the production office over how to best approach it?

"There was always a difference of opinion. I mean, I've got daughters who don't agree with me on a whole range of topics, including perhaps some aspects of this debate... that was one of the reasons I... ".

She hesitates. "To go back to the decision to leave... I did believe it was time for a younger voice to be heard."

But Garvey, who is 56 and has two daughters aged 18 and 21 (from her 11 year marriage to the television presenter Adrian Chiles, which ended in 2009), is passionate about the BBC's mission to speak to an older as well as younger audience.

So, having read the whole interview, it does seem that BBC presenters face many of the same issues that many others working for similar organisations also face.

Well, she's still working for R4 so I guess she still has to be guarded

Years of listening to Jane Garvey on Woman's Hour gave me the firm impression that she was working very hard indeed not to destroy her BBC career by speaking unguardedly about the gender identity ideology. I'm not going to hold it against her that she might have got away with it.

Following both Jenni Murray and Jane Garvey on Twitter, I can definitely say that Jenni seems to have embraced her freedoms with both hands and is continually retweeting gender critical views. JG, less so. But it feels as if JM has partially retired (god I miss her!) and therefore perhaps has the freedom to say it like it is. Jane Garvey has a great career and is nowhere near retirement age. I think it's fairly obvious that she tries hard to be circumspect on this issue and I really can't blame her!

Discovering her and Fi Glover's joint podcast was one of the most life-enhancing things to happen to me all this last year, so I tend to cut JG some slack anyway. I suspect she's reasonably GC (but who knows?) but it sounds as if she's constantly in a very difficult position both at work (well, when she was on WH anyway) and at home with her daughters. Not an enviable position to be in.

From listening to Fortunately, and given that yes unlike DJM, she has a sizeable chunk of her career ahead of her, I get the impression she want to maintain some old school neutrality and thinks v seriously but not uncritically about how the BBC is supposed to operate. She really did speak out on pay inequality and that was the campaign she remains hugely passionate about. Interestingly DGM it seems was v fired in her thinking by the 90s fight for women to be priests.

By some accident or miracle I was able to open and read the Telegraph interview by Charlotte Runcie. The comments too. They are mostly from men.

Don't know if it will work for readers here but here's a link:

www.telegraph.co.uk/radio/what-to-listen-to/jane-garvey-life-womens-hour-aware-losing-touch/

@GlomOfNit

Thanks for mentioning the podcast. I've never come across it before and just listened to an episode.

Discovering her and Fi Glover's joint podcast was one of the most life-enhancing things to happen to me all this last year

I totally get what you mean. I'm looking forward to catching up on these.

my biggest concern was, how do I make this comprehensible to our audience? What I hated, was that so many important conversations end up being conducted in a way and in a language that alienates so many people

This resonated with me: I’ve heard many interviews where I’ve imagined that the average listener who’s not already clued up about it all would be completely lost, and it’s very frustrating.

But if you think about it, tbf a lot of that is to do with the trans rights movement having spawned so many new terms, and allocated new meanings to old terms, and also having brought about very significant social and legal changes in a fairly short space of time that many people are still unaware of. It does make it very difficult indeed to have the conversation in terms that are readily understandable to the uninitiated.

Think about how many things you might have to explain before you can deal with the issue. “Cis”, “TERF”, “TWAW”, “GC”, gender identity, gender expression, the fact that “woman” is now used by many to denote people of either sex. The GRA, what a GRC is, how you can change your BC with a GRC. The EA, with its protected characteristics and exemptions. The fact that most biologically male trans people, aka “transwomen” are nothing like the “transsexuals” of old and still have male genitalia.

The nano thingyummy measurement for testosterone in sports, and the other significant physical differences between females and males that impact sporting performance. The fact that so many sporting bodies have been captured. The fact that so many organisations and institutions of all kinds have been captured.

Puberty blockers, cross sex hormones, desistance rates. The sexual inclination that dare not speak its name. The political significance of the tagging of the T onto the LGB, and how gender identity is a different kettle of fish from sexual orientation. The whole LGBTQ+ alphabet soup. Queer theory and post modernism. The IPSO guidelines and the equal treatment bench book.

Crimes being recorded according to self identified GI. Being able to change the “gender marker” on your passport or driving licence on the basis of self ID. Supposedly single sex spaces like prisons, refuges and hospital wards all being accessed on the basis of self ID. The very concept of self ID.

The list is not exhaustive but it is exhausting! What a load to carry. These are all things (among others) that may be relevant to a discussion on the topic and yet which many people will have no idea about. It’s a LOT of background which is still very obscure to the average person, I think, and yet without which it’s hard to make sense of any kind of discussion. I can think of few (if any?) other areas which are so “closed off” but have such impact on society as a whole.

The fact is there were huge and far reaching changes taking place completely under the radar of the vast majority of people for quite some years, and in that time a whole new vocabulary was invented. And when you come to debate the issues it’s pretty hard to do so without recourse to some of that vocabulary, especially if that’s the terminology being used by the other party.

If you start explaining any of that stuff, the danger is you’re going to run out of time to say what you actually want to say. It does put interviewees in a very difficult position. It calls for a knack of explaining things in terms as simple and as commonly understood as possible, which is not a knack that everyone has! So hats off to all those brave women who’ve got the message out there in whatever way they could.

Anyway. Given JG says she’s on the other side of the issue from her young adult DD’s, I think we can make an educated guess as to where her own opinons fall.

The 'Fortunately' podcasts have got me round my local park every day since shielders were allowed out for exercise, listening to them has been a great distraction from negative news/thoughts. I love listening to Fi and JG. They touched on this debate once, JG was talking about how difficult WH had been when they'd tried to cover it and one of the guests had refused to be there or be interviewed at the same time as the other. She didn't go into details, but I think it's easy to guess what happened. I was irritated with her when they covered 'The politicisation of MN' but agree she's in a v difficult position, still working for the BBC.

Does anyone have a share token for the link Abitofalark posted?

Not a share token but the next best thing:

archive.fo/efEEA

thanks for that link nauticant - lovely interview.

Alienating language is all that is left when all the plain English is now pretty much deemed hate speech, and will lead to cancellation, deletion and loss of employment.

That has been an effective tactic for ensuring that the general public is kept in the dark for as long as possible because it is so difficult, obscure and high risk trying to tackle this topic.

They didn’t only declare #nodebate they took extra measures to back it up and make debate difficult.

Orwell is often mentioned, it bears repeating that when we don’t have the words, when they are forbidden or forgotten or their meaning is changed we are effectively silenced.