Free speech is at risk from the easily-offended
ICAN’T say I am a regular listener to Woman’s Hour on Radio 4, but whenever I have caught the show its presenter Jenni Murray has always struck me as a very professional broadcaster. I may not share the feminist slant with which she sees the world, but I respect her opinions. By the standards of some BBC presenters she is as middle-ofthe-road as they come.
The idea, then, that Murray is some kind of extremist who must be kept from spreading her hate on an unsuspecting public is one that I struggle to take on board. But then again I am not a member of Oxford University’s LGBTQ+ campaign, which it seems has won its campaign to prevent Murray addressing the student History Society on Saturday about “powerful British women in history and society”.
Don’t ask me what the Q+ in LGBTQ+ stands for. While I know LGBT stands for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender rather than Lettuce, Gammon, Bacon and Tomato, I have long since given up the struggle to keep abreast of the terminology used in Left-wing identity politics. But according to a posting on its Facebook page it seems that the LGBTQ+ group is worked up about comments Murray made in a newspaper piece last year in which she suggested that transwomen were not “real women” and that it “takes more than a sex change and make-up” to “lay claim to womanhood”.
HER point was well argued. While she respected those who felt they had been born in the wrong body, she said many of the trans women she had met continued to have a male idea of what it was to be female.
She cited the case of a transgender Church of England vicar who was mostly concerned about what clothes and makeup she should wear in church. It hadn’t occurred to the vicar, said Murray, that having been ordained when she was a man, she had not experienced the fight which women had had to endure before being allowed to take up the priesthood.
Whatever your views on transgenderism, feminism or even female vicars, you would have to work hard to feel offended by Murray’s piece. She was simply making a point that women face a struggle