HOW FEMINIST WARRIOR JENNI FELL FOUL OF GENDER POLICE
DAME JENNI Murray is one of the great voices of feminism. She is a presenter of Radio 4’ s Woman’s Hour, a patron of the Family Planning Association, supporter of the British Humanist Association.
Such connections ring triple cherries on the fruit machine of public life. They are badges of virtue, proclaiming a grandee of the Establishment game.
Yet even she had to be disciplined by the BBC for saying something untoward about trans people.
Egad. Pass the gin bottle, Mabel. For Murray to be charged with political incorrectness was like accusing Buzz Aldrin of being a stay-at-home cissy, or alleging that Mahatma Gandhi was a greedy-guts who scoffed all the pies. What on earth had happened?
Well, our dame had declared that transsexuals who became female were not proper women. Having grown up as boys, they had not experienced the injustice of sexism throughout their years. No. They had been (dark chords, please) men.
To say ‘the balloon went up’ would be an understatement. The transitioning community threw up varnished fingernails in horror. Egalitarian theorists spluttered.
‘ Dinosaur’ Murray was rebuked for being ‘transphobic’ and ‘spouting bile’.
The nation was agog, watching this confrontation. In the red corner: an over-indignant trans woman named India, revelling in victimhood. In the blue corner, peering over her half-moon spectacles, J. Murray, OBE, DBE, lay Professor of Gender Grievances who had once announced that marriage was legalised prostitution.
The BBC could have told India to grow a pair, although on reflection that might not have been wise. So it part-grovelled, saying Dame Jenni would be pulled into a corporate lay-by and ‘reminded that presenters should remain impartial on controversial topics covered by their BBC programmes’.
Ha! She had been political much of her life and that had not stopped them placing her at the helm of news and current affairs programmes.
Had Dame Jenni only taken a pot- shot at the Masons or campanologists or some such unfashionable band of innocents, she’d have been fine.
But she had made the schoolgirl error of saying something about transsexuals. Gender preference has become the most heavily defended pillbox on the liberals’ Maginot Line. She had to be punished.
What boring self-absorption grips the sexual-politics sector, demanding that we listen to people’s proclamations about their wobbly bits and what an unhappy time they have had.
Most of us are not that interested. It’s a free country. Live and let live. But please don’t bore the smalls off us by banging on about your ‘journeys’.
Equality campaigners argue that loose talk must be silenced because it might offend. Really, they want to starve the populace of views that differ from those of the ruling class. Thou shalt not think for thyself.