Transgender politics: a modern minefield

Jenni Murray is a brave woman – or cis woman, as some would demand, said The Daily Telegraph. You’d think that after what happened to her fellow feminist Germaine Greer, she’d have kept out of transgender politics. Yet last week, Murray – the presenter of Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour – decided to wade straight into the quagmire. In an article in The Sunday Times, she defended LGBT rights, but questioned whether transwomen were “real” women, given that they have grown up male, with “the privileges” that entails. Cue outrage from the trans lobby, and a warning from the BBC, which said Murray had broken a rule that bans presenters from expressing views on controversial topics covered on their shows.

Murray doesn’t know what she’s talking about, said L.J. Ferris on The Huffington Post. She writes as if transpeople have opted to change gender. Not so. They’ve always been that gender; they just haven’t been able to express it. As for saying that transwomen can’t be “real” women as they haven’t experienced life as other women have – spurious nonsense. Women in India have different experiences of being female to those in China. They’re still women. To support her argument that transwomen have been shaped by their years living as men, Murray cites the case of transgender journalist India Willoughby, who – as a guest on Woman’s Hour – took the “unsisterly” view that women who don’t shave their legs are dirty, said Gaby Hinsliff in The Guardian. Yet many cis women share Willoughby’s take on unshaven legs. Does that make them “un-women”?

But there comes a point where blurring distinctions becomes an exercise in deception, said Rachel Johnson in The Mail on Sunday. Recently on Crimewatch, we were asked to look out for a woman who’d committed two violent rapes. Lisa Hauxwell might be living as a man, we were told, yet there was no mention of the fact “she” was born male and had a penis. The same day a newspaper article bewailing the rise in female sexual violence cited Hauxwell as an example of it. Owing to a terror of being accused of “misgendering”, we’re being sold fake news as “alternative facts”. The MP Maria Miller is now pushing for a law that would enable people to change their legal gender at will, said Janice Turner in The Times. This would certainly make life easier for transpeople, but what about the rest of us: do we want anyone who says they are female to have access to women’s changing rooms, women’s refuges, women’s prisons? The trans community may find these questions upsetting, but we have a right to ask them.