The BBC has thrown its feminist High Priestess to the transgender wolves because she dared to suggest that a man born with a penis isn’t really a woman.
As blue on blue SJW infighting goes, you could scarcely ask for a more perfect popcorn movement.
Up until now, Dame “Jenni” Murray has maintained a reputation for stern, disapproving, joke-free feminist political correctness (but is there any other kind…?) of the most impeccably fingerwagging rectitude.
Listening to her morning BBC radio show Woman’s Hour is like being subjected to a 60 minute lecture on the shortcomings of men, the superiority of women and the manifest injustice of the patriarchal hegemony, delivered by a school games mistress wearing iron underwear and a kaftan knitted by a Turkish oppressed women’s collective, while being forcefed organic breast milk laced with Hormone Replacement chemicals and the collected works of Germaine Greer, Erica Jong and Susie Orbach.
So for Dame Jenni [she’s very proud of her title and uses it a lot] to find herself caught out on the wrong side by the PC Gestapo is about as deliciously unlikely as Meryl Streep raising her next Oscar statuette high and saying: “I’m dedicating this one to my hero The Donald!”
But where, if anywhere, should our sympathies lie in this hilarious “Death of Little Nell on steroids” tragedy?
On the one hand, it’s true, Murray has long deserved her comeuppance. She may not be quite as shrill or deranged as some of the younger generation of Third Wave feminazis, but she has definitely helped poison the wells for male/female relationships by promulgating her grisly, joyless Marxist feminist view that any time a woman does the dishes, cooks a souffle or puts on a sexy maid’s outfit then basically she has failed as a meaningful human being.
Earlier in her career, she was famed for saying that marriage humiliated women. When, in 2003 she finally married David, her partner and the father of her sons, she made it clear that she was only doing it for financial not for sentimental reasons – namely to avoid inheritance tax. The new Mrs Forgham-Bailey (as she certainly did not want to be known) said she had no intention of introducing David as her husband and would not be pleased if he had the temerity to say: ‘Meet my wife.’ That put him in his place.
Poor David. (Actually, bloody stupid David. What were you thinking?)
On the other hand, Murray deserves credit for braving the wrath of her nauseatingly right-on employer the BBC by stating clearly something that really ought to be said more often: that a man who has gender reassignment surgery – like the transexual she recently interviewed called India Willoughby – can never be a real woman.
It’s a shame Murray had to phrase it in such a PC way, using it to have yet another dig at male privilege:
“India held firmly to her belief that she was a ‘real woman’, ignoring the fact that she had spent all of her life before her transition enjoying the privileged position in our society generally accorded to a man.
But at least she said it. And there’s no doubt that when an impeccably PC, uber feminist doyenne and BBC presenter says this kind of thing, it carries a lot more weight than it does when an irreverent, sexist, transphobic, polemicist like me says it.
This really is a battle that needs fighting right now. Transgenderism is one of the very hottest of the many fronts of the wars which Cultural Marxism is waging on Western Civilisation. It matters so much because it goes to the heart of one of the most important and contested issues which divide right and left: is there such a thing as truth?
If you believe – as the Social Justice Warriors, liberal “intellectuals” and other relativistic cretins do – that truth is just a matter of opinion then clearly, you are whatever you say you are, be it a man, a woman, non-binary, polygender, intersex, trans and the rest of that nonsense list of LBGTetc terms.
If, on the other hand, you subscribe to the more traditional, rational view that biological sex (not “gender” – a left-wing invention) is determined by chromosomes and organs like wombs and penises, then it’s pretty damned obvious that you’re born either one thing or the other, regardless of how much surgical mutilation you undergo or how many hormones you take.
Crusading progressives want to portray this as a war between nice people who have feelings and horrid people who are stuck in the dark ages because of their vile prejudices. But it’s not that at all. Ultimately, it’s a battle over who gets to define what truth is: the rationalists or the idealistic fantasists.
Murray is not, of course, the first Social Justice crusader to find herself undone by her own side’s increasingly deranged identity-politics-driven moral value system.
Before her, there was fellow feminist icon Germaine Greer who in 2015 found herself berated online and no-platformed for making similarly sceptical remarks about transgenderism, albeit a lot more amusingly than Murray:
“Just because you lop off your penis and then wear a dress doesn’t make you a ******* woman,” Ms Greer said in a statement given to the Victoria Derbyshire show. “I’ve asked my doctor to give me long ears and liver spots and I’m going to wear a brown coat but that won’t turn me into a ******* cocker spaniel.
And before that, in 2013, even the arch feminist and man-hating harridan Suzanne Moore found herself being berated by the prickly and uber-aggressive trans activist movement for having failed to speak about trans people with sufficient reverence.
One could take heart from the fact that left-liberals like Murray, Greer, and Moore are finally beginning to recognise just how poisonous, small-minded and fascistic liberalism is becoming these days.
But I suspect their moment of enlightenment will be shortlived. It’s not penetrating insight which has led these card-carrying progressives to see the awful truth about the oppressive lunacy of their movement: it’s quite simply their age. Being all well over 50, they’ve just inherited the prejudices of their generation. Had they been born more recently with their left-liberal politics, they would surely have been far less capable of resisting their contemporaries’ fashionable nonsense about “gender” being a “social construct.”
Meanwhile, if any transgender activists want to have a crack at me on Twitter for saying this stuff, I look forward to the attention. I do like a bit banter with the lads….
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