“Let’s hope a similar extinction is coming for her”
Jenni Murray, longstanding presenter of BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour, wrote a piece for yesterday’s Times (the London one) about women and trans women. We all know what happened next.
The reporting, predictably, is not accurate. It never is, is it. Maev Kennedy at the Guardian for instance led with this:
A chorus of protest – and some support – has greeted an article by the broadcaster Jenni Murray, presenter of BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour, that questioned the claims of transgender women to be considered “real women”.
That “real women” is tricksy, because in fact it’s Murray herself who put it in scare quotes, but that’s not what that sentence looks like, is it. I’ll just quote the five places she used the phrase so that you can see:
I can’t agree with Julie Burchill or Germaine Greer , whose language in their expression of revulsion at the trans woman (a man who becomes a woman) claiming to be a real woman has been unacceptably crude.
That’s attribution rather than use – she’s talking about Burchill and Greer, not herself.
But my concern, which I know is shared by numerous women who are now to be known as “cis” (short for “cisgender” – naturalborn women, in the language that’s more familiar to most of us ), is for the impact this question of what constitutes “a real woman” will have on sexual politics.
Scare quotes. The whole point of the scare quotes is to acknowledge that that’s a contested concept.
This time I was speaking to another trans woman, India Willoughby , who had hit the headlines after appearing on the ITV programme Loose Women. 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.
Scare quotes again.
There are some trans women who willingly accept they cannot describe themselves as women and who agree that sex and gender are not interchangeable. I met Jenny Roberts a bout 15 years ago; she’s now 72 and made her transition, including hormon e treatment and surgery, when she was 50.
“I’m not a real woman,” is the first thing she said to me in a recent conversation.
Attribution, not use.
The most significant part of Jenny’s understanding of the trans woman/real woman debate came about as a result of her selling the printing business and, instead, opening a feminist bookshop in York, which she called Libertas.
That’s the closest she comes to using it herself as coming from her. She doesn’t say what Maev Kennedy accused her of saying – she said more nuanced things than that.
Anyway. Of course there are yells of anger, of course there’s a petition demanding the BBC fire her, of course the BBC punished her.
The BBC has issued presenter Dame Jenni Murray with an impartiality warning over her transgender comments as a TV presenter called for her to be sacked.
Dame Jenni, the veteran host of Woman’s Hour, has been told that she must remain impartial on “controversial topics” after she claimed that a sex change can’t make a man a “real woman”.
No she didn’t. See above. She did say there are differences, differences that matter, but she didn’t make the claim in that form.
The claims, which have been fiercely criticised by equality campaigners, have resulted in Dame Jenni being reminded that she must remain neutral on the subject.
…
Writing in the Sunday Times, Dame Jenni criticised Willoughby for claiming she was a “woman” because she had failed to acknowledge that she had spent most of her life “enjoying the privileged position in our society generally accorded to a man”.
…
She also criticised Willoughby’s apparent willingness to accept the Dorchester hotel’s strict dress code for female staff, which requires that they always wear makeup, have manicures and shaved legs.
“There wasn’t a hint of understanding that she was simply playing into the stereotype – a man’s idea of what a woman should be.”
India Willoughby apparently wants the BBC to fire Murray.
Calling for Dame Jenni’s dismissal, Willoughby said that she had never supported the Dorchester’s staffing policies, adding that the Woman’s Hour presenter had created “fake news” in order to sell a “storyline”.
“She and Woman’s Hour have subsequently tried to portray me as someone who believes all women must have perfectly shaved legs at all times, which quite frankly is ridiculous,” she added.
“I called Jenni transphobic that day – and I haven’t changed my mind since. Jenni talks about trans women growing up with ‘male privilege’. As if we have a great time and, then on a whim, jump ship.
“Honestly, I wouldn’t wish being trans on anyone, even Jenni. ‘Male privilege’ was never a privilege to me and is not something I benefited from.”
And yet, that kind of privilege is something one can benefit from without realizing it. That’s a rather basic truism of progressive politics, isn’t it? That just not being aware of one’s privilege really can’t be taken as just straightforwardly showing one doesn’t have it. We don’t walk around counting up all the times we’re not shot at by snipers, but that doesn’t mean we don’t have an enormous benefit that people who live in a war zone would love to have too. Willoughby can’t be sure she never derived any benefit from male privilege simply because she was never aware of deriving it. It ain’t that simple.
“The fact that she’s still allowed to host Woman’s Hour while spouting this bile is ridiculous and she should finally be sacked.
“The world has changed and, as a public-funded broadcaster the BBC know that more than anyone, Jenni Murray is a dinosaur and we all know what happened to them. Let’s hope a similar extinction is coming for her in the not too distant future.”
To me that casual misogyny reeks of male privilege.
To boil it down: Murray isn’t convinced that being a trans woman is exactly the same thing as being a non-trans woman, and she said so, with examples. I don’t think that’s a good reason for people to demand she be fired.
Yep. Trans men have written about the experience of suddenly being accorded male privilege, after a lifetime without it. It’s hard to believe that no trans woman has ever benefited from male privilege before transitioning.
Intersectionality does muddy up the picture a bit, it’s also true. Many trans (and queer) people violate gender norms in their behavior, so for the ones perceived as male, their male privilege is often offset by queer disprivilege. It’s not really possible to quantify the net privilege or disprivilege of that situation. People assume they can be a doctor without condescending to them — but at the same time assume that if they became a doctor, they would probably become a child-molesting pediatrician (because all sexual deviates are child molesters, as everyone knows). Does that go in the “win” or the “loss” column?
I’m hardly a cutting edge theorist in this stuff. It seems to me that intersectionality is a useful pedagogical tool, but not necessarily a useful analytical one. It’s helpful to realize that a white male who codes as a Harvard grad is going to experience life quite differently from a white male who codes as a farmhand from Hogs’ Waller, and that being a black woman can be much more unpleasant than being a white woman, all else equal.
But it always seems to lead to disprivilege olympics. “My oppression as a cis gay black woman from Oxford is worse than yours as a trans bi white man with a GED!”
As a straight, white, cis, male New Englander who graduated from Brown, most of this is beyond bewildering to me. I’ve been poor, in fact homeless, in my life, but apart from that little thing, oppression is something I read about. I can just barely comprehend suffering along one dimension, let alone multiple. The only real contribution I can make is to observe that it’s pretty damn hard to truly understand an experience one has never lived. Me telling anyone about their experience would be absurd — be they woman, gay, black, trans, or anything else. It seems like a lot of anger arises when members of one oppressed group are told by members of another oppressed group that they really don’t know what it’s like. My own experience suggests that they’re probably right. Being homeless never gave me any special insight into what it’s like to be black, say.
Absolutely right. If someone’s got the patience and temperament to observe, listen, and think about these things a little bit; if they’ve got the thoughtfulness to state their conclusions with some care; and if someone else has the attention span to take in those thoughts – we can have reasonable discussions and appreciate that you can be enjoying unnoticed, unwanted, even repugnant privilege at the very same times you’re suffering discrimination on other bases.
But when we’ve got sound bite politics that can’t work with notions longer than a curt slogan, and when things are emotionally loaded and we’re grabbing for terms like “extinction”, those aren’t conditions that are satisfied.
Well, obviously, what could be more biased than women talking about womanhood. Only men are rational, objective, clearthinking, so only their take on womanhood is allowed.
But wait. Trans women insist they’re absolutely women. But if that were true, nobody’d be listening to them. The BBC would be treating them like they treat Jenni Murray. But it doesn’t. So they aren’t. But they say they are. But that’s only true if they aren’t.
Right?
Absolutely. Trans disprivilege is probably worse than women’s disprivilege in many areas. I also get that trans women and girls don’t necessarily experience male privilege the way “cis” men and boys do…but it depends. I find India Willoughby’s scorn for the very possibility coupled with her blunt misogyny a sign that she experienced more of it than she realizes – and that she’s a bit of a shit.
It’s also interesting to me to wonder how much of the oppression they are attributing to being trans is coming about because of being woman now? Not that people don’t express hatred and prejudice against trans, but it seems possible to me that, if you are unaware of your male privilege, then when you become a transwoman, you may attribute every slight as being because you’re trans, and not realizing that at least some of those slights are because you are now perceived as a woman. So she doesn’t see the male privilege, because she doesn’t see that part of the hatred she gets now is because she is a woman. It’s all because she’s trans, as far as she can tell, since the privilege of being a male never existed for her.
Ah yes, so you may. Which sort of relates to the way many of us detest being called “cis,” as if we liked being disparaged and dismissed because we’re women. It always seems so clueless to me to call feminist women “cis”…and that cluelessness could also lead to mistaking the brand of hatred and prejudice one is facing.
Avenger, I agree with most of your post, but not the bit about telling someone about their experience. Listening to someone’s perspective is important, but “my lived experience” isn’t the trump card that a vocal part of progressive circles want it to be. Is there anything someone could be less impartial about than their own life? And it’s appalling to see “lived experience” put on a pedestal (for some topics) at places that came out of movement atheism, which is very much about denying people’s lived experiences. As in, no, god is not actually talking to you.
“She and Woman’s Hour have subsequently tried to portray me as someone who believes all women must have perfectly shaved legs at all times, which quite frankly is ridiculous,” she added
That is not at all what Murray said. In fact Murray quoted Willoughby saying she (Willoughby) thought unshaved legs on women was “dirty.”
What Willoughby said, in context, according to the Mirror:
Now that’s man-thought right there. I’ve known many men who’ve shaved their legs even before it became fashionable, and the only people whom I heard questioning it as odd were other men.
And in that one passage, India Willoughby follows the lead of countless MRA dickheads by demonstrating that she does not know what privelage is.
StlSin,
I fear you may have this backwards.
Of course personal experience does not over-ride scientific fact, nor the historical record – provided that the history is complete and unbiased, which it rarely is.
When someone pops up, though, to tell you that you have completely misunderstood or misrepresented every damn thing which happened to you in 70+ years as Jenni beautifully illustrated in her account of that interview, does it not cross your mind that they might be bullshitting?
I haven’t read Kennedy’s article but that first bit you quoted, where she didn’t acknowledge that the scare quotes are in the original, is simply dishonest.
That quoted passage is so absurdly mindless. It’s Trump-level mindless. Granted, it was an extempore conversation, but still.
So she wouldn’t want to be served by a man with hairy legs? But she just said, “Why would I shave my legs when I was living as a man?”
But also yes: that is indeed exactly what Jenni Murray said she said – hairy legs [on women, and women only] are equated to grubby nails and disheveled hair: dirty and sloppy.
I find it very tempting to assume that her in-born male privilege is at the bottom of Willoughby’s insistence on transplaining how women should behave and what terminology they should use.