Ban that woman

And there’s the “never let this woman speak anywhere ever again because we say so” thing.

Transgender advocacy groups and supporters have demanded that Leeds Lit Festival ban Dame Jenni Murray from speaking amid accusations of transphobia.

An open letter, signed by TransLeeds, Non-binary Leeds, Yorkshire Mesmac and 13 other groups, says Dame Jenni is ‘an active transphobe’ and that ‘there is no debate as to whether trans women are women’.

Oh but there is debate, it’s just that the narcissistic wing of trans activism wants to wipe it off the map. Saying “there is no debate” is an attempt to enforce the absence of debate by demanding that all dissenters be forcibly prevented from dissenting where anyone can hear them.

Dame Jenni, who was born in Barnsley, is due to appear at The Leeds Library on Saturday to talk about her book A History of the World in 21 Women.

Leeds Lit Festival and The Leeds Library have said they are standing by their position.

See here is one compelling reason to think, and to continue to say, that trans women are not literally women: it’s because of this lust to silence a well-known woman talking about women. There are anti-feminist women, of course, but even they mostly don’t try to prevent women from talking at literary festivals in libraries about their books about women. That bit of specialness is pretty much confined to trans “women”…which makes it ever more difficult to ignore their raging hostility to women.

The open letter to The Leeds Library and Leeds Lit Festival reads: “Jenni Murray is clearly hostile towards the trans community, but especially towards transgender women.

“This isn’t feminism. It is misogyny. This is not free speech or radical discussion. Far from it.

“It is hate speech against a vulnerable minority that in the last year alone has been the subject of a hateful campaign by the British media, both nationally and locally here in Leeds.”

No. Saying that men who “identify as” women are not [literally/in every sense] women is not misogyny. You can call it anti-trans if you want to, but it’s nothing to do with misogyny. Saying a dog is not a cat is not canephobia. It’s not misogyny at all, and calling it that is appropriation of a word that names what keeps women down.

It’s also not hate speech, and the flag-waving about “a vulnerable minority” is, again, appropriation of women’s oppression to dress up narcissistic entitlement as “political.”

The event has happened (or not) by now, but so far I can’t find anything about how it went. I hope it went well, with no raging misogynists in lipstick standing in the way.

7 Responses to “Ban that woman”