A Tribute To Jenni Murray
Update 834. #BeMorePorcupine.
I am jumping in early to pay tribute to Dame Jenni Murray who presented Woman’s Hour on BBC Radio 4 for 33 years and who passed away yesterday. She retired from Woman’s Hour in 2020 but, effectively, she was pushed out because of her views on ‘gender critical’ issues. I used to be a Radio 4 addict and would frequently listen to her on Woman’s Hour. She had the perfect radio voice. She became persona non grata at the BBC after writing a piece in the Times entitled ‘Be trans, be proud but don’t call yourself a “real woman”.’
I think her departure roughly marks the moment I stopped listening to or watching the BBC as I realised it had gone off with the Woo! My wife and I have now cancelled our licence. Jenni was one of the most famous presenters on the radio. Despite her cancellation she had the courage to keep speaking up for women’s and children’s rights.
She was not a Terf but described herself as a feminist and was clearly ‘gender critical.’ She believed in all the main principles of the Terfs: protecting women’s single sex spaces and sports; no ‘transitioning’ of children; no erasure of women’s language.
In an article in the Daily Mail she explained why she left the BBC.
How I was cancelled by the BBC I adore: As DAME JENNI MURRAY steps aside from Woman’s Hour after 33 years she reveals her off-air battles for daring to challenge the trans lobby, Auntie’s views and her fury at huge pay gap
02 October 2020
I was not leaving, contrary to popular rumour, as a result of ageism on the part of the BBC. I made the decision a year ago when it became clear to me that it was time to move on and be free of the leash which, in recent years, had caused me to be what I can only describe as ‘cancelled’.
First came the furore concerning an article I had written in which I acknowledged that I was entering the most controversial and, at times, vicious, vulgar and threatening debate of our day.
I made clear that I was not transphobic or anti-trans. Indeed, I emphasised my belief that everyone — whether transgender or those of us who hold to the sex assigned to us at birth — should be treated with respect and protected from the bullying and violence that so many like me have suffered.
I merely asked the trans activists to acknowledge the difference between sex and gender, a trans woman and a woman, respect our right to safe single-sex spaces and abandon the nonsensical idea that we should be known as ‘cis women’.
We are women. No need for further definition. I begged trans activists to understand feminism and the struggle we had experienced in fighting for our right to be viewed as equals to men.
I reminded them that feminism had fought against sexual stereotyping, and that it was ridiculous to assume a girl who liked cars and trousers really wanted to be a boy, or a boy who loved dolls was ‘born in the wrong body’ and needed to be a girl.
Of course, I was branded a TERF — a Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist — on social media and threatened with all kinds of violence. But what shocked me most was the BBC’s response.
I was roundly ticked off publicly and informed that I would not be allowed to chair any discussions on the trans question or the proposed changes to the Gender Recognition Act. I had lots of emails and tweets asking me why I had not been involved in this debate, as it was so important to Woman’s Hour listeners. You have the answer.
The full piece is here:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-8799931/amp/DAME-JENNI-MURRAY-cancelled-BBC-adore.html
Here is a good interview with Camilla Tominey.
https://x.com/sexbasedrights/status/2035349139668476191
SEEN In Journalism start their piece about Jenni with an attack on the current Woman’s Hour featuring a larping man called Raewyn Connell being interviewed about the misogyny he has experienced! Run that by me again!!
The Woman’s Hour betrayal, court cases, Hampstead Heath, and men in women’s sport
Media overview March 14-21
Mar 21, 2026
We’ll start with Woman’s Hour, as it has now rounded out the complete and absolute betrayal of women, of its consumers, and of its beloved former presenter, Jenni Murray.
The BBC has rejected all initial complaints about the decision by Woman’s Hour to interview Raewyn Connell, a man who says he’s a woman, about misogyny.
It’s a phone-in response triggered by the volume of complaints, and can be dismissed and ignored. It also affirmed Connell with pronouns: one captured BBC hub passing judgement on another. Feel free to progress to the Executive Complaints Unit. Might seem hard to believe, but these obsessively activist hubs are becoming more isolated at the BBC - it’s just that here we have two of them working together.
Woman’s Hour had described Connell as a feminist and asked him about his own experience of ‘misogyny’, failing to point out that what he calls misogyny is merely people looking at him in puzzlement, suspicion or dislike because he’s committing the ultimate misogynist abuse of claiming to be a woman. The clip is here. Only a team of extremely committed gender identity activists would run this item in this way, deliberately breaching the BBC’s publicly-funded duties of accuracy and impartiality.
The stupidity of the whole affair reached Australian media. Woman’s Hour’s editorial leadership will not understand the problem, and will vehemently resist attempts to explain it. There’s nothing to say to WH that hasn’t already been said, and now the Controller of Radio 4 needs to step up and manage its conduct. We’ve contacted him, along with the Head of Editorial Policy. Identity activism has been ruinous to Woman’s Hour.
Instead of a ghastly picture of Connell here’s the wonderful feminist presenter Jenni Murray, whose death was announced yesterday. Jenni was treated very cruelly by the BBC for writing in the Times that men aren’t women after this interview with India Willoughby. If it happened now she would probably be able to bring a case. BBC tributes here, frankly not good enough, and nothing there from the current Woman’s Hour team leader, Karen Dalziel, or lead presenter, Nuala McGovern, or the other name best associated with WH, Emma Barnett. It’s poor to dismal. Jenni was magnificent, and deserved better than this from the BBC. Here’s a respectful and lovely Times obituary instead and one from the iPaper - ‘radio gold’.
Here’s the BBC copy, which is deliberately, insultingly tagged only ‘Radio’ - not Feminism, Women, or Women’s Rights. It accuses her of making ‘comments about trans people’, implying they were insults, rather than a simple explanation that you can’t change sex. An explanation the BBC should have made fifteen years ago and still hasn’t the guts for.
Tony Hall was the Director-General who failed Jenni, as he presided over the BBC’s descent into gender activism, child transition and gaslighting women and LGB people. Lord Hall went on to the National Trust, which had its own problems with extreme diversity compliance, and he’s still on the Digital and Comms Committee of the Lords.
This piece then moves on to discuss many other media stories, several of which we have already covered. The full piece is here:
And here, on his GB News series Talking Pints is Nigel Farage interviewing Jenni when she has her first ever alcoholic drink while on air 😀
https://x.com/Nigel_Farage/status/2035075667344105885
On the BBC Today programme this morning, Harriet Harman, currently a Labour Peer in the House of Lords, had the gall to state that Jenni Murray’s concerns regarding women’s sex based rights shouldn’t ‘take away’ from her decades instigating change.
https://x.com/Sorelle_Arduino/status/2035327890879824091
That is some front from Harman who worked at the National Council for Civil Liberties ( now Liberty) as legal officer between 1978 and 1982 when one of NCCL’s affiliated members was the Paedophile Information Exchange. It also nicely sums up Labour’s position on women’s sex based rights!!
STOP Press
Excellent piece from Suzanne Moore in the Daily Telegraph. Thanks to Liz Parker for sending this to me.
It is a travesty not to celebrate Jenni Murray’s bravery in the trans debate
Some commentators, including Harriet Harman, have suggested the radio host’s views detracted from her feminism. But they were key to it
21 March 2026
Dame Jenni Murray has died at the age of 75 and though I hardly knew her I miss her already. As the tributes pour in for this legendary broadcaster, let’s just say some are more fitting than others. I would love to see that expression that was hers alone as she peered over the top of her glasses at her interviewee. That look, both withering and bemused, could stop lesser mortals – however famous they were – in their tracks. That voice, deceptively soothing, was the voice of a woman who championed women’s rights for more than three decades. She spoke with the knowledge of someone who listened intently to the personal details of all kinds of women – and fought publicly for our political rights.
Make no mistake, Dame Jenni was Woman’s Hour and she left after 33 years at its helm because the BBC would not let her discuss one of the issues of the day. “I was roundly ticked off publicly and informed that I would not be allowed to chair any discussions on the trans question or the proposed changes to the Gender Recognition Act,” she wrote in the Daily Mail in 2020 of the BBC’s actions towards her. She’d left Woman’s Hour earlier that year.
In the name of “impartiality”, the BBC chose not to stand by one of its most beloved journalists because she had written that women’s rights were based on biological sex.
She explained what had happened to her when we both went to talk to MPs and Lords in the House of Commons in 2023. There were members from all the political parties there. I spoke about my experience at The Guardian, and she spoke about what had happened at the BBC, which was much worse. All her decades of experience had been trashed because of her mild and common-sense views on the gender issue. She was using a wheelchair at that point and was in pain. Yet of course when she spoke, it was with an authority that a lifetime of listening to women had given her. She had an aura of unflappability but with bite, somehow very grand and very human at the same time. You would not want to cross Jenni, but in any battle you would want her on your side.
She had no time for anyone who was rude or nasty about trans people and wanted no bullying or insults to go their way, always insisting that they be treated with respect. However, her deep understanding of sexual politics meant that she knew that there was more to being a woman than frocks and make-up.
Another bugbear for her was the compelled language that trans activism had brought in, such as “chest-feeding”. “Sorry, but I breastfed my kids and it was my breast that was cut off when I had cancer,” she wrote memorably in 2017.
Safeguarding children, single-sex spaces, women’s ability to define themselves: these were things that mattered to her and despite the many death threats and the loss of her beloved job she would not shut up.
“And yet I am not prepared to stop talking about this. It’s an issue that needs to be discussed without anyone fearing losing their livelihood or their life.” Brava Jenni.
Her defenestration was possibly meant to be an example to junior women at the BBC, an attempt at silencing. Woman’s Hour is now an unlistenable mishmash of awed, whispering presenters kowtowing to men. Last week, for instance, in a discussion about misogyny and the manosphere, a man who had not transitioned into “womanhood” until his sixties was interviewed as an expert on the subject. Impartiality? No, this is a closing down of exactly the debate Jenni wanted to have.
Her views on the trans issue were an intrinsic part of her feminism, but we had to listen to Harriet Harman on the Today programme on Saturday patronisingly explain that they didn’t “detract” from it. This is a travesty. Murray thought as she did because she was a feminist to her fingertips. She never regretted what she said and felt that the 2025 Supreme Court ruling on the matter had proved her right: that the legal definition of women is based on biological sex. She never backed down. She was never afraid to ask the difficult questions. She was magnificent, she had class.
Her legacy is not to bow down to flimsy thinking that reduces womanhood to mere “feelings”. As she fought for us, we must now fight to make sure she is remembered with the respect she deserves.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/gift/148bf58cb1582092
Thank you Jenni Murray for standing up for women and girls. I raise a glass to you!
Thanks to my wife for locating relevant pieces on X.
Jenni signed off her final Woman’s Hour broadcast with ‘I Am Woman’ by Helen Reddy. So here it is:
#BeMorePorcupine
#RIPJenniMurray