Mick Hartley

Jenni Murray’s final words on the BBC’s Woman’s Hour, before she retired:

“If you do a programme like Woman’s Hour you have to consistently remind yourself that women are a vast range. There are many, many, many different stereotypes that fit our gender. So there is no one stereotypical woman. But our sex, we share.”

She knew the difference between trans women and, in her words “real women”. It’s rumoured that she left because she’d been muzzled on the subject of gender and sex.

As we learned of her death, Woman’s Hour was featuring a man pretending to be a woman lecturing real women on the subject of misogyny. Grim irony.

No mention of any of this in the obituaries, of course.

@HarrietHarman still not standing up for Jenni today. She said on @BBCr4today that her position on trans shouldn’t ‘take away’ anything from previous decades work. On the contrary – it only ADDS to it and further demonstrates her courage.

— Wendy Stephenson (@WendySteph) March 21, 2026

Remember this article from Jenni Murray in 2017. Totally reasonable, nothing extreme, just saying men can’t be women.

Then there was all the protests, calls to cancel talks, The BBC warned her, restricted her on air, and by 2020 she left Woman’s Hour.

But she never backed… pic.twitter.com/m7WpWFANr7

— Sara (@SeeRedWoman1) March 20, 2026

But she never backed down, even as the pushback continued for years. This is how speaking honestly costs you in public life. But she was forever right.

Rest in peace, brave and courageous Jenni Murray.

Dame Jenni Murray was the swallow whose unwilling flight showed up the BBC’s degeneration

— Emma Harriet Nicholson (@Baroness_Nichol) March 21, 2026