Joe Duffy is retired now and free to say what he likes – and his insight into the entirely choreographed and unjustified controversy around Liveline’s hosting of a debate on the clash between women’s rights and the demands of trans activists is very revealing.
The row, which erupted in June 2022, wasn’t actually a row at all, but a warning: this is what will happen if anyone, even someone as perennially popular and powerful as Joe Duffy even tries to facilitate a debate on the absurd insistence that big hairy men are women if they say so, or that children should be exposed to gender ideology, or that domestic violence shelters can’t be female-only spaces, or that women shouldn’t object to being called ‘persons with a cervix’ or ‘menstruators’ or ‘chest-feeders’.