Naga Munchetty used a Breakfast-linked talk for It’s Probably Nothing last August to discuss women’s health and female empowerment. She also spoke about how women are treated in medical settings and joked about the criticism she has faced during her career.
Naga Munchetty and It’s Probably Nothing
Munchetty said the medical system often misdiagnoses women’s symptoms and diminishes them. She said women can be judged by the colour of their skin, their voice, or their socioeconomic status, and said the term for that is testimonial injustice.
She also discussed female reproductive health topics including vaginal dryness and flooding. One of the book’s central ideas is that women’s symptoms are not always taken seriously, which turns a private health complaint into a wider problem of being dismissed.
Breakfast scrutiny
The talk came after years of criticism around her time at Breakfast. Munchetty has faced allegations about workplace bullying, complaints over a jokey comment to Carol Kirkwood, and criticism over the size of her salary.
That background sits behind the tone of the event. A presenter who has been publicly judged for years was speaking about how judgment works in medicine, then describing it in her own words.
What Munchetty said on stage
Munchetty was visibly moved while discussing the story of a mother whose baby had died during a hospital birth. She also said there is a trope that Asian women are princesses and “can’t suffer pain and want to be treated really well.”
She joked, “I am an unemotional cold woman and obviously hate you for making me tell that.” She also said, “I didn’t punch Hugh, can you not tell the papers that I punched you?”
Her remarks moved from humor to personal boundaries. She said, “No, I don’t really like children.” She also said she had faced judgment for not having her own children and had been accused of being “obsessed with career”.
Munchetty on marriage and body
Munchetty pushed back on the idea that reproductive choices should be treated as a shared approval process. She said, “Did my husband agree to it? The idea that it wouldn’t be a discussion with my partner - by the way we are still married - so I find that a bit odd, and to be honest if I don’t want a baby, I ain’t having one, and if he wanted a baby and I didn’t, we would probably be divorced and he’d have found a partner who wanted a baby,”
She added, “He doesn’t agree to anything, but when it comes to my body he needs to support me.” For readers, that leaves the clearest practical point of the discussion: Munchetty is using the book to frame women’s health as a matter of being believed, not corrected.
