Culture

Germaine Greer Defends Her “Hateful” Views On Transgender Issues Amid Petition Calling To Have Her Banned

You'd be forgiven for feeling a sense of déjà vu.

by Hannah Hawkins  25 October 2015

Want more Junkee in your life? Sign up to our newsletter, and follow us on Instagram and Facebook so you always know where to find us.

Australian feminist icon and habitual headline-generator Germaine Greer didn’t rise to — and continue to amass — fame by keeping her regularly controversial opinions and sometimes bizarre stream of consciousness to herself.

And with her established penchant for stirring the pot, it’s not always clear when Greer is being genuine or deliberately provocative — she’s compared female genital mutilation to tattoos; called out former prime minister Julia Gillard for wearing unflattering clothes and having “a big arse”; said of the late “Crocodile Hunter” Steve Irwin that the animal world had “finally taken its revenge”; and once, on national television, asked the Minister for Foreign Affairs, Julie Bishop, if she’d flash her tits to save the Australian Bali nine pair, who were waiting to be executed.

But recently, the ideas she’s come under fire for most fervently concern transgender women. That is, that she doesn’t believe them to be women at all; and, just as problematic, that they don’t suffer from any comparable levels of discrimination or prejudice. She now-famously dismissed the whole transgender community in one fell swoop by claiming being trans was a “delusion”, and during a question and answer session earlier this year she denied the existence of transphobia.

It’s these ideas she’s been so unashamedly vocal about which have prompted an online petition to have her upcoming lecture — ‘Women & Power: The Lessons of the 20th Century’ — at Cardiff University in Wales cancelled.

“Greer has demonstrated time and time again her misogynistic views towards trans women, including continually misgendering trans women and denying the existence of transphobia altogether,” reads the petition, which was launched by the university’s Students’ Union women’s officer Rachael Melhuish, and has garnered over 1,600 signatures since Friday.

“While debate in a university should be encouraged, hosting a speaker with such problematic and hateful views towards marginalised and vulnerable groups is dangerous. Allowing Greer a platform endorses her views, and by extension, the transmisogyny which she continues to perpetuate.”

Greer — who is now 76 — came out publicly to defend her views and respond to the petition, telling BBC Newsnight over the weekend that she is “not about to walk on eggshells”.

“Apparently people have decided that because I don’t think that post-operative transgender men are women, I’m not to be allowed to talk,” she said.

“I’m not saying that people should not be allowed to go through that procedure, what I’m saying is it doesn’t make them a woman.

“It happens to be an opinion, it’s not a prohibition.”

Greer’s views on trans issues, and their intersection with feminism, have been widely known for a while, and it’s not the first time she’s been accused of “hate speech”. After her 2009 Guardian column that claimed transgender women “seem to us ghastly parodies” she was ‘glitter-bombed’ at a book-signing in New Zealand; and her outright denial of the existence of transphobia earlier this year prompted some Cambridge University students to set up a counter-event during her talk at the campus in January. “I didn’t know there was such a thing [as transphobia]. Arachnaphobia, yes. Transphobia, no,” Greer said during the question and answer session, according to the Cambridge Student.

She was quoted at the same event as also suggesting transgender women aren’t real women because they don’t have a “big, hairy, smelly vagina” — a remark that stirred some post-operative trans women, such as star of UK TV series Banana Bethany Black, to respond with, “well, actually I do”. Black went further, telling The Independent: “People who like what Germaine Greer has been saying are very much a product of the past and it’s becoming less and less relevant today.

“It’s still causing offence, but they’re people who have always felt like they’re fighting against the power and they suddenly find themselves in a position where they’re the old people in power. The people they’re punching out at are people lower down the scale.”

When Greer was asked whether she’ll still be appearing at Cardiff on November 18 despite this recent outcry, she was apprehensive: “I’m getting a bit old for all this. I’m 76. I don’t want to go down there and be screamed at and have things thrown at me.”

“Bugger it. It’s not that interesting or rewarding.”

Watch BBC‘s interview with Greer below. Warning: clip actually contains far less swearing than you’re expecting.

–