Germaine Greer is an Australian author and anti-transgender activist from the second-wave radical feminist faction.
Most of Greer’s hatred is directed at trans women, including:
- trans women are not women
- trans women who feel they are women have a delusion
- transphobia does not exist
Background
Greer was born 29 January 1939 in Melbourne. Greer’s parent lived under an assumed identity as an adult. Greer’s family was Catholic, but Germaine Greer longed to assume a Jewish identity as an adolescent. Greer learned Yiddish, joined a Jewish theatre group, dated Jewish people, and reportedly “felt Jewish.”
After graduating from convent school, Greer earned a bachelor’s degree from University of Melbourne, a master’s degree from University of Sydney and a doctorate in English from Newnham College, Cambridge.
Greer was sexually assaulted in college, which strongly influenced Greer’s thinking and writing on sex and gender.
In 1968, Greer began teaching at University of Warwick. Greer was officially married to Paul du Feu from 1968 to 1973, but Greer cheated on du Feu seven times in the first month, and they separated. Greer wrote for Oz and co-founded Suck, a “new pornogrqaphy” venture based around sexual liberation that sometimes depicted graphic nonconsensual sex. Suck published a nude photo of Greer, prompting Greer to resign.
In 1970 Greer published The Female Eunuch, an important second-wave feminist text. Greer said, “I don’t like women. I probably share in all the effortless and unconscious contempt that men pour on women.” Greer had notable debates with Norman Mailer, William F. Buckley, and others throughout a steady string of television appearances.
Greer founded the Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature as part of her work to reclaim women’s cultural contributions. Through the 1990s Greer continued to write about women’s issues.
Anti-transgender activism
Greer has made many inflammatory comments about trans people. One chapter of Greer’s 1999 book The Whole Woman is titled “Pantomime Dames.” In keeping with the views presented in The Female Eunuch, Greer wrote:
Governments that consist of very few women have hurried to recognise as women, men who believe that they are women and have had themselves castrated to prove it, because they see women not as another sex but as a non-sex.
She added: “When a man decides to spend his life impersonating his mother (like Norman Bates in Psycho), it is as if he murders her and gets away with it.”
Greer protested the appointment of trans physicist Rachael Padman to a women’s college and Glamour magazine’s 2015 Woman of the Year honor given to Caitlyn Jenner.
References
Greer, Germaine (1999). The Whole Woman. London: Transworld Publishers Ltd. p. 64. ISBN 978-0385720038
Garner, Clare (25 June 1997). Fellows divided over don who breached last bastion. The Independent. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/fellows-divided-over-don-who-breached-last-bastion-1257781.html
Q&A: Germaine Greer revives an old controversy about what constitutes a real woman. ABC News. 11 April 2016. http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-04-11/q&a-germaine-greer-weighs-in-sexuality-transgender/7318024
Ditum, Sarah (13 May 2018). Genderquake failed. Now for a proper trans debate. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/may/13/genderquake-failed-now-for-a-proper-trans-debate
Morris, Steven (18 November 2015). Germaine Greer gives university lecture despite campaign to silence her. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/nov/18/transgender-activists-protest-germaine-greer-lecture-cardiff-university
Germaine Greer: Transgender women are ‘not women’. BBC News. 24 October 2015. https://www.bbc.com/news/av/uk-34625512/germaine-greer-transgender-women-are-not-women
De Freytas-Tamura, Kimiko (24 October 2015). Cardiff University Rejects Bid to Bar Germaine Greer. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/25/world/europe/cardiff-university-rejects-bid-to-bar-germaine-greer.html
Lehmann, Claire (27 October 2015). Germaine Greer and the scourge of ‘no-platforming’. ABC News. http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-10-27/lehmann-greer-and-the-no-platforming-scourge/6887576
Campbell, Beatrix; et al. (14 February 2015). We cannot allow censorship and silencing of individuals. The Observer. Archived from the original on 13 October 2018. Retrieved 12 October 2018. https://web.archive.org/web/20181013014630/https://www.theguardian.com/theobserver/2015/feb/14/letters-censorship
Resources
GLAAD (glaad.org)
Britannica (britannica.com)
Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org)
Twitter (twitter.com)
- thefemalegreer [last post in 2012]