Veteran second wave feminist Germaine Greer has been honoured with an “Iconoclast” prize at the Oldie of the Year awards for her insistence that transgendered men are not women.
Ms. Greer, 76, has written many times before that men who choose to feminise their bodies with hormones and cosmetic surgery do not constitute the category of women, first making the claim decades ago.
Her views were considered obvious, almost a tautology, when she first expressed them; but today, they are so subversive the can be reasonably classes as iconoclastic, and with the fad taking off following the “watershed” Bruce Jenner magazine cover last year, they came under renewed scrutiny.
Speaking on BBC Newsnight in October last year, she said that Bruce ‘Caitlyn’ Jenner was “wanting to steal the limelight” from Kardashian Girls by declaring himself a women.
“Germaine Greer’s comments on transgender women are grossly offensive” says Boy Meets Girl star @rebeccaroot1969 https://t.co/s1HFrdepzB
— Victoria Derbyshire (@VictoriaLIVE) October 26, 2015
She doubled down on the comments later that month, giving a statement to the Victoria Derbyshire Show, which read: “Just because you lop off your dick and then wear a dress doesn’t make you a fucking woman.
“I’ve asked my doctor to give me long ears and liver spots and I’m going to wear a brown coat but that doesn’t turn me into a fucking cocker spaniel.
“A man who gets his dick chopped off is actually inflicting an extraordinary act of violence on himself”, she said.
Once hailed as a feminist hero, her views today put her at odds with the majority of the new feminist establishment. Accepting the award last night she pleaded with viewers not to regard her as a “reactionary”.
“I feel I have nicked this award. I don’t want to be recognised for being a reactionary. I’m not. I don’t want to recognise polarised gender. We are none of us masculine enough, none of us feminine enough. It’s a losing battle”, she argued.
By this, Ms. Greer means that she believes that internal “identity” should not trump physical bodies. Masculine women and feminine men should not be encouraged to alter their bodies to meet “social constructed” gender norms. Rather, they should challenge those norms, and accept their bodies.
She added: “The most fuss and bother wasn’t for anything I said and did recently, rather it’s to do with what I wrote years ago. It was important to me that women understood femininity as a pose, a posture, a cultural artefact.
“I was talking about this fraud of femininity that women are persuaded to accept. I never actually bought into the fight. I was co-opted into the fight”, she said.
Many in the transgender lobby are agitating to have even Ms. Greer’s feminist view made a hate crime in the UK.
The British government’s Women’s and Equalities committee, say, recently declared that biology is almost completely irrelevant to our modern lives, and proposed that denying biological men access to women’s changing rooms and should be illegal.
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