Feminist icon: Transgender ‘women’ like Bruce Jenner aren’t women. They’re delusional.
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| Australian author and feminist Germaine Greer at the 2006 Humber Mouth Festival. (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
Author
and '60s radical feminist Germaine Greer is coming under fire after telling the
BBC that transgender "women," such as Bruce Jenner, are not women and
that they don't "look like, sound like, or behave like women.”
Greer
was responding to a petition that was being passed around by leftist activists
demanding that Cardiff University cancel a lecture by the radical feminist scheduled for November 18
because of her history of making statements questioning transgenderism.
Criticizing
Glamour magazine’s decision to name Jenner "Woman of the Year," Greer
told the BBC, "I think misogyny plays a really big part in all of this,
that a man who goes to these lengths to become a woman will be a better woman
than someone who is just born a woman.”
Greer
suggested that Jenner's transition was part of an effort to gain attention in
the public eye. “It seems to me that what was going on there was that
he/she wanted the limelight that the other, female, members of the family were
enjoying and has conquered it, just like that,” she added,
When
Greer's comments provoked a backlash, she responded in a strongly worded
statement, saying that simply because a man gets his genitals removed and wears
a dress doesn't make him a 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 won’t turn me
into a fu**ing cocker spaniel," she said.
“I
do understand that some people are born intersex and they deserve support in
coming to terms with their gender but it’s not the same thing. A man who gets
his d**k chopped off is actually inflicting an extraordinary act of violence on
himself.”
The
petition against Greer states that she "has demonstrated time and
time again her misogynistic views towards trans women, including continually
misgendering trans women and denying the existence of transphobia altogether.”
Greer
says many women – including strong feminists – agree with her, but it has
become politically correct to propagate the lie that transgenders are whatever
sex they imagine themselves to be. "Nowadays we are all likely to meet
people who think they are women, have women's names, and feminine clothes and
lots of eyeshadow, who seem to us to be some kind of ghastly parody, though it
isn't polite to say so," Greer told The Guardian in 2009.
"We
pretend that all the people passing for female really are," Greer wrote.
"Other delusions may be challenged, but not a man's delusion that he is
female."
The
Australian-born professor and bestselling author refers to transgenders as
"male to female transgender people" and "female to male
transgender people."
Greer's
first book, The Female
Eunuch (1970), became
an international bestseller and made her a feminist icon. She argued in the
book that women do not realize how much men hate them and how much they are
taught to hate themselves. Greer compared women to "beasts who are
castrated in farming in order to serve their master's ulterior motives – to be
fattened or made docile." The self-avowed Marxist advocated giving up
celibacy and monogamy.
In
1999's The Whole
Woman, Greer wrote, "Governments that consist of very few
women have hurried to recognize 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."
"No
so-called sex-change has ever begged for a uterus-and-ovaries transplant;
if uterus-and-ovaries transplants were made mandatory for wannabe women they
would disappear overnight," Greer wrote.
Greer
concluded, "The insistence that man-made women be accepted as women is the
institutional expression of the mistaken conviction that women are defective
males."
Greer
was appointed as a special lecturer and fellow at Newnham College, Cambridge.
While at the school, Greer opposed the official fellowshipping of a
male-to-female transgender colleague, arguing that he had been born male and
therefore should not be admitted to Newnham, a women's college.
Greer
is accurate to say many feminists agree with her. Many feminists say
transgenders merely uphold and reinforce sexist roles.
In
1977, Gloria Steinem wrote that transgenders "surgically mutilate their own bodies" in order to conform to a gender role that is
inexorably tied to physical body parts. She famously concluded, "If the
shoe doesn't fit, must we change the foot?" Steinem has since repudiated
those views.
In
1979, University of Massachusetts-Amherst professor Janice Raymond's The Transsexual Empire criticized transsexualism as based on
"patriarchal myths" and the "making of woman according to man's
image." Raymond wrote, "All transsexuals
rape women's bodies by
reducing the real female form to an artifact[.] ... Transsexuals merely cut off
the most obvious means of invading women, so that they seem non-invasive."
In
1997, Sheila Jeffreys, co-author of Gender
Hurts: A Feminist Analysis of the Politics of Transgenderism,
wrote, "transsexualism should be seen as a
violation of human rights."
More
recently, Julie Bindel wrote an article titled "Gender Benders
Beware" about trans-regret, concluding, "I don't have a problem with
men disposing of their genitals, but it does not make them women, in the same way that shoving a bit of vacuum hose
down your 501s [jeans] does not make you a man."
Other
feminists have been less kind. Dr. Mary Daly wrote in her book Gyn/ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism,
"Today the Frankenstein phenomenon is omnipresent ... in phallocratic technology[.] …
Necrophiliacs sense the lack of soul/spirit/life-loving principle within
themselves, and therefore try to invade and kill off all spirit, substituting
conglomerates of corpses. This necrophilic invasion/elimination takes a variety
of forms. Transsexualism is an example."
Even
some transgenders admit that they are not, in fact, women. Miranda Yardley, a
male-to-female trans, wrote an honest article in England's socialist daily, The Morning Star, entitled "The conflict between feminism and the transgender
movement." She says that the mantra
"'[t]rans women are women' is a dogma that reduces what it means to be a
woman to an identity and this erases women's lived reality."
Yardley
argues that natural women should be allowed privacy in public bathrooms and
should be allowed even to exclude transgendered men from women's groups.
"Women having their own spaces is not about trans exclusion, rather allowing
women with shared experiences space to gather, celebrate and heal,"
Yardley explained. "Who is harmed by women setting their own
boundaries?"
Yardley,
himself a transgendered male-to-female, concluded, "Being a woman is a
reality, not an identity. Trans women are not women – I know this, you know this, everybody knows this[.]
... Trans women are biologically male[.] ... The lives of women and trans women
are different."
A
Cardiff University Students' Union officer called Ms. Greer's views towards
transgender women "misogynistic."
