Germaine Greer

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Germaine Greer
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.
—Germain Greer, 2009[1]

Germaine Greer is an accomplished radical feminist author, journalist and scholar. She wrote the important feminist tome The Female Eunuch, which decried the 1970s ideal of a "stable," suburban nuclear family as repressive of women, and dedicated her life to "women's liberation." She is currently emeritus professor in English Literature and Comparative Studies at the University of Warwick.[2]

As with many other powerful voices of the second wave of feminism, Greer has been a frequent and forceful critic of transsexualism and transgenderism. Like her contemporaries Janice Raymond and Sheila Jeffreys, Greer actively worked against trans women, participating in a kind of a witch-hunt that in one case forced a trans woman out of her job. She unsuccessfully campaigned against the election of scholar Rachel Padman to Newnham College, Cambridge, a women's college.

Greer holds views on transgender people that are common for transphobic individuals, but compounded by a grounding in a rather simplistic interpretation of feminist theory. For instance:

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. 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. The insistence that man-made women be accepted as women is the institutional expression of the mistaken conviction that women are defective males.
—Germaine Greer, The Whole Woman, 1999

This excerpt from her book The Whole Woman is way off base. The procedures she describes are beyond current medical technology; it is literally impossible to meet the standard she arbitrarily imposes. Transsexual women have actually died attempting to have uterine transplant procedures, and it is a common occurrence in post-op trans women to strongly desire the procedure, in some cases resulting in depression at the fact that medical science has not made it safely viable.[3] Uterine transplantation has been performed successfully on at least one cisgender woman, meaning the day might soon come when a trans woman could likewise have a uterus, though this would not justify her bigoted gatekeeping. The first successful operation was performed in Turkey in 2011,[4] but the patient - a cis woman - was not able to carry a pregnancy to term.

[edit] Accusations of sexism

Greer was accused of sexism and hypocrisy as a feminist when critiquing Australia's first female Prime Minister Julia Gillard, during a television debate in March 2012. Rather than discuss policy, Greer chose to mock the Prime Minister's fashion sense, and labelled her a "big arse".[5][6]

[edit] See also

[edit] Footnotes

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