Feminist Germaine Greer Goes on Anti-Trans Rant Over Caitlyn Jenner
Feminist Stalwart versus Transgender Icon: It may sound like a warped new comic strip, but really it’s the first installment in what could be a series of very real conflicts between warring politically correct factions.
Prominent feminist Germaine Greer is being denounced for claiming that transgender women “can’t be women.” And in defending her original remarks, Greer has ignited long-simmering tensions between some self-proclaimed feminists and transgender women.
In an interview with the BBC’s Newsnight Friday, Greer reacted harshly to the news that Caitlyn Jenner would be named one of Glamour magazine’s Women of the Year. While the magazine has not yet made an official announcement, Jenner and Reese Witherspoon are both rumored to be included in the December issue, which will mark the 25th anniversary of the tradition, according to Gossip Cop.
“I think misogyny plays a really big part in all of this,” Greer told the BBC, “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.”
When Greer’s BBC comments drew backlash, including a petition to have a scheduled lecture canceled, she responded to the fury both in the media and online, with a statement laced with profanity:
“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 won’t turn me into a fucking cocker spaniel.
“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 dick chopped off is actually inflicting an extraordinary act of violence on himself.”
Greer’s response made explicit the transphobia she unleashed in the Newsnight interview, where she suggested that trans women are “not women” because, according to her, many people do not think that they “look like, sound like, or behave like women.”
She also repeated old criticism of Jenner’s transition to womanhood, claiming that it is a media ploy designed to steal the spotlight from her ex-wife, daughters, and stepdaughters and their hit E! reality TV show, Keeping Up With the Kardashians. Jenner flatly rejected that theory in a March interview with ABC’s Diane Sawyer.
Greer’s comments are hardly her first public anti-trans statements. Her seminal 1999 book, The Whole Woman, denounced transgender women as “men who believe that they are women and have had themselves castrated,” according to The Huffington Post U.K.
In 2009, the native Australian academic, long a U.K. resident, suggested in a Guardian article that trans women were “deluded” for “thinking” they are women.
At a Cambridge University speech this year, Greer insisted that trans women do not deserve womanhood because they do not understand what it is like to possess what she called “a big, hairy, smelly vagina.”
Even more worrisome, given the rise in anti-trans violence, Greer went on to tell Cambridge students that transphobia does not exist.
But after Greer’s latest comments on Newsnight, the backlash has been swift and loud.
An online petition with 2,000-plus signatures urged Cardiff University to revoke her invitation to speak at the school November 18 on the grounds that she spreads hate. In response, Greer canceled her lecture.
Both trans advocates and queer theorists have counted Greer among the top of so-called trans-exclusionary radical feminists, or TERFs, along with figures such as Cathy Brennan, Sheila Jeffreys, and Janice Raymond.
Whether Greer considers herself radical is open to question, but she is a self-described feminist. She addressed her beliefs March 8 during the “All About Women” panel at the Sydney Opera House:
“I’ve always been a liberation feminist. I’m not an equality feminist. I think that’s a profoundly conservative aim, and it wouldn’t change anything. It would just mean that women were implicated.”
While Greer decries what she terms the misogyny behind Jenner’s rise in the media, Greer’s own anti-trans stance is reflective of what advocates like Laura Kacere at Everyday Feminism call transmisogyny. Kacere used that word last year to describe “the confluence of … negative attitudes, expressed through cultural hate, individual and state violence, and discrimination directed toward trans women and trans and gender non-conforming people on the feminine end of the gender spectrum.”
According to Kacere:
“Trans women experience a particular kind of sexist marginalization based in their unique position of overlapping oppressions — they are both trans and feminine. They are devalued by society on both accounts. … Understanding transmisogyny is absolutely imperative to our work as feminists, and makes clear just how integral trans issues and rights are to our work around gender.”
Watch Greer’s original comments to the BBC about trans women here.
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47 Comments
Jamie
October 28, 06:40Eyaa… So you feel so insecure??? These woman are so hurt that they can’t help but bitch loudly around…and that’s not a misogynistic statement up there!!!
#TeamKizito
October 28, 06:57Hmmm.
KryxxX
October 28, 07:03Ogaa ooooooooooo!
Ah ah! Is it your dick that they chopped off?! See how somebody go just carried oshuka abi aju and carry another person’s trouble on their head! Chukwu aju!
Maybe there is something sister Germany is not telling us. Maybe she once wanted to transition but didn’t have d balls to. Or maybe riding Cait’s dick was in her bucket list but alas, it is gone!
Believe me, I have my reservations about this mummy Cait ish eh, but this woman’s hate stems from somewhere deeper! It is chuking her heart down down!
kacee
October 28, 07:45Ths woman is Cray cray I tell you.
Francis
October 28, 08:13She had a chance to make her point come off right but ended up revealing her transphobic self.
Delle
October 28, 08:37What in the world of blazes is this? Are we still talking about this, like seriously?
I want to understand something, is her anger the fact that Caitlyn Jenner had her dick ‘chopped off’ or the fact that she is to be named Glamour magazine’s Woman of the Year? Is she really venting on fact or jealousy?
You’ve always had a ‘big, hairy and smelly vagina’ (so gross) all the while and yet you couldn’t clinch ‘Vanguard’s Woman of the Year’ award and someone who u apparently feel threatened by just ‘cos she was born male, comes into the picture and gets the golden prize. Honey, doesn’t that tell u something?!
Being feminine or masculine isn’t in the physical, its all about how you carry yourself, and how you impart positively your aura on people around you.
If that Greer of a woman (sounds like a bear growling) can just keep her hate aside for some months and get conventional adult education…maybe I wouldn’t have to deal with this.
Please, I’m out!
Chizzie
October 28, 09:11Well its safe to say I’m actually a fan of this woman and I in ways completely agree. Trans women and this Is IMO btw, can’t be completely regarded as women cause there’s so much that embodies being a woman than having boobs and a non self dilated and lubricating vagina, and I’m saying this from the feminist standpoint
A trans woman will never experience the pain of child birth, menstrual cramps, what it is to be biologically and anatomically weaker. They never really share the same struggles that real women do.
If you are really pro feminism and a feminist, not a pretentious fck and a liberal wannabe you’ll see reasons with Germaine Greer.
Plus have to admit, the bit abt getting one’s dick chopped off was extremely funny and arguably true!
Pink Panther
October 28, 09:28You know, as I read this report, I could see you and Ms. Greer at a tea table, munching on crumpets and plotting on who and who to take down.
Jamie
October 28, 14:47So barren women are not women? And hermaphrodites are just…nothing?
Hermaphrodites are who they feel like. Transsexuals are who they feel like. Homosexuals and Bisexuals and Genderqueer folks are who they feel like. Why decide for them? How would you feel if you were in the shoes of any transgender at all and faced all that hateful rant? Why are we even here if we discriminate as well?
Max
October 28, 09:14“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 dick chopped off is actually inflicting an extraordinary act of violence on himself.”
????
Marc Francis of Chelsea
October 28, 09:31I think another view on transmisogyny is that how can someone who was born in the privileged gender decide to switch (for transwomen) and how could a woman be so disloyal to her long-suffering gender as to want to become a man (for transmen).
KingBey
October 28, 09:55I have never been a fan of Trannies, so I’m with this woman. You don’t just wake up one day, visit a Surgeon and gbam ! You’re a woman ! Mba ! Caitlyn is not a real woman and they should stop hyping him abii her.
Jamie
October 28, 15:00This is not about Bruce/Caitlyn Genner; this is about human beings and humanity!! What is so difficult about letting people live, if it doesn’t affect us? You think someone would just decide to go through all of that tasky journey, just for show-off? You believe that they are not hurt listening to vitriol???
We should please develop the humane habit of respecting people and their choices and privacies…
#Chestnut
October 28, 09:56The woman might have been harsh in her approach, but I get her frustration with d issue. I don’t think I’ll ever really be able to see caitlyn the way I see cis-women(like my mother and sister and Omotola and Angelina Jolie etc); I have a memory of Bruce Jenner and it would be unfair to ask me to forget that a man called Bruce ever existed,but he’s now a woman called Caitlyn.
PETROVICH
October 28, 10:05Hmmmmm…..all this wahala because of another wo-man’s dick…Sister West Germany, you berra confess what the main issue is
Teflondon
October 28, 10:36One word for Greer; Bigot!
Needlesstosay, not a fan of Cait Jenner either.
Mandy
October 28, 10:41A one-man non-ass-kissing soldier.
Got it. 🙂
Khaleesi
October 28, 11:51****takes 3 steps back, lets out a big yawn, jumps and passes ****
ronniephoenix
October 28, 15:16Ok, I wanted to stay off the coments section of this blog for obvious reasons but this useless bitch has decided to bring me back.
I know I am (I think) the only transgender person here, so its literally up to me to seriously adress this issue.
First, being a woman is totally different from being a female but then people don’t take that into consideration before opening their mouth to spew rubbish.
Being a woman is felt deep within, it is a concious, subconcious and unconcious feeling that “yes I am a woman” a woman of valor. Being a trans woman is exactly the same as being a cis woman, the only difference is the former being male born and the latter being female born.
I am a person unlike folks like cait and laverne who are women, and who deserve to be treated as such. Like conchita wurst (my fav idol) I am a person of flunctuating gender identities but that doesn’t stop me from transitioning if or when I want to.
That doesn’t even stop me from being a woman, I know what it feels like to be a woman. I know what it feels like to want to have them boobs, vag, soft skin, cherry lips and all that but I have to endure this torture of being in a body I feel like tearing off every time I look myself in the mirror, until recently I have always never had the guts to look myself in the mirror to see the horror looking back at me.
People saying trans women cannot be women are in other words saying gay people should become straight. And gay people saying such should as well decide to become straight this instance, lead by example.
Being a woman isn’t about giving birth or having a menstrual cycle and stuff like that, that is being female, being a woman is plain simple just being a woman.
*in conchita’s voice* we are unstoppable
#transisbeautiful
#blackisbeautiful
#blacktransisbeautiful
#wearewomen
#wearequeer
#weareone
*kisses*
From the agender panromantic demisexual asexual.
Xoxo
Teflondon
October 28, 17:53Oh lord! Help me..
I can’t even take it all in, I’m having all sorts of headache. All these names and identities! In one person?
Feels like I was reading some complex Sci-fi shit.
ronniephoenix
October 28, 18:13O tef, you cisgender homosexual male/man, take your BS somewhere else.
Cho
October 28, 22:23Caitlyn isn’t a woman! I wonder the criteria used for such decision. Either way its an insult to real women. I still think its BS the whole Cait drama.
Also, having the XX chromosomes is what makes one female. I understand some abnormalities occur in which XX females don’t develop uterus, etc. Shall we say they are not female because of that? If you’re not XX, and you feel “trapped”you are only consoling yourself that you’re female.
ronniephoenix
October 28, 23:34Ummmmmm cho, you know there is a difference between being a woman and being female right?
Wikipaedia will explain futher.
Marc Francis of Chelsea
October 29, 02:46From studying sociology, you will learn that “female” is a sex and “woman” is a gender. Sex is assigned at birth based on the organs you come out with while gender is defined by society. This is why parents of interSEX people (bearing both sets of genitalia) are allowed to select their baby’s gender. (There are many cases where this has turned out to be a wrong decision as the gender they chose is not what the child accepts growing up).
In today’s world, traditional gender role are expanding exponentially but it is the confusion between sex and gender that has people like Greer miffed. A few years ago, her gender were not meant to do more than birth kids and clean the home. Times have changed and people can now redefine their gender and I believe that despite the pre-requisitions of society, there is nothing wrong with this. When they decide to go from transGENDER to transSEXUAL, then it is simply their way of confirming to themselves that they have accepted their new gender in conformity with its sexual requirements.
That ‘T’ in LGBT is very important so let’s try to understand and support trans people.
Deola
November 02, 08:19Mind Blown!
Cho
October 29, 01:08Really? Another distortion of reality. You mean being feminine? Am sure there is because some women are not feminine.
ronniephoenix
October 29, 09:02Feminity, masculinity,trans feminity,trans masculinity,man,woman,agender,gender queer,male,female ETC
THEY ALL HAVE DIFFERENT MEANINGS!!!!!!!
Do more research my dear, as a member of the LGBTIAQ community I expected more.
Cho
October 29, 09:30Ronnie am actually heterosexual. I stumbled on this blog while snooping around comments made on some fb post and I find some stories interesting that’s why I read some posts in my spare time.
Jamie
October 29, 09:55Aww *hand on cheek*…sounds cute!! Welcome!!!
Pink Panther
October 29, 11:36Perhaps, Cho, some day you’d send something for submission here that’s from the heterosexual point of view… 🙂
ronniephoenix
October 29, 13:44Awwwwwww isn’t that just sweet, that is actually sarcasm. Being heterosexual is not an excuse for ignorance(I didn’t mean that as an insult), I think you should educate yourself more about your “surroundings”.
But then some people from the LGBTIAQ community do not have the common courtesy to educate themselves *side eyeing some people on kd*.
Chizzie
October 29, 14:45Whats the ‘A’ for again now? ?
ronniephoenix
October 29, 15:26Ummmmmm chizzie, don’t tell you don’t the “A” stands for Agender,Asexual and Ally.
Don’t tell me (except if you were being sarcastic)
Chizzie
October 29, 15:55Nope honestly didn’t know. I think its fine with just LGBT, all these other additions aren’t necessary?
ronniephoenix
October 29, 16:12What?!!!!!!, my (a)sexual and agender identity is not necessary and should not be taken seriously? Please don’t start.
Transphobia and acephobia is as serious as homophobia and should be taken seriously.
Chizzie
October 29, 16:29Rolls eyes*
ronniephoenix
October 29, 17:37*long hiss*
Cho
October 29, 21:39Ronnie, there are far too many other things to learn! All those terms are just novel ways of putting people in a “box” isn’t it? Just live and lets live already!
Mr Pink Panther, thanks, your mail Addy? And please note that i am not a good writer.
ronniephoenix
October 29, 22:23“Live love” “live and let live”, these are quotes on which my life is based.
But the terms have to be known for the prejudice to subside.
ronniephoenix
October 29, 22:28………..And it is great to have a cisgender heterosexual on this blog.
*kisses*
Pink Panther
October 30, 06:41It is pantherptb@yahoo.com
Thanks in advance. 🙂
Brian Collins
October 31, 06:49Some pipu were just born to be fishermen.
Stranger
November 01, 20:23This Ronnie”attention seeker” phoenix should go and die abeg.
Pink Panther
November 01, 21:45That’s not very nice, Stranger.
ronniephoenix
November 02, 16:23Hi stranger, I would love to do exactly what you ask but I’ve already tried that. I am actually a mutiple time suicide survivor, so really thank you for reminding me that I am still alive.
Stranger
November 12, 15:28I’m sorry.
The ‘Drop The T’ Petition and how the LGBT is reacting to it | KitoDiaries
November 15, 06:16[…] the petition points to recent remarks from prominent feminist Germaine Greer, who recently claimed that trans women — namely Caitlyn Jenner — “can’t be women.” When trans activists and allies […]