In a move that is sure to add false legitimacy to transphobia Germaine Greer was yesterday awarded the Iconoclast of the Year Award by The Oldie Magazine.
Greer, 76, hit the headlines in October when she met with accusations of mysogyny over comments about trans women after she’d been booked to speak at Cardiff University.
Her dangerous opinions on Trans women first appeared in a chapter of her 1999 book ‘The Whole Woman’ entitled ‘Pantomime Dames’ in which she denounced transgender women as “men who believe that they are women and have had themselves castrated.”
In a BBC Newsnight interview last year she accused trans women of mysogyny after Caitlyn Jenner was named as one of Glamour magazine’s Women of the Year.
“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.”
Following criticism of these comments she responded with a profanity laden statement claiming:
“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.
“A man who gets his dick chopped off is actually inflicting an extraordinary act of violence on himself.”
Gender dysphoria is not something that we choose, it is an intrinsic part of our very souls and to deny it led me and many other trans women to a lifetime battling self harm and suicidal feelings.
As well as being deeply hurtful and dismissive of transgender people’s very real pain Greer’s bigotry attempts to lend a factual sheen to transphobia and this award is an obscene validation of dangerous hate speech disguised as intellectual thought.
Bigotry makes strange bed fellows and the thought of the feminist Greer and the mysogynist Jeremy Clarkson uniting against a shared enemy is truly bizarre.
Where once her views were at the vanguard of feminist thought she increasingly looks as out of touch with the times as the sexists, homophobes and racists of the 60s and 70s.
Photo of Germaine Greer by walnut whippet from Hull, UK (Germaine Greer at Humber Mouth Festival 2006) [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons