The controversy dates back to something Greer wrote in the Guardian in 2009. She opined that "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. We pretend that all the people passing for female really are. Other delusions may be challenged, but not a man's delusion that he is female."

This was six years before the July 2015 cover of Vanity Fair featuring Bruce Jenner.

More recently, speaking at Cambridge University, Greer was given a chance to walk her comments back. She declined. According to reports, "audience members were relentless in their questioning of Greer on her exclusion of transgender women from her feminist ideas," to which Greer replied, "I've got 51 per cent of the world to think about, and I've got to talk about transphobia."

Cardiff University stood by its invitation, saying that "Our events include speakers with a range of views, all of which are rigorously challenged and debated." But Greer withdrew, telling the BBC "I'm getting a bit old for this . . . I don't want to go down there and be screamed at and have things thrown at me."

Not to mention being absurdly labeled a "misogynist."

In a delicious bit of irony, at the same time Greer was withdrawing from her speaking engagement, Rachel Dolezal, the former head of the Spokane NAACP admitted that, while she was "born white," she "identifies as black."

When the story about Dolezal broke, some people drew what should have been an obvious parallel to the Bruce Jenner story: both were people whose self-identification did not square with their personal history.

Let's just say that the transgender movement didn't appreciate the comparison.

This despite the fact that, as my friend and colleague Roberto Rivera recently wrote at BreakPoint.org, race is, scientifically-speaking, a "much less precise concept than sex and gender." Most geneticists and anthropologists consider our ideas about race to be largely a social and political construct. As one prominent geneticist has written, "racial classifications are of 'virtually no genetic or taxonomic significance'."

Even if you don't understand how this is possible, the important issue is that nothing remotely like this has ever been said about sex and gender. No serious scientist denies the biological reality--and fixed nature--of male and female.

But in an ironic demonstration of turning reality on its head, the more malleable concept, race, is treated as fixed, and the fixed concept, sex, is treated as malleable.

Political correctness has become like the mythical Ouroboros--a snake swallowing its own tail. Even leading feminists aren't safe anymore. Because, as Germaine Greer has learned, when you challenge people's delusions, they will travel to the ends of the earth to silence you. Even if they have to stand on their heads all the way.

Reprinted with permission from Break Point.

*****

Transsexuals trash a feminist icon

By Michael Cook
http://www.mercatornet.com/
October 26, 2015

You know that we have come to the end of an era when a bra-burning torchbearer for the sexual revolution is being vilified as a misogynist.

Germaine Greer, an Australian feminist whose book The Female Eunuch became an international best-seller and a textbook of sexual liberation, is being pilloried for her views on "transwomen".

She is scheduled to give a lecture on November 18 at Cardiff University, in Wales, "Women & Power: The Lessons of the 20th Century". But 2,000 people have signed a petition demanding that the University cancel the lecture because of her views on transexuals. It reads:

Greer has demonstrated time and time again her misogynistic views towards trans women, including continually misgendering trans women and denying the existence of transphobia altogether.

Trans-exclusionary views should have no place in feminism or society. Such attitudes contribute to the high levels of stigma, hatred and violence towards trans people - particularly trans women - both in the UK and across the world.

It's unclear what will happen. The University says that it does not plan to cancel the lecture, but Greer says that its words are "as weak as piss". Having been glitter-bombed in the past by trans activists, she wants robust assurance of her safety. "If the University of Cardiff cannot guarantee that I will not have things thrown at me then I won't go there. I can't be bothered."

Greer's bombastic views are colourful and clever, but not always (or even seldom) consistent. In her younger days she posed nude for university magazines and now she rages against pornography (a "huge wart" on cyberspace). She had more than one abortion and now claims that legal abortion was a plot invented by IVF clinics. But she knows what a woman is, is proud of being a woman, and can't bear to see a "ghastly parody" of womanhood, or what she calls "pantomime dames", to invade her turf.

In her eyes, transsexuality is an attempt by men to colonize her sex.

Even though we know that a Y chromosome is only an X that has lost a leg, we still think in terms of male = perfect, female = imperfect. In plainer terms what the academic feminists could be taken to be saying is that (a) you're a woman if you think you are and (b) you're a woman if other people think you are. Unfortunately (b) cannot be made to follow from (a).

This is a conviction she has held for decades. In 1996 she opposed the election of another Australian academic, transsexual Rachael Padman, to her all-women college at the University of Cambridge because "she" was really a man. Transsexual activists have had her in their crosshairs ever since.

But Greer is right. Her opinion is not "problematic and hateful"; it's biology. Men have XY chromosomes and women have XX chromosomes. It is delusional (to borrow another of Greer's adjectives) to assert that hormones and surgery can change a man into a woman. In fact, as Greer points out, it is an unethical procedure because doctors "remove healthy tissue and create lifelong dependence on medicine".

Allegations of her "transphobia" are nonsense. As Greer put it, "I didn't know there was such a thing. Arachnaphobia, yes. Transphobia, no." She is being pilloried for uttering the plain truth, empirically verifiable with a discrete look at one's private parts, that men cannot become women. They can only play a part.

"I just don't think that surgery turns a man into a woman,[she says]. A perfectly permissable view. I mean, an un-man is not necessarily a woman. We don't really know what women are and I think that a lot of women are female impersonators, because our notion of who we are is not authentic, and so I am not surprised men are better at impersonating women than women are. Not a surprise, but it's not something I welcome."

The bucketing Greer has endured for telling the plain truth is a window onto the dangers of the transsexual project. It cannot endure the slightest humiliation and will lash out at pinpricks of criticism. This obsessive self-centredness can't last, of course. Society will indefinitely support people who build castles in the air and then ask for government subsidies to pay the repair bills.

With the media agog at the fantasies of Bruce/Caitlyn Jenner & Co, we're in dire need of people who have the courage to say that the emperor has no clothes. I never could have imagined myself saying this, but thank God for Germaine Greer.

Michael Cook is editor of MercatorNet.