Culture

“I Belong In This Hole”: Germaine Greer Tried To Understand Transgender Experience Again

She tried. She really failed.

by Sinead Stubbins  12 April 2016

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Last night on Q&A, Germaine Greer contributed to the already expansive canon of her ignorant views on the transgender community. It began with a young woman voicing a very relatable experience for many feminists, saying that while she once found Greer’s work to be a source of “inspiration”, Greer’s stance that transgender women are not “real women” was very troubling. “Isn’t that the kind of essentialism that you and I are trying to resist and escape?” she asked. 

You can watch a clip of the episode below:

The segment was interesting, because at first Greer does appear to try to work through her bias. You get the sense that we’re watching someone wrestle with decades of ideas about gender and what it means to be a woman, in real time, but she’s ultimately unable to move past these ideas. “I now realise, partly because I’m not entirely immune to information, that this was wrong,” she said.

Unfortunately, Greer’s reasoning that gender is a construct that hurts both men and women, and being transgender isn’t a way to fix this, meant that she slipped back into confused prejudice pretty quickly. “If you’re unhappy with [being a man], it doesn’t mean that you belong at the other end of the spectrum,” she said, before asserting that you “can’t know” that you’ve been born the wrong sex at birth. Oh, boy.

The issue is that Greer still seems to view being transgender as a flippant choice rather than something deeper and ingrained in one’s identity (another issue is her idea that women felt “wry” when Caitlyn Jenner won Glamour‘s Women of the Year, which she also brought up last night). Panellist and Aria-award winning oud player Joseph Tawadros, very frankly explained to Greer that just because she doesn’t ‘get it’, doesn’t mean that she should challenge the entire existence of transgender people.

“Society is moving very quickly. There’s still a lot of people who don’t understand transgender — I don’t understand all the aspects of transgender people,” he said. “But I just have to respect that.”

Germaine Greer’s inability to recognise transgender women as ‘legitimate’ women is damaging and out of step with the times, but it was interesting to see someone admit that their previous strongly-held views were wrong. It’s rare that there’s actually a space for people to work through their prejudices and ‘see the light’ of understanding and reason, without fear of attack (and it’s depressing that this redemption didn’t occur). What Greer has said is indefensible.

However, it’s safe to say that we all agree on one thing: when it comes to the transgender community, Germaine Greer needs to stop spouting archaic views and start exercising some goddamn compassion and respect.

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