Greer has the right to speak, but she also has something worth listening to

Early on in my transition I was physically assaulted whilst boarding a bus. My back had been turned, my hands occupied with digging in my purse for a ticket when a solid fist struck me from the side – a sucker punch.

He yelled “TRANNY!” and trotted away at a mild gait, unhindered by any witnesses.

This thug’s annoyance resulted from me having just declined his offer of a nugget of crack cocaine in exchange for an alleyway blowjob. Since I was a transwoman waiting for public transit, I was clearly available to be propositioned for sex.

I know one thing for certain as I look back on that incident. This vicious bloke had never read Simone de Beauvoir. He had never read Germaine Greer.

And yet according to students from Cardiff University, Germaine Greer is somehow responsible for me getting smacked on the skull because of her views about transgender issues. What are these violent ideas? In her own words:

I don’t think that post-operative transgender men – M to F transgender people – are women . . . I’m not saying that people should not be allowed to go through that procedure, what I’m saying is it doesn’t make them a woman.

A petition written by Cardiff University Students’ Union’s women’s officer reads:

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.

So, an academic lecturing in Wales who understands “woman” to mean “an adult human female” is complicit in the murder of trans women (often poor and of a racial minority) by savage men (almost always by men)?

Let’s be honest about liberals and their armchair activism. Slagging off older women on Twitter or from the ivory tower is a hell of a lot easier than confronting actual male violence.

Greer, following feminists such as Simone de Beauvoir, assesses that male and female sexuation is not a myth or a personal feeling, but material states of embodiment within ethical circumstances. She rejects a world in which a bepenised Caitlyn Jenner is dubbed Woman of the Year without having actually lived as a woman for an entire year. Greer denies feeling you are actually female inside is enough to define you as female.

Greer denies feeling you are actually female inside is enough to define you as female.

I signed a petition in support of Germaine Greer because I support her right to speak. As an academic I’m not afraid of lively and vigorous argument. As a transsexual I’m tired of my experience being erased in service to genderism. As a human person I would like a world without gender where we’re free to express ourselves regardless of sex.

Trans activists tell us “gender is not sex” like a mantra bereft of enlightenment. Well, what is gender? They never answer. Where did it come from? They never answer.

Sexual difference is the reality of how mammals reproduce. Gender is a socially constructed hierarchy of sex-based norms imposed onto bodies. Feminism contends that the specific reproductive capacities of female persons are exploited and dominated by male power, with gender as a mechanism of control.

Transgenderism, however, disavows that biological sex is an actual, real category people can fall into. Instead, trans activists adhere to the claim that being male or female is a matter of arbitrary opinion. A male must really be female if ‘she’ possesses a subjectively-identifiable cache of feminine personality traits. By her own command, she was always female, will always be female because thinking makes it so.

Greer rejects gender identity as a coherent essence. Attentive to the practical circumstances of sexuality and power, Greer defines woman as the female sex, and this by definition is exclusive of males – no matter how arbitrarily feminine their inner disposition might be.

To claim males who express “feminine” preferences must actually be female inside is to try to turn ideology into reality.

By defining sex as a materially determined fact and not imaginary assignment, Greer states an anthropological truth. You may not fancy her tact but objecting to her tone is not sufficient to overcome the feminist analysis of gender that Greer advances.

Gender is a synthetic ideology imposed on sex. To claim males who express “feminine” preferences must actually be female inside is to try to turn ideology into reality. And it is to do so on the basis of sex-based stereotypes.

Because these views can appear harsh, troubling, and oppositional to the worldview of many trans sympathisers, Greer’s opponents turn to the most regressive, chauvinistic tactic – aggressively enforcing silence. Rather than providing cogent arguments concerning gender identity, trans activists choose the tactic of no platforming.

Why are people afraid of Greer? Because she is a woman saying no to gender.

Read a different take on trans women and Germaine Greer here, by Helen Boyd.