Germaine Greer gives talk at university: ‘Women aren’t just men without c***s’
Despite a campaign to stop her from giving a lecture, Germaine Greer has given a lecture at Cardiff University.
Feminist author Greer was due to give a talk at Cardiff University next month – but had seemingly cancelled the talk of her own accord after a number of activists protested her repeated derogatory comments about trans women.
However, the talk went ahead, and Greer re-iterated her comments that she does not believe trans women are women.
“I don’t believe a woman is a man without a cock,” she said. “You can beat me over the head with a baseball bat. It still won’t make me change my mind.”
She added: “Being a woman is a bit tricky. If you didn’t find your pants full of blood when you were 13 there’s something important about being a woman you don’t know. It’s not all cake and jam.”
Speaking at the event, Greer mentioned Will Young’s latest music video which features a trans man walking down a street naked, facing abuse.
She said if an elderly woman did that she would be thrown in a waste disposal unit, reports the Guardian.
“Try doing that if you were a 76-year-old woman. They would throw a blanket over you. They would throw you in a waste disposal unit. People are intolerant,” Greer said.
Of trans people and the campaign against her, Greer said: “They are not my issue. It should be perfectly clear why not. I think 51% of the world’s population is enough for me to be going on with. I do agree that calling people names may add to their misery but it happens to old women every day.”
Later in the talk, Greer also claimed five women had approached her, commending her for her views.
“They said: ‘I’m so glad that someone is saying what we think. We don’t think that post-operative male transexuals are women but we are not allowed to say so’. I will say so because I don’t believe they are women. That’s not tantamount to calling them names. I also happen to believe that the surgery is unethical.”
She declined to speak to interviewers before or after the event.
Greer has previously spoken out against “man’s delusion that he is female”, claiming trans women are “some kind of ghastly parody” that will never be women because they do not know what it’s like to have a “big, hairy, smelly vagina”.
