This article is doing the Twitter rounds.
www.independent.co.uk/voices/i-challenged-germaine-greer-over-her-transphobic-comments-at-her-controversial-lecture-this-week-a6741771.html
I think that Dr Greer's answer is really interesting & food for thought - or rather, at the foundation of what feminism is to me:
“I don’t accept transgender males post-operatively as female because I don’t believe a woman is a man without a cock.”
I think this is so so so important: for millennia we have had a cultural story told us that women are men with a bit missing. So we are defective not-men. Therefore not fully human.
She;s also challenging psychological truisms from Freud onward.
This isn't about transphobia. It's clear that Dr Greer doesn't hate transgender people. She is just adamant that a woman is not simply a man without a penis. I think this is such a radical statement still, which is a depressing testament to misogyny.
And also a reminder that all the liberal, equality feminist gains we have (and there are many) are not worth much if we cannot be public about the experience of the female body.
There's a beautiful essay by Virginia Woolf about women's writing, "Professions for Women," where she writes:
Be that as it may, I want you to imagine me writing a novel in a state of trance. I want you to figure to yourselves a girl sitting with a pen in her hand, which for minutes, and indeed for hours, she never dips into the inkpot. The image that comes to my mind when I think of this girl is the image of a fisherman lying sunk in dreams on the verge of a deep lake with a rod held out over the water. She was letting her imagination sweep unchecked round every rock and cranny of the world that lies submerged in the depths of our unconscious being. Now came the experience, the experience that I believe to be far commoner with women writers than with men. The line raced through the girl's fingers. Her imagination had rushed away. It had sought the pools, the depths, the dark places where the largest fish slumber. And then there was a smash. There was an explosion. There was foam and confusion. The imagination had dashed itself against something hard. The girl was roused from her dream. She was indeed in a state of the most acute and difficult distress. To speak without figure she had thought of something, something about the body, about the passions which it was unfitting for her as a woman to say. Men, her reason told her, would be shocked. The consciousness ofwhat men will say of a woman who speaks the truth about her passions had roused her from her artist's state of unconsciousness. She could write no more. The trance was over. Her imagination could work no longer. This I believe to be a very common experience with women writersthey are impeded by the extreme conventionality of the other sex. For though men sensibly allow themselves great freedom in these respects, I doubt that they realize or can control the extreme severity with which they condemn such freedom in women.
These then were two very genuine experiences of my own. These were two of the adventures of my professional life. The firstkilling the Angel in the HouseI think I solved. She died. But the second, telling the truth about my own experiences as a body, I do not think I solved. I doubt that any woman has solved it yet. The obstacles against her are still immensely powerful--and yet they are very difficult to define. Outwardly, what is simpler than to write books? Outwardly, what obstacles are there for a woman rather than for a man? Inwardly, I think, the case is very different; she has still many ghosts to fight, many prejudices to overcome. Indeed it will be a long time still, I think, before a woman can sit down to write a book without finding a phantom to be slain, a rock to be dashed against. And if this is so in literature, the freest of all professions for women, how is it in the new professions which you are now for the first time entering?
And there are still these obstacles ... Telling the truth about our experiences as bodies ... that sentence has resonated with me for 30 years, since I first read it.