Germaine Greer

YY Buffy. I think it also depends on what subjects speakers are planning to address. I remember being very against giving David Irving a platform to talk about holocaust denial, but I would have been grudgingly OK about him speaking about Hitler's military strategy, for instance.

Similarly, if Greer was planning a talk called 'Why Transwomen aren't Women' I'd be quite sympathetic to transactivists who called for her no-platforming, but given that she was going to talk about something entirely different I think they should grit their teeth and hold back.

The equivalence of post-hysterectomy women with MTTs is such a straw (wo)man. Amputees don't suddenly stop being bipeds because they only have one leg. A woman is a woman post-hysterectomy. And a man is still a man post-castration.

Furedi's article is good. I'm afraid I agree with him that this is a free speech issue at root, not purely a feminist one. If we want free speech we have to defend it for people we don't like too. Dapper Laughs. Nigel Farage. All those unpleasant imams. There are lots of feminists who have been busy cracking down o. The free speech of people whose views they deem hurtful to feminism and now it's all got so out of hand they've turned on a feminist icon.

Feminism needs to get behind free speech - real free speech including for people who don't like feminists - because ultimately there are lots of people who would like to see women's voices shut down and if we lend our voices to a cultural climate where it's acceptable to shut down certain opinions that will, inevitably, eventually be turned on women. As we are now seeing.

I've just been reading the comments under Jack's Guardian article. There are some very good discussions going on in there about what gender actually is.

www.buzzfeed.com/emilyashton/jess-phillips-rape-threats#.qi1Om1X2QD

Freshwater Selkie
"aren't we all a bit non-binary inside"? Aaaaaaarrrghhhhhhh! What on EARTH could this possibly mean? It's DEVOID of thought and nuance.

Not only that, it also is devoid of meaning. Or at least, devoid of the meaning they want it to have.

We are not "a bit non-binary inside" we are all completely not at all binary inside, because a person's sex has no influence on their interests and a personality can't be "female" or "male". Only bodies can. (Unless maybe they were talking about inner organs? I'm afraid my uterus is rather binary, sorry.)

Brilliant Daily Mail piece.

There's 4 words I never thought I'd type.

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3297734/Death-free-speech-Germaine-Greer-branded-transphobic-student-feminists-academic-attacks-self-righteous-zealots-censoring-history-literature-crushing-debate-universities.html

didnt see it but agree with OP. hope GG had the wits to call the interviewer out on this. HOWEVER,, I'm a fan (kind off), but she does like the sound of her own voice and often seems to require little encouragement to go 'off topic'.
I like the other Greer better, the American one. I don't think they are related.

Just saw this article on my Facebook feed and thought it hit the nail on the head really. Transgenderism as "the latest anti-feminist wedge of the left"

www.abc.net.au/religion/articles/2015/10/28/4340688.htm

I get hating your own body. When I was a teenager I hated it for the opposite reasons - my breasts were too small. Teenage boys and girls can be mean about girls with small chests. Fried eggs on an ironing board was one I heard more than once.

It seems that Jack would have preferred my boobs instead of their own and I would probably have been happy to swap!

But it seems wrong that Jack feels it's their body that's the problem, rather than societies for making them feel that way. And I think that's wear body hatred becomes body dysmorphia. I saw on another thread that being trans is not a mental illness but surely it is? I'd always assumed it was part of things like eating disorders and people who have endless amounts of cosmetic surgery.

If she wants to know why she couldn't have the meccano set, she could try asking her parents.

I don't think Jack will have seen this thread before writing the article because Jack wasn't mentioned. Now we've used their name though, their google alert will possibly bring Jack here.

That article pissed me off too - although I did laugh out loud at the response to Greer and saying that women who shave their pubic hair and don't have smelly vaginas must not be real women. How fucking ridiculous.

No, there was another thread discussing her specifically - that's the one she's referring to.

That article! Argh!

"aren't we all a bit non-binary inside"? Aaaaaaarrrghhhhhhh! What on EARTH could this possibly mean? It's DEVOID of thought and nuance.

Conchita Wurst is a drag act and makes no secret of it. It's utterly facile and meaningless to pretend that he says anything at all about transsexualism or transgenderism (except for the obvious misogyny of drag).

I've had a hysterectomy, as it goes, and at a young age. I'm still a bloody woman, for god's sake! And I don't like my situation being co-opted like that, with people crying "look, you're being told you're not a real woman, aren't you offended by that?". No, I'm not, I just think it's a ridiculous thing to say.

I wonder was it this thread that Jack read? Because all the analysis seems to have passed them by in favour of just yelling "yer all meanies and trollz!".

Jack is back to the stereotypes of wanting to play with her brother's meccano set therefore not feeling girly. Why didn't she become a civil engineer in that case rather than growing a beard? It's all so superficial the changes they make. If it's the meccano set you want ask for the meccano set. You don't need a beard to play with meccano.
The sexual abuse she got when younger was awful but pretending to be a man and having a mastectomy won't make it all go away.
It does seem to be giving her attention though and a lot of prominent transexuals seem very attention seeking.

Jack Monroe has written the inevitable article about Greer, Jenner and herself but I think she misses the point a bit, as its radfems like Greer who want gender to be reconstructed, and she doesn't seem to get that sex and gender are different things.

I used to like Jack and followed her on Twitter but after a while her tweets started to consist mainly of retweeting people who'd insulted her, in the hope of her fans piling on them. It got very tedious.

I just realised I used the wrong pronouns for Jack, but it's late and I can't be arsed going back and correcting myself!

I'd agree, but I tend to shy away, given my views, of threads asking for support in that area.

In my view, giving puberty blockers and offering surgery to minors who have got the trans* is child abuse.

I posted on the AIBU thread (unaware of the gentlemen's agreement). The mother is gender critical and feminist and sounds both supportive of her confused son but wary of predetermined outcomes of 'yep, you must be trans' from entering the counselling process.
Her feeling is that her son is generally confused about his developing body and society's expectations of manhood. I think it's really important for a teenager to get some input along the gender critical lines. There's such a zeitgeist at the moment and especially where children are concerned I think it's important to hear the alternative.

THanks all. This is why I teach as much feminism as I can sneak in to all my courses (I used to run a postgrad Women's Studies programme but where have they all gone?). It's almost worse for young women and thinking young men than when I was growing up in the late 70s Depressing. THat thread had me dreaming about it. Stupid isn't it - some random unknown boy and his mother making me lose sleep!

Don't worry Blackbird - her DS says he's 70% sure and has been thinking about it a week and there have been a lot of sensible people saying that the first step is to talk to a counsellor to understand how her DS feels and what he's really feeling rather than taking any quick jumps.

There have also been people sharing their own experiences (or of their friends) of feeling confused as teenagers and then either a) coming to terms with their changing bodies or b) discovering they were gay rather than born in the wrong body.

I think there's a sort of gentleman's agreement that those of us who know that women don't have dicks don't post on support threads.

However, I would totally agree with you that it's a mixture of toxic masculinity and a rise in homophobia that has caused the upsurge in trans* self diagnoses.