Germaine Greer

Sorry if this is just the wrong place, but I'm in haste shouldn't be here but the thread in AIBU about a possible trans son has had me thinking & thinking. I don't want to go into that thread myself to post coward but has there been some good feminist input?

I suspect the boy may be nervous/anxious/scared of the increasingly hypermasculinity pushed on kids today, or gay but not able to leave the safety of heteronormativity & all the privilege that it confers (and I say that as a female hetero - I've always been aware how much shit I avoid by conforming to heteronormative behaviours.

Nothing has changed, we have made so few real increments into equality, and the grief that GG is getting as an older woman is living proof of this. Her age is constantly referred to, her looks commented on. I am on the edge of menopause and it has come as quite a shock to realise how much of my currency has been my looks alone, how much less men pay lip service to listening to me now that I am no longer 22. I really couldn't care less what a few blokes "identifying" as women think/do/wear. I care that women in middle age are almost unemployable (read "the invisible woman" for emplyment stats, horrifying). As a victim of male violence and a mother of girls I care that most of the violent crime against women is by men. That when walking alone on dark Winter nights I feel a tick of panic when a van driven by a man slows. That my brilliant daughters will be more acceptable because of their luck in being beautiful. That when they reach 50 they will be sidelined and expected to have their faces frozen or cut into to be considered beautiful still. That in much of the world women and girls are bought and sold like cattle. Abused, their genitals disfigured, their bodies used as commodities. If you are born a man, you got lucky in life's lottery. If you want to wear a bra and call yourself Lulu, go ahead. But don't trample all over the issues that real women face every day. Same old male privilege, with nail varnish on.

sillyoldfool I wanted to cheer reading that blog!

Why are these voices being drowned out?

I mean, I know why, but that was more a cry from the heart...THAT is what the debate should look like.

Boak.

The man I saw on Sky News said of his anticipated journey from being a gay man to his idea of femininity: 'If I knew I didn't have to get off at Gayville but there was a stop called Transtown...'

Imaginary music swelled at that point while I stuck two fingers down my throat.

How long do you think he rehearsed that line in front of a mirror in anticipation of a media career?

I read a really funny exchange on jezebel. This lad called Benjamin is very angry with GG and her er...terftitude. Anyway, he said that it was time for her to move aside and let contemporary feminists do the talking now. He was challenged for his ageism, which he denies in the strongest possible terms.

He meant contemporary as in modern, not young and bleated about how, if we aren't using words with agreed meanings, then we can't converse.

I would have had to have set up an account to tell him that he essentially agrees with GG but I couldn't be arsed.

I was thinking this on the way home...
For about 100 years women have been unhappy with the way society defines them and controls their lives, so they have fought and won quite a lot of ground to be allowed to do what they want.

Men feel the same annoyance at how society defines what it is to be a man, so they fight... To become women.

Ok i know there are some FTM but you hear less about them

Maybe I have the wrong person. He was stupidly flippant and could talk only of his own experience.

Sky News often does this. In a fit of liberalism a reporter will put together a five minute package on deprived inner city youth, immigrants, the morbidly obese, transgender people or other 'freaks'. They won't ask any challenging questions. It will run every 30 minutes and guests will be wheeled in for the presenter of the moment to ask them bored questions.

It's then put up for an industry award.

I assumed Zach was transitioning from female to male?

I think Zach was on Sky News today commenting on a report on the ethics of allowing children to take puberty-delaying drugs and/or sex hormones to mimic the gender they wished to be.

It's hard for my dimming menopausal eyes to pick him out from that link but if he's a nice-looking pale-faced redhead that's probably him.

If it was him, he is a gay man in his 20s who wishes to become MTF and will soon take artificial female hormones. He wished he had taken them before puberty.

It was an entirely sympathetic piece towards transpeople and the rather more complex issue of starting children on the path to trans.

Zach (or whoever he was) was not challenged about that. He was just asked for his personal view. That was very wrong.

He was then asked to comment on Germaine Greer even though that was of only peripheral relevance to the report. He went on to make some comments about her that ranged from biased to untrue and was not challenged about them.

I think the interviewer, Dermot Murnaghan, found the whole thing - queers, transpeople, feminists - especially wrinkled ones - rather distasteful.

No publicity is bad publicity - let's hope this is the case for GG.

Aoife's blog was very, very interesting.

If he wasn't being such a special snowflake, he could have done wonders for expanding the definition of masculinity. Rather than more strictly enforcing the boundaries of femininity.

Completely agree

Alex Drummond works with people with ADHD. I wonder how that works vis a vis the beard and skirts thing. I can well imagine his clients doing the child in the emperors new clothes thing and pointing out that he's a man in a dress. And given how sensitive a lot of TW appear to be when it comes to being told they're men, I suspect there are often tears before bedtime.

If he wasn't being such a special snowflake, he could have done wonders for expanding the definition of masculinity. Rather than more strictly enforcing the boundaries of femininity.

Excellent translation from nonsense to sense passive.

Yy passive

Buzzfeed does seem to have some sort of current obsession with trans women and "curvy" (in some cases, bordering on obese) women.

Good blogpost here - aoifeschatology.com/2015/10/26/whos-afraid-of-germaine-greer/

Thank you all again for this thread. I feel I can breathe easy here, the rest of my social media is covered in anti Greer nastiness. It's really oppressive.

from an alex drummond article
"Six years ago, Drummond started living as a woman and kept her awesome bushy beard. She also decided not to opt for hormones or surgery."

or as I would word it

"Six years ago, Drummond started wearing dresses."

from the article:
"What I want to do is to widen the bandwidth of gender, to make it more possible for more people to come out as a transgender,"

what i think should have been said:

"What I want to do is to widen the bandwidth of gender, to make it more possible for more people to realise male isn't such a stupidly narrow concept."

I LOLed at 'Zach is a sports student at Queen Alexandra College in Birmingham. He is currently transitioning and is really passionate about increasing awareness of his journey.'

Self-centred much?!

(From the context I'm assuming it's not a parody, though it sounds like one.)

The more I read this shit, the more I get the RAGE! If love to know how many women they have talked to as part of this consultation, or is it just the very special snowflakes that are TW ?

I find Alex Drummond to be utterly offensive
On par with the black and white minstrel show in the 1970s.

'present' as female - MY BIG FAT ARSE.
Sorry but they are like drag queens, almost mocking what it is to be a woman and invading women's space.
Totally with GG on this one.
She is only being silenced because she is an old wrinkled woman. That is what these idiots don't get.

Woops, meant to use "they" and accidentally put "he".

I actually think that the world has gone mad, when a man in a dress with some chunky jewellery, and a nice beard, is officially a woman. Up is down, left is right, day is night, because I want it to be so.

I find Alex Drummond's idea of being a woman to be very conforming to gender stereotypes. I am a "natal female" as Alex might put it, and nothing he describes is what I would do to "present" as female. I don't "present" as female, simply I am female by dint of genetics. Anything that I choose to do or wear or look like would be how I present as female.