Germaine Greer - On Why Sex-Change Is a Lie
<Edited to remove the naught N- word>
On the day that The Female Eunuch was issued in America, a person in flapping draperies rushed up to me and grabbed my hand. “Thank you,” it breathed hoarsely, “Thank you so much for all you have done for us girls!” I smirked and nodded and stepped backward, trying to extricate my hand from the enormous, knuckly, hairy, be-ringed paw that clutched it. The face staring into mine was thickly coated with pancake make-up through which the stubble was already burgeoning, in futile competition with a Dynel wig of immense luxuriance and two pairs of false eyelashes. Against the bony ribs that could be counted through its flimsy scarf dress swung a polished steel women’s liberation emblem.
I should have said, “You're a man. The Female Eunuch has done less than nothing for you. Piss off.” The transvestite held me in a rapist’s grip while he deftly positioned himself next to me, so that he could flash an open-mouthed pin-up smile to the photographers who for reasons connected with Life magazine and ITV happened to be dogging my footsteps. He tried to get into the limousine, but somebody got rid of him, probably by slamming the door on his fingers. When the car moved off I found in my lap the fat packet of photocopied writings that such predators invariably have about them.
From then on, every time I put my nose outside the Chelsea Hotel he would appear as if from nowhere. Though he certainly considered that he was psychologically a female, for I had a few hundred pages of ecstatic scribblings to prove it, he behaved exactly like a predatory man. He was blind and deaf to all evidence of dislike, quite unaware of the existence of a separate personality with its own preoccupations. He even masked his thoroughly invasive and exploitative intent by the commonplace ruse of giving expensive, unwanted and unwelcome presents.
Knee-jerk etiquette demanded that I humour this gross parody of my sex by accepting him as female, even to the point of allowing him to come to the lavatory with me. Bureaucratic moves were afoot to give him and his kind the right to female identity, a female passport even. We might not be surprised to find bureaucrats accepting the idea that the female is no more than a castrated male, in flat contradiction of the biology that tells us that maleness is no more than damage to one chromosome of the female set. It is strange though that a vocal and combative body of feminists did not throw the whole idea out on its ear before it was quietly and sneakily implemented. If you want to be female so badly that you are prepared to mutilate yourself, and if the doctor who mutilated you will write you a letter saying that the change is permanent, then the beneficent state will declare that you are what you are not, a woman. The general populace, despite the evidence of their eyes and ears, will go along with the bluff. They might with as much justification change the birth dates in the passports of women who are on oestrogen replacement or have had facelifts, but this is unlikely to happen. Age is considered real, femaleness not.
People who believe that feminists burn bras also believe that someone, usually me, has argued that there is no difference between the sexes. The argument, my argument anyway, is that the genuine difference has been obscured by a series of phoney differences. Femaleness has been distorted into femininity; womanhood has become permanent girlishness. One of the principal mechanisms by which this is done is the suppression of female sexuality, and its substitution with a notion of female libido as a mirror image of male desire, as mere receptivity. Women’s other erotic relationships, with their babies in particular, are denied, or presumed to imitate the male paradigm, and therefore to be invasive and genitally fixated.
Certainly there are men about who seriously, passionately and consistently want to be what they think of as women, and they may as well be it. Most of them envy women's right to sexual exhibitionism; most of them have an even more stereotyped view of femininity than is commonly accepted, and hark back to the Fifties when breasts stuck out like gun-barrels, waists were cinched to nothing, petticoats frothed invitingly, and make-up dripped. Such men may call themselves girls, but it is quite a different matter when women themselves are forced by custom to go along, as 1 consented 20 years ago in New York to call my persecutor “sister”.
In enduring the attentions of that caricature of myself, I displayed the same foolish good nature that allows mothers-in-law to continue to be the staple of English humour, that gives Benny Hill his ratings, that fills the working-men's clubs when there’s a female impersonator on. You won't see N- <edited> Minstrels any more and you certainly won't see real black men watching them, but you will see women laughing obligingly at the sight of half-naked men with tennis-ball tits tied on their chests, switching their bums in imitation of women’s (imaginary) endless come-on. There is more than one kind of rape, more than one kind of murderous attack on women's self-esteem. Male transvestism is in no way evidence of a female psyche, but rather the last attack on female otherness, by way of reducing it to no more than a rag, a bone and a hank of hair,
I have on my desk three letters from a “gender transient”, who believes that he can pop in and out of either sex at will, and supplies the usual slew of tarty pictures of himself as a female to prove it. His letters set out in detail what he wants me to do, namely to accept his view of the universe, to admit him to instant intimacy and to allow him to describe my feelings. I brought the second and third letters on myself by acknowledging the first and telling him I was not interested. I should have said, “Gender transience is a lie. You are a man. Piss off.” Because I didn't I have exposed myself again to the same old aggressive, insensitive, arrogant, thoroughly masculine hoo-ha.e