Germaine Greer: ‘It’s not fair’ for trans women to marry other women
Feminist author Germaine Greer has claimed that it is “unfair” for trans women to be married to other women.
The noted feminist author has come under scrutiny a number of times for her extreme views about trans people, famously claiming: “Just because you lop off your d**k and then wear a dress doesn’t make you a f***ing woman.
Speaking on Australian debate show Q&A, Greer spoke about trans issues again – and made another surprising claim.
She said: “I don’t believe a man who has lived for 40 years as a man and had children with a woman and enjoyed the unpaid services of a wife, which most women will never know… but he then decides that the whole time he’s been a woman?
“At that point I’d like to say, well hang on a minute, you believed you were a woman but you married another women. That wasn’t fair, was it?”
Germaine Greer: Why do you believe there is such a thing as a “real woman”? #QandA https://t.co/fBsHKm5NM5
— ABC Q&A (@QandA) April 11, 2016
Greer’s comments are surprising given she supports equality for lesbians – insisting “the problem with gay marriage is not the gay bit but the marriage bit.” She has previously opposed male same-sex parenting on the grounds of “motherhood”.
She continued: ‘If you’re a 50-year-old truck driver who’s had four children with a wife and you’ve decided the whole time you’ve been a woman, I think you’re probably wrong.”
The feminist did concede some ground on the issue, though.
She said: “When I first was thinking about what is a woman, I fell for the usual view that women were people with two Xs and men were people with an X and a Y, which made life nice and easy for me. I now realise that this was wrong.”
“There are all kinds of intersexual conditions and there’s all kinds of ways that genes are expressed in behaviour and development.”
But she said: “If you decide 0 because you’re uncomfortable in the masculine system which turns boys into men, often at great cost to themselves – if you’re unhappy with that, it doesn’t mean that you belong at the other end of the spectrum.
“You can’t know that because you don’t know what the other sex is!
“Women are constantly being told that they are not satisfactory as women, that women make better women than they do.
“The Woman of the Year may be Caitlyn Jenner, which makes the rest of the world feel slightly wry.”
