Tag: Germaine Greer

  • What Greer stands accused of is thoughtcrime

    Rebecca Reilly-Cooper makes an important point about the campaign to no-platform Germaine Greer:

    Greer said nothing about what rights trans people ought to have or how they ought to be treated, and certainly nothing that could plausibly be interpreted as an incitement to violence. Believing that trans women are men is neither an incitement to violence, nor is it dehumanising, unless you also happen to think that men deserve violence and are not human. So the two main offences she is accused of are ones she openly admits to: not believing that transgender women are women, and not believing that transphobia – prejudice and bigotry towards transgender people – exists.

    Both of these offences are solely concerned with the propositional content of Greer’s beliefs. That is, the objection is that she believes things that her opponents believe to be false, and that these beliefs are, for reasons that are never properly articulated, “dangerous”. So what Greer stands accused of is, essentially, thoughtcrime. She is guilty of holding the wrong thoughts, of believing the wrong things, of entertaining ideas and defining concepts in ways that diverge from some doctrine to which all decent people are supposed to subscribe. One must believe that trans women are women, and one must believe that trans people are subject to forms of prejudice and discrimination that others are not, and if you do not hold those beliefs, then you are by definition dangerous, a potential threat to others, and must be silenced. The possibility of reasonable disagreement on these issues is ruled out, ex hypothesi.

    I’ve been noticing this for a long time, and not with pleasure. I’ve never tried to excavate and repair the beliefs of for instance the people who spend all their free time harassing feminists on Twitter. They could fake basic decency as opposed to believing in it, and the result for everyone else would be the same.

    We all do try to influence each other’s beliefs by arguing or questioning or shouting, but that’s not the same kind of thing as punishing people for having Wrong Beliefs.

    The response to Greer and her alleged transphobia is just one example of a creeping trend among social justice activists of an identitarian persuasion: a tendency towards ideological totalism, the attempt to determine not only what policies and actions are acceptable, but what thoughts and beliefs are, too. Contemporary identity-based social justice activism is increasingly displaying the kinds of totalising and authoritarian tactics that we usually associate with cults or quasi-religious movements which aim to control the thoughts and inner lives of their members. The doctrine of “gender identity” – the idea that people possess an essential inner gender that is independent both of their sexed body and of the social reality of being treated as a person with such a body – has rapidly been elevated to the status of quasi-religious belief, such that those who do not subscribe to it are seen as not only mistaken and misguided, but dangerous and threatening, and must therefore be silenced.

    Even those who aren’t sure whether they subscribe to it or not are seen as dangerous and threatening and to be silenced.

    She compares the methods and reactions of the belief-policers to “many, if not all, of the features of thought control identified by Robert Jay Lifton in his classic study of indoctrination in Chinese re-education camps” including

    • Demands for purity – dividing the world sharply into pure and impure, good and evil, believer and nonbeliever. There are people who believe that trans women are women, and there are transphobic bigots who “deny trans people’s right to exist”. No intermediate position is possible.
    • A cult of confession – individuals are required to reveal their sins and transgressions in order to be redeemed. As a non-trans person, the only way to secure one’s status as an ally is to confess to one’s “cis privilege” and to engage in repeated, performative privilege checking. (My own personal experience of this came when I publicly stated that I do not accept the label “cisgender”, which resulted in my being accused of the chillingly Orwellian-sounding crime of “privilege denial”).
    • Loading the language – the use of thought-terminating clichés and complex and ever changing terminological rules. Just try to critically examine the soundbite “trans women are women” and see how fast the accusations of prejudice and bigotry come flying in. This is a phrase intended to stop you asking difficult questions.

    That all sounds so grindingly familiar to me.

    It’s not healthy. Boot my antiquated butt all you want, but this situation is not healthy.

  • Often the face of evil

    NPR asks an always-timely question: Why Are Old Women Often The Face Of Evil In Fairy Tales And Folklore?

    Because everybody* hates old women.

    Typecasting is one explanation. “What do we have? Nags, witches, evil stepmothers, cannibals, ogres. It’s quite dreadful,” says Maria Tatar, who teaches a course on folklore and mythology at Harvard. Still, Tatar is quick to point out that old women are also powerful — they’re often the ones who can work magic.

    Well, “powerful” until they’re killed at the end. Not a particularly desirable brand of power.

    Tatar says old women villains are especially scary because, historically, the most powerful person in a child’s life was the mother. “Children do have a way of splitting the mother figure into … the evil mother — who’s always making rules and regulations, policing your behavior, getting angry at you — and then the benevolent nurturer — the one who is giving and protects you, makes sure that you survive.”

    Veronique Tadjo, a writer who grew up in the Ivory Coast, thinks there’s a fear of female power in general. She says a common figure in African folk tales is the old witch who destroys people’s souls. As Tadjo explains, “She’s usually a solitary woman. She’s already marginal. She’s angry at something — at life, or whatever — and she will ‘eat’ — that’s the expression — people’s souls, in the sense that she’s going to possess people and then they die a terrible death. And everybody knows it’s the witch; it’s the old woman.”

    As I’ve mentioned, we’re seeing a lot of that in the commentary on Germaine Greer. Even PZ – whom I would have expected to know better – went there:

    My personal feeling is that Greer really is saying hateful crap, and my sentiment favors booting her antiquated butt off the campus.

    Boot all the antiquated females butts off everything. Get them out of public life. They’re the face (and butt) of evil, so get rid of them.

    *Everybody in the Anglophone world, that is.

  • A politer way of saying “witch”

    Helen Lewis has a brilliant piece at the New Statesman about the attempt to no-platform Germaine Greer. Read every word.

    It’s interesting that it is Greer’s views on gender that are the flashpoint, because she has been flat wrong about many things in her career – FGM, for example, which she has defended given its “cultural” element – without anything like the same backlash. Put simply, trans issues are the new dividing line for progressive activism; the way for younger activists to kick against their foremothers in the feminist movement.

    And by god they do, with loathing and contempt.

    Think about that for a second. Young feminist women – not all, obviously, but depressingly many – loathe and scorn old feminist women.

    Well what does that say about the prospects for feminism? Feminism isn’t going to work if it applies only to young women, you know. If even feminist women hate old feminist women, then what hope is there that misogyny will ever fade away? If misogyny is that available and that pervasive and that irresistible…what hope is there?

    I’m not sure there is much.

    With gay marriage now legal in America, there is also the sense among online social justice communities that trans rights are “the new civil rights frontier” (as Time magazine wrote next to a photo of Orange is the New Black star Laverne Cox). Social media has acted like an accelerant on this fire: sites like Buzzfeed and Huffington Post’s LGBT section offer uplifting tales of transgender children’s achievements and famous adults coming out, alternating with occasional three-minute hates for “TERFs” (trans exclusionary radical feminists), a group who are said to be inciting violence against trans women by refusing to accept them as women. Sharing such articles has become a badge of progressive correctness. The word “TERF” is sprayed around like confetti, with very little understanding of what it means. I’ve been called a TERF, even though I think trans women are women and absolutely have a place in feminism. I think it’s become a politer way of saying “witch”.

    And what is a “witch”? An evil old woman that we have a license to hate. We see her plastered against utility poles and trees everywhere at this time of year, having ridden her broomstick into one and crashed. All women are future old women, and we all hate old women, so how can we agree with feminism? We all reserve the right to hate women, dammit.

     

    Trans  activists, tired of being treated as objects of curiousity, fear or pity by outsiders, have decided to seize control of the discourse and develop their own ways of talking about how they feel. This is understandable, but it also means that everyone is constantly making mistakes. This would be OK – in everyday life, people slip up and get corrected, and the world keeps turning – but because it’s happening in the crucible of social media, where women’s opinions carry a higher cost, censure for those mistakes is distributed unfairly. There are phrases that a man could say – “female socialisation” springs to mind – with no comeback, but would be read as Deep TERF Code coming from a feminist’s mouth. I’ve lost count of the number of times that male friends have expressed surprise that their normally quiet, polite Twitter experience suddenly turns into a hornet’s nest if they chat with me about a controversial divide in feminism.

    It’s not men who get demonized and hounded out, it’s women. It wasn’t two men that Improbable Joe “warned” me about on Twitter DM, it was two women – Helen Lewis being one of them. There are no outcries or “warnings” about TEMRAs – as far as I know TEMRA isn’t even a thing.

    Even trans people who do not have the “correct” opinions feel worried about broaching the subject; I know a group of “gender critical” trans women who are castigated regularly as “TERF tokens” and “Uncle Toms”. (Putting paid to the flatulent piety so often circulated on social media: “Why don’t you just listen to trans people?” Because it turns out, O Wise One, that minority groups are not homogenous.)

    Ok so it has to be “Why don’t you just listen to the right trans people?”

    In my Pollyanna-ish way, I hope that all of these questions can be resolved with respectful negotiation; but there will have to be compromises between competing interests. It’s not – as many people on Twitter seem to believe – as simple as identifying the group you feel is most fashionably oppressed and sprinting to shout: “Solidarity!” And God save us from all the progressive men who will never face the sharp end of such questions – who have never had to think about rape shelter policy, for example – using this issue to show how right-on they are. Come on, feminists, they chirrup without self-awareness. Stop being so uptight!

    Be like us: not talking over the marginalized!

    But here is a list of things which can get you called a TERF, if you are a woman with a public profile: a) believing that biological sex is different from gender, ie that the penis is a male sex organ, even when attached to someone who identifies as a woman; b) believing that being raised as a boy gives you a different experience of life to anyone raised as a girl; c) believing that you need to transition using surgery or hormones to be trans (a recent Buzzfeed piece was headlined “This Trans Women Kept Her Beard And Couldn’t Be Happier”) d) believing that someone who transitions at 45 has not “always been female”.

    I’d argue that those positions are far removed from the hateful, discriminatory behaviour and speech which most of us would accept is transphobic. And it is entirely possible that some or all of them will seem completely outdated in 50 years as our ideas about sex and gender move on. But they don’t seem to me to be in themselves vile or beyond the pale.

    …

    From the trans perspective, I can understand the feelings that the gains the movement has recently made are both recent and fragile, and the desire to set the terms of the debate after so long being treated as objects of pity or ridicule. After all, the challenges of transition are a daily task for many people, not a theoretical debate. But the subject has become part of a society-wide conversation; to move on, it must be something that ordinary people, outside the charmed circle who know that trans no longer takes an asterisk, can have an opinion on.

    It also needs to be something that’s not a pretext for attacking feminist women.

    This battle against Germaine Greer is driven, at least in part, by sexism. After all, the world is full of academics with bad opinions, happily going about their business. Richard Dawkins, for example, is obsessed with proving that a teenage Muslim American boy suspended for bringing a clock to school should not be an object of pity and is instead a cunning hoaxer. David Starkey went on an extraordinary rant on Newsnight a few years ago about how “whites had become black” (i.e. were getting involved in street violence). No one is trying to ban him from talking to British universities.

    The same students who tried to stop Julie Bindel from talking about free speech (the irony) at Manchester university this autumn did not simultaneously attack her fellow speaker Milo Yiannopolous, even though his views on transgender people are more extreme than hers. (He believes they are mentally ill and should be denied surgery.) Brendan O’Neill writes almost weekly on the Spectator website that transgender politics is “hocus pocus”. Where’s the NUS motion condemning him?

    Exactly. Why is it women? Why is it feminist women? Why is it people who see themselves as progressives leading the charge?

    It is ironic that this debate has focused around the idea of accepting trans women as women, because it also seems to me that we have a problem accepting non-trans women as fully human – a mixture of good and bad, wrong and right. Because, of course, Germaine Greer wasn’t even booked to talk about trans issues at Cardiff: the title of her lecture was “Women and Power in the 20th Century”. As with other feminists, it is assumed that her bad opinions on one subject render her persona non grata on everything else.

    Tell me about it.

    But in better news – she has an update at the end:

    Cardiff University have been in touch to say they have subsequently spoken to Greer’s representatives, and the event is still scheduled to go ahead next month.

    Good.

  • Kirsty Wark talks to Germaine Greer

    Here is that Newsnight:

  • Guest post: Transcript of Newsnight interview with Germaine Greer

    “Amateur” transcript by commenter eigensprocketUK.

    Newsnight 23 October 2015

    STUDIO INTRO: Kirsty Wark, presenter of BBC’s “Newsnight”.

    KW: Dr Germaine Greer has always been outspoken, but never before has she been “no-platformed”. A petition has been launched asking Cardiff University to cancel a lecture she’s due to give next month entitled “Women and Power – the Lessons of the 20th Century” saying that her views – on something else, transgender people – are problematic.

    KW: She believes that men who transition can not then be “women”. And Cardiff Student Union Women’s Officer has said that her views towards transgender women are misogynist. The university’s vice-chancellor has said that the university is committed to freedom of speech and open debate.

    KW: Well I spoke to Germaine Greer this afternoon at her home near Cambridge and started by asking her why she thought she’d been no-platformed. During the interview she employed some forthright language.

    INTERVIEW WITH GERMAINE GREER, Academic and writer

    GG: I was going to talk about women in power, the lessons of the 20th century, because I think there’s a lot of triumphalist talk that masks the real historic situation. And apparently people have decided that because I don’t think that post-operative trans-gender men, i.e. M-to-F transgender people are ‘women’, I’m not to be allowed to talk!

    KW: But surely if a man who feels that he actually would like gender reassignment to make him…her be more comfortable in her body, then that’s what should be done – that’s … they should be allowed to do that.

    GG I’m not saying that people should not be allowed to go through that procedure. What I’m saying is it doesn’t make them a woman. It happens to be an opinion. It’s not a prohibition. Carry on if …if that’s what you think it is you want to do.

    GG I’ve been accused of inciting violence against transsexual people – that’s absolute nonsense.

    KW But do you feel that the transgender community has too big a voice now? It seems to me you’re saying that that they’re becoming what you might… what feminists were often called – ‘strident’?

    GG (LAUGHS) Yes but they very seldom were strident, alas. I think that a very great many women don’t think that, um, post-operative or even non post-operative transexual M-to-F transexual people look like, sound like, or behave like women. They daren’t say so.

    KW But just because they daren’t say so doesn’t mean that person can’t feel like that and feels more comfortable with themselves.

    GG Yeah, but so what? That’s not my issue. I don’t even talk about it. Not everybody does feel comfortable, by the way – post-operatively. There’s been a couple of cases I found very interesting where the actual accepter of the procedure has felt that it’s been a disaster.

    KW But for those who do not feel it’s been a disaster and feel more comfortable then do you understand that they might feel that you are being hurtful to them?

    GG (SHAKES HEAD) People are hurtful to me all the time. Try being an old woman! For goodness sake – people get hurt all the time. I’m not about to walk on eggshells.

    KW: So you believe in free speech really – no matter what?

    GG Well not quite ‘no matter what’. You don’t have to say everything that’s in your mind. You do use tact in the usual way. I would for example, with someone who wished to be known as female, use female speech forms. As a courtesy.

    KW: Now though, people who are intersex are feeling a little more confident about coming forward and … and, a level of acceptance. But for example a woman, who outwardly has female genitalia but who inside has testes and doesn’t wish to have them rather than accepting that she has them – she should be allowed, shouldn’t she, and offered the chance to remove these inner testes?

    GG We remove undescended testicles … from men, because they’re dangerous. I’m sure they wouldn’t be allowed to just lurk because that would be – I think – that would be a problem. I mean physically a problem. But then it’s also a problem if what you have to do after sex, er, gender reassignment, is use steroids [SIC, IMPLIED HORMONES?] every day of your life. That’s not a happy outcome either.

    KW But it may be a happy outcome for them and they may feel that you are in a way denigrating them for taking that road.

    GG I don’t even talk about them. They’re not my issue. I don’t … haven’t published anything about transgender for years!

    KW So how do you feel that Newnham College, your own college, is considering not giving you an honorary doctorate –apparently– because of what you said about the transgender community?

    GG There’s been two votes at my college about whether I should have an honorary degree and I’m , um, I’m not going to get one. They’ve been turned down. Which is thought by some to be astonishing. But not by me.

    KW So someone like Caitlyn Jenner, for example, who’s been …/

    GG /…must you? ! …

    KW /…yes, who’s been on the front of lots of magazines and apparently is – I think I’m right in saying – is getting an award for being kind of glamour woman of the year. What do you think about that?

    GG I think it’s misogynist. I think misogyny plays a really big part in all of this. That a man who goes to all of these lengths to be a woman will be a better woman than someone who is just born a woman.

    KW But are people, you would say necessarily, born a woman, or born feeling female. And if he feels more female …? (OPEN HANDS QUESTION GESTURE) …

    GG It seems to me that he … that, ah, what was going on there is that he … he/she … ah, wanted the limelight that the other female members of the family were enjoying. And has conquered it – just like that!

    KW Will Young apparently has a new video out, I don’t think you’ve seen it, in which a transgender person is going down the road and is abused. Reasonable position?

    GG Ah, am I mistaken in thinking that this individual is naked … /

    KW (AFFIRMATIVE)

    GG / …and running down the street with just a hand over his/her genitals?

    KW (AFFIRMATIVE)

    GG You try running with your sagging breasts down the middle of the fucking street! And see what people will … throw a… a…a blanket over you! And grab you and call the police! For fuck’s sake! It is simply not true that intersexual people suffer in a way that other people don’t suffer.

    KW Would you ever consider saying something more – ameliorating?

    GG No! I’m getting fed up with it, you know. I’ve had things thrown at me, I’ve been accused of things I’ve never done or said. People seem to have no concern about evidence or indeed even about libel.

    KW If a man who is gender reassigned, and outwardly – and he feels, inwardly, is a woman – in your view can he be a woman or not?

    GG No.

    KW Do you understand how some people feel that’s insulting?

    GG I don’t care! People get insulted all the time. Australians get insulted ever day of the week.

    KW Finally – if your safety is guaranteed, will you go to Cardiff?

    GG I’m getting a bit old for all of this. I’m 76, I don’t want to go down there and be screamed at and have things thrown at me. Bugger it. It’s not that interesting, or rewarding.

    KW Germaine Greer, thank you very much.

    (INTERVIEW ENDS)