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Germaine Greer appears to make sense on QandA, then loses it

IT WAS going so well. Germaine Greer was making a whole lot of sense on her return to Australian TV. But then someone brought up Caitlyn Jenner.

Matt YoungMatt Young
@MattYoung
4 min read
April 12, 2016 - 7:06PM
Q&A: Germaine Greer on 'real women'

HOLD on, did Germaine Greer just do a backflip and, wait for it, make SENSE, on QandA?

Well, until the topic of the transgender community was brought up, that is.

Studio 10 host Joe Hildebrand said what we were all thinking before the political ABC show aired, tweeting: “The truth is that everyone is just waiting for Germaine to say something crazy. And I say: Bring it.”

And how true Mr Hildebrand was; After all, there was the time Greer asked Foreign Minister Julie Bishop if she’d whip out her nipples to free Bali Nine ringleaders Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran.

And then there was the time she told then-Prime Minister Julia Gillard to “wave that arse” after describing women as “fat-arsed creatures”.

So it was no surprise the nation was waiting with bated breath to find out what the renowned feminist would come up with this week - particularly with issues like Islamic fundamentalism and domestic violence on the agenda.

Greer featured alongside author and columnist Theodore Dalrymple (British in every sense of the word), Liberal MP Sharman Stone (yawn), Tasmanian Labor senator Lisa Singh (double yawn) and ARIA award winner Joseph Tawadros (who won major points for the moustache) — so it was all up to Germaine to make the show worth the panda eyes in the morning.

Things looked up when Greer responded to the first question regarding Islamic fundamentalist ideals in Australia — and Australia was stunned by her approach.

“Are the policy makers and fellow Australians so naive that we fail to notice the majority of people claiming refugee status nowadays are the very people wanting to introduce fundamentalist ideals if to our country?”

Greer responded: “The people who came to Australia and took the land, invaded the country, took the land from the aborigines, were people who have been expropriated themselves.

“We are all descended from people who were refugees. We ought to understand the mindset and we ought to understand the suffering. We’ve got to not be afraid. We’ve got to be patient. We have got to be accessible. We’ve got to listen. I think it’s quite wrong to suggest that a sizeable proportion of Muslims in England are terrorists.”

“It doesn’t take very many terrorists to perform an atrocity and to then characterise a whole huge group of people, most of whom are performing essential work in these economies, to criminalise them because of this element in their population is foolish. It’s foolhardy, it’s dangerous, it’s stupid. Let’s not do it.”

Hold the phone. What the hell just happened?

She continued answering questions regarding domestic violence, the Panama Papers and Shakespeare without blowing the lid or breaking the internet. Could Germaine Greer have softened?

Alas, apparently not. The joke was on us. Because so, so close to the end of the show, just as our mouths had hit the floor with disbelief, she was asked about the transgender community.

Last year she refused to back down from fiery claims that transgender women are “not real women” and accused Caitlyn Jenner of misogyny for trying to steal the limelight from the females in the Kardashian clan. Oh yes, it’s true.

So when the question was posed tonight, it was make or break for Greer’s return to Australian screens.

“When I was younger I found your work a great source of strength and inspiration. It helped me resist the limitations that society or even misogynists could place on me but I find really confusing views you’ve expressed that transgender women are not real women. Why do you believe there is such a thing as a real woman? Isn’t that the kind of essentialism that you and I are trying to resist and escape?”

This is so difficult,” Greer responded. Oh, we couldn’t agree more.

“The interesting thing to me is this,” as Greer began to dig.

“That if you decide, 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, that by expressing it that way.

“We’ve got a problem now with the word no and we could spend a lot of time discussing what that means philosophically, is believe the same as know? Is true belief the same as knowing? None of this is easy. The difficulty for me, that women are constantly being told that they are not satisfactory as women, that other people make better women than they do and that the woman of the year may be Caitlin Jenner which makes the rest of the female population of the world feel slightly wry.

“I don’t believe that a man who has lived for 40 years as a man and had children with a woman and enjoyed the services, the unpaid services of a wife, then decides that the whole time he’s been a woman and at that point I’d like to say, ‘Hang on a minute, you believed you were a woman but you married another woman. That wasn’t fair, was it?’

And so Germaine Greer tumbled back toward the cave of calamity, reassuring Australian audiences she didn’t completely disappoint, and that long hour wasn’t a complete waste of our time.

“I belong in this hole,” she quipped to host Tony Jones.

It appears you do, Greer. For another episode, at least.

— youngma@news.com.au

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Original URL: https://www.news.com.au/entertainment/tv/current-affairs/germaine-greer-appears-to-make-sense-on-qanda-then-loses-it/news-story/fbff4fb69aaf28b220d462e62c24d946