Students try to ban ‘transphobe’ Germaine Greer

Germaine Greer faces an attempt to stop her speaking at Cardiff University over her ‘extreme transphobia’.

Germaine Greer appearing on ABC TV.

To previous generations of students she was an icon, a liberation feminist who excited undergraduates with her message that women should be free from men rather than equal to them.

For today’s students, Germaine Greer has morphed into something altogether different. She is, apparently, a dangerous exponent of “problematic and hateful views”.

So much so that students in Cardiff have started a petition seeking to prevent her from giving a lecture next month titled Women & Power: The Lessons of the 20th Century.

The petition was launched by Rachael Melhuish, the women’s officer at Cardiff University students’ union, who declared herself outraged that Ms Greer should speak on the campus because of her “extremely transphobic” views.

Ms Greer, the Australian-born feminist and author of The Female Eunuch, caused controversy when she suggested to an audience at the University of Cambridge this year that transsexual women were not women because they did not know what it was to have a vagina.

She has been quoted as dismissing the idea of “transphobia” and in 2009 wrote that people who think they are women are “some kind of ghastly parody”.

The Cardiff petition calls on the university to cancel Ms Greer’s lecture.

“Trans-exclusionary views should have no place in feminism or society. Such attitudes contribute to the high levels of stigma, hatred and violence towards trans people — particularly trans women — both in the UK and across the world,” it says.

“While debate in a university should be encouraged, hosting a speaker with such problematic and hateful views towards marginalised and vulnerable groups is dangerous.

“Allowing Greer a platform endorses her views, and by extension, the transmisogyny which she continues to perpetuate.”

The petition appears to invoke the “no platform” policy of the National Union of Students that is generally used to bar fascists or racists, such as the British National Party, English Defence League or extremist groups such as Al-Muhajiroun and Hizb ut-Tahrir.

How Ms Greer, 76, found herself lumped with such organisations may be a suitable subject for a dissertation on tolerance.

Last month the University of Manchester’s students’ union banned two speakers from a debate on free speech.

Julie Bindel, the radical feminist activist and author, had been due to spar with a right-wing blogger at an event called, “From liberation to censorship: does modern feminism have a problem with free speech?”

The union withdrew Ms Bindel’s invitation because 11 years ago she had publicly questioned the right of men who undergo gender reassignment surgery to be treated as women.

By yesterday the petition against Greer’s lecture had attracted 263 signatures. A counter-petition calling for the lecture to go ahead in the name of free speech had generated only a handful of supporters.

Professor Colin Riordan, the vice-chancellor of Cardiff University, was in no mood to back down. He said: “We are committed to freedom of speech and open debate.”

Greer said she did not understand why she should not be allowed to speak.

“I don’t really know what I think of it. It strikes me as a bit of a put-up job really because I am not even going to talk about the issue that they are on about,’’ she said.

“What they are saying is because I don’t think surgery will turn a man into a woman, I should not be allowed to speak.

“I do not know why universities cannot hear unpopular views and think about what they mean.”

She said she would not appear at the event next month if the university could not guarantee her safety.

The Times/AAP