Germaine Greer made a pariah – by girls she won vital rights for
BRITISH journalist Julie Bindel has been one of the most consistent and hard-fighting feminists for decades. But in recent years she has fallen victim to the trans tripwire.
In the early part of this century, Bindel started to notice that people who had been born men and were now demanding to be regarded, and treated, as women (whether they had had any surgery or not) were all over what had been her area.
In 2002, she had been incensed by news that a Vancouver rights tribunal had ruled that a male-to-female transsexual named Kimberley Nixon should be allowed to train as a counsellor for female rape victims.
Indeed, the tribunal said Vancouver Rape Relief’s refusal to allow Nixon to train for this role had breached her human rights and awarded $7,500 for injury to ‘her dignity’ – the highest such amount it had ever awarded. The decision was later overturned.
Bindel let rip in a newspaper, defending the Rape Relief sisters who ‘do not believe a surgically constructed vagina and hormonally grown breasts make you a woman’. She added. ‘For now at least, the law says that to suffer discrimination as a woman you have to be, er, a woman.’
Bindel rounded off her tirade with a flourish: ‘I don’t have a problem with men disposing of their genitals but it does not make them women, in the same way that shoving a bit of vacuum hose down your 501s does not make you a man.’
For this phrase in particular, and for the article as a whole, Bindel was going to suffer for the rest of her life. Even a decade later she was forced to cancel an appearance on a panel at Manchester University after dozens of rape and death threats against her were reported to the police. Bindel was not the last feminist to trip the trans wire. In 2015, Germaine Greer was due to deliver a lecture at Cardiff University. However, a significant number of students didn’t want to hear from the most influential feminist of the late 20th Century. Greer’s views on trans issues were, they said, ‘problematic’ and she had demonstrated ‘misogynistic views towards trans women’. Only years earlier, it would have been deemed the height of insanity to dismiss Greer as a misogynist. Yet here they were, claiming that among her crimes was ‘continually misgendering trans women and denying the existence of transphobia altogether’. In a subsequent TV interview about the controversy Greer said: ‘Apparently people have decided that because I don’t think that post-operative transgender men are women, I’m not to be allowed to talk. 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.’ Insulting Greer became a rite of passage for a generation of women who had benefited from her trailblazing. In Cambridge University’s Varsity magazine, Eve Hodgson wrote: ‘Greer is now just an old, white woman who has forced herself into exile. Her comments are irreparably damaging, reflecting a total lack of regard for trans lives.’ It did not stop there. At the London Pride event in 2018 lesbian campaigners spoilt the LGBT party by protesting at what they saw as the transgender takeover of the celebrations. The UK gay press accused these women (‘TERFS’, or ‘trans-exclusionary radical feminists’) of bigotry. And a few weeks later at Manchester Pride, there were reportedly loud cheers when a gay male MC, charmingly, announced that the protesters in London should have been dragged off by their ‘saggy t***’.