I found this image on this media release page at the Southern Cross University website, which uses it to illustrate promotional information for “An Evening With Germaine Greer” that took place in early 2008. I chose it because it is a relatively neutral portrait, unlike the usual photos that emphasise either her strident aspect or her hedonistic aspect.
The introduction from the SCU media release is this: “Germaine Greer has been in the business of jolting people out of established theories and complacent thought for decades” which is a rather neat piece of understated ambiguity. Controversy has been raging around Greer in Australia this week as she has discussed her new work “On Rage” examining the tendency towards violence in indigenous communities with respect to the alienation of Aboriginal men. The media has been quick to denounce her at great length as not worth any attention, which raises the question (as others have noted) as to why they pay her so much attention themselves, and especially why they pay so much attention to her personality rather than pay attention to addressing the meat of her arguments, (There’s been some heated discussion over at Larvatus Prodeo)
Also, if it’s accurate that she only gets this level of personal hostility in Australia whereas elsewhere it is her ideas that get dissected and challenged instead (a claim Greer is alleged to have made), what does that say about the Australian media?
I myself have mixed responses to what i have read of Greer’s work (which is far from all of it, particularly not much of her literary analysis), but I suspect she deliberately writes to avoid anyone’s comfort zone. Some people decry her as a contrarian who courts denunciations, while others make the fine distinction of describing her a provocateur who may seek an element of controversy but not for its own sake, rather for the sake of inspiring wider debate. I lean more toward the second view, but I can see why the first view persists.
Where do you stand on Greer? What work of hers tempts you to applaud, and what efforts have tempted you to hurl it from the room? How do you think she compares with other public intellectuals in respect of how much she gets right versus what she gets wrong, and why aren’t some others with far less rigorous arguments not held to the same strict standard?
As an aside, what do you think of the way that the media has historically represented successful/popular feminist authors (most of whom are also academics) as if they are thus feminist leaders? This appears to happen less in actual journalism than it used to, but it’s a continuing trope in online debates about feminism with non-feminists, and several prominent US feminist bloggers have aldo been referred to as feminist “leaders” in various forums. Yet a talent for wrapping up a concept in a succinct and memorable way is not the same as either the ability or the desire to lead others. Is this continued conflation of authors with leaders an artefact of a deep discomfort with the idea that feminism does not follow the standard model of a leader-driven hierarchical movement?
Similar Posts:
- Germaine Greer on Margaret Throsby by Lauredhel
- Louis Nowra? He has no idea what makes sexists tick by tigtog
- Courtesy and the Cultural Cringe by tigtog
- Denialism: it’s a tactic, not an ideology by tigtog
- Still scary after all these years by tigtog
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Below is a letter I wrote to The Age newspaper in response to Trace Hutchison’s article on Germaine Greer (above). It was not published.
I am in the process of setting up my own blogsite at present which will mostly focus on theatre, but theatre also a springboard to other cultural matters -
Cheers James Waites
From: James Waites
To: letters@theage.com.au
Sent: Saturday, August 16, 2008 3:58 PM
Subject: Greer the Seer
Why have so many journalists, mostly white women, responded with such viciousness to On Rage, Germaine Greer’s latest attempt to raise an important topic for public debate?
Especially disturbing are comments by Tracee Hutchison’s in this paper (Greer’s Latest Rage More Glib Than Lib, August 16). Her response is to some random remarks made by Greer in a brief television appearance (ABC’s Q&A), hardly a controlled environment for the dissemination of complex ideas.
What becomes increasingly alarming as one reads through Hutchison’s attack, is the likelihood that she has not yet read Greer’s book before choosing to respond to its content. In an altogether unrelated spray at the end of the article, this is what Hutchison accuses Greer of doing over a previous storm in a teacup over a play by Melbourne writer Joanna Murray-Smith. Surely Hutchison cannot have it both ways?
Nor, I presume, was Hutchison at the book launch (in Sydney) that took place immediately prior to Greer’s appearance on Q&A. If she had been, Hutchison would not be able to attack Greer for allegedly raising the subject for debate from ‘the comfort of her English garden’. I was at the launch, and Greer not only delivered a most informed and passionate summary of the content of her book, Greer also revealed she has made many visits to the outback communities she is talking about, going back to the 1970s through to quite recently; she has read voluminously across the topic – including all major public documents (see the index to her book); and she has also talked one-to-one with many Aboriginal men and women.
I have since read the book in horrified gulps at the truths Greer lays down – in black and white (yes literally).
To paraphrase just one example: ‘there would have been no Stolen Generation had white men kept their hands off Aboriginal women, or taken responsibility for the progeny’. Any arguments with that? An observation surely worth pondering for a minute or two? Classic Greer? No? Yet, our gut reaction – among female peers in particular – is to spit on Greer. I remember when this happened to Helen Garner over The First Stone; and they were equally high-ranking women journalists who led the hysterical, and later disproved, attack on Lindy Chamberlain.
To sneer over whether what Greer calls ‘rage’ is better described as ‘grief’ is as productive as correcting someone for calling ’silverbeet’ ’spinach’. It’s the feelings of Aboriginal men (alongside those of the women and children) Greer is asking for us to stop and consider. And at no point in her launch speech or in the book does she excuse the violence Aboriginal men have inflicted on the women and children in their lives. Quite the opposite. She is merely attempting to add more data and fresh perspectives to the issues, in the hope that we may all work more effectively towards solutions.
James Waites
“I remember when this happened to Helen Garner over The First Stone”
Yes, but in The First Stone Helen Garner suggested that sexual harrassment wasn’t really that bad, and that two young women who brought a case against (I think from memory) a professor at their university were overreacting and shouldn’t have brought the case because they ruined his life.
So if she then got a thumping from journalists, of either sex, well, it was well deserved if my memory of the book is correct.
It was a shame, really, she’s a great author but it really put me off reading anything she’s written since.
Yeah, the interview on Lateline http://www.abc.net.au/lateline/content/2008/s2334393.htm
was shocking for that stuff I found and while I have not read that much of Greers, her final retort which I’ll past below makes me love her.
PROFESSOR GERMAINE GREER: Isn’t it a curious thing that I write about the pathology of rage in this situation and it suddenly turns into a conversation about whether or not these people can “get over it”. What I am saying is they can’t get over it and it’s inhuman to ask them to get over it. It has to be recognised that they have undergone a series of the most appalling outrages and abuses. That they’ve been jerked from pillar to post, that constant variation in their legal status, in the Government’s approach to them, in their ordinary rights and the conditions of their every day lives, they’ve been driven back and forth across the country, they’ve ended up in one concentration camp after another. To me, it’s outrageous that you back off and say “why can’t they take responsibility”. Actually they would take responsibility but someone has got to register the savagery of what has been done to them instead of constantly minimalising it. I do think reconciliation is a bitter joke. We have nothing to forgive and yet we say magnanimously we will carry on as if there was no serious problem. I think that is outrageous and disrespectful.
Fuckin’A.
Germaine Greer gets quite a rough ride over in Europe, too. The press give her a lot of critical coverage and even in the Guardian, where she has a column, there has been criticism of her radical stance.
Of course, my problem with her comes from her radical stance against transsexual women and I’m afraid that the hatred she shows us makes it extremely difficult for me to value her work.
Yeah. Fair call…I haven’t read any quotes/writing regarding trans individuals/issues, but I was pretty appalled to hear third hand a rough approximation of her views.
Emily S, those passages of hers on transsexualism (and intersex as well) were basically what I was thinking of when I wrote about material of Greer’s that makes one want to hurl it from the room. She also seemed far too generous towards cultural apologetics for female genital mutilation.
Yet there’s other material she has written which is insightful, analytic, scathing and valuable. She’s not simple to evaluate.
FP: here’s one excerpt from The Whole Woman.
Lauredhel: Thanks for the link, though I can’t help wishing I *hadn’t* read it. Sigh.
I gave up on Germaine Greer when she approved arranged marriage because young women are ‘healthy animals ready to be mated’ in Sex and Destiny: it disgusts me that a feminist can underwrite the classical patriarchal treatment of women as domestic animals; this is the treatment underpins women’s subordination as chattel in cultures which use women’s bodies and labour as objects to be sold, traded and exchanged. Her contrarian and relatvist tendencies deeply undermine any humanitarian position.
Hunourless, po-faced, one-dimensional women will never get women like Germaine Greer. Why even try?
The tall poppy syndrome is clearly alive and kicking in Australia and I wouldn’t be surprised if GG moderates her personal views for public consumption and censors herself more than we’ll ever know–but then don’t we all. Germaine is foremostly an academic. She researches her work thoroughly, she’s not perfect and makes mistakes (apparently, but she doesn’t rely on being clever with words and having an original and timely point of view.
The only book I’ve tried to read of her’s was Daddy we Hardly Knew You. It was humourless, well half of it was, I couldn’t keep going. It was also boringly academic, every iota had been researched to the nth degree–really detracted from it.
I wonder how we would receive her were she not an ex-pat,i.e, had she never lived here. There seems to be some mindless tradition in the Australian media of Germs bashing.
Bub at #10, to whomever could you be referring?
Weird. Daddy, We Hardly Knew You is not at all an academic book. It is a very personal, conversational piece of writing. It’s primarily an exploration of family history undertaken with the aim of finding out the truth about the newly discovered (for GG) conundrum of the true identity of her father.
It’s a brave and honest book, perhaps the bravest and most personally and emotionally self-revealing of all her books. Like the best mysteries it is exciting, a page-turner, as this superb writer and communicator traverses the continent of her birth and others her father visited in war. The truth about her father and his mother and foster mother is stranger and more poignant than any thing fiction could devise and reveals much about the social situation of so many men and women of her parents’ generation.
It’s an absolute gem of a book.
At the risk of opening a big ole can of nationalistic worms, the commentary on Steve Irwin made me laugh out loud, particularly:
The animal world has finally taken its revenge on Irwin, but probably not before a whole generation of kids in shorts seven sizes too small has learned to shout in the ears of animals with hearing 10 times more acute than theirs, determined to become millionaire animal-loving zoo-owners in their turn.
Bub: hunourless? Who’re you calling hunourless??!
Well I love her, even though I have read things of hers that have made me extremely uncomfortable.
Her position on transgendered people I think is theoretically defensible and rhetorically effective, but falls in a dreadful heap once real people enter the picture (as of course it is irresponsible and cruel to pretend they don’t.)
Galloise Blonde, I value her for her contrarian tendencies. It’s probably what has given her the energy to keep up the fight for so long.
Laura: she falls into a giant heap once actual biological knowledge comes into her picture, too. Her “understanding” of intersex conditions is ridiculous no matter what theoretical angle you’re coming from. Sadly, her lack of knowledge and hand-waving on other biological science issues has made me want to throw some of her other stuff at the wall, too.
Greer is one of those writers where I’ll read some stuff that really grabs me; I love that she’s an older female academic who doesn’t pull her punches; but it’s really hard to get past this stuff (and I’m not sure how much I want to). It bugs me when someone claims special insights way, way outside of their area of experience or knowledge, and sticks to those guns no matter what evidence is presented to the contrary.
Lauredhel said: “It bugs me when someone claims special insights way, way outside of their area of experience or knowledge, and sticks to those guns no matter what evidence is presented to the contrary.”
Yes, that’s what makes me ask myself how much of the rest of her work I can trust. She *is* a remarkable woman and we need more people like her, but the way I feel about her trans comments is simple: She’s a bigot.
That doesn’t mean she hasn’t written some excellent work, it just means that at least on the TG/TS/IS front she is one of the most anti-trans feminists and she legitimises discrimination of us without even understanding us.
A man having such views of a woman? Indefensible. A straight person having such views of a gay person? Likewise. Germaine Greer having such opinions of a transsexual? It’s “theoretically defensible”
Sorry… She is an intelligent woman and she’s done a great deal of good fighting for basic women’s rights, but there are too many areas where she scares me. (Wow… That actually is right… She *does* scare me.)
If people are so dead set opposed to her point of view that they’ll actually throw her books at the wall (I have always found this a strange concept, btw – is in literally what you do? Or do you just stop reading?) then it’s probably best I don’t engage in discussing it further.
cheers all, and have a nice weekend :)
what Laura said.
Weird.
Out of here.
I’m not out of here :) I just don’t want to get carried away and debate this, cos I know I’ll feel bad about it later. Sorry to be meta. Carry on.
It’s more of a literary nod to Dorothy Parker, I think. Although I did actually hurl a Heinlein once.
I think Greer is definitely brilliant in many ways. I certainly wouldn’t reject Greer in her entirety because some of her work is flawed (especially when it applies to biological science). When she keeps her focus on literature/history/anthropology, she writes some eye-openingly important stuff, as (from reviews only, I haven’t read it yet) it appears that On Rage will be.
It should be possible to discuss both her strengths and her flaws, surely?
A guy drops in here and you dont even say hi…
by the look of what most of you have to say about Germaine Greer I suspect I’m not missing much…
and to the trnn – just in case yr gonno go off an another ‘it’s all about me’ tangent – I’m a poof!
James Waites #23,
???
Rebekka and fuckpoliteness both responded directly to points you raised in your post, and you haven’t responded in turn.
Grow a thicker skin, mate.
Laura #21,
my comment at #22 crossed with yours, and I only just saw it. Glad that you’re not out of here.
(edited to add: I find it bemusing that the stoush on Greer over at LP is on whether she’s worth reading at all, and the objections here are about some suggestions that not everything she’s written is as perfectly brilliant as her very best work)
A guy drops in here and you don’t even say hi…
*sigh* (Altogether now..) “Hi James.”
I guess what I most admire about Greer is that she is a real 100% human being. Her opinions aren’t 100% consistent and like most of us she probably can’t be sure what she believes herself more than 75% of the time, but she’s at least willing to put some time into thinking about it until she develops a clearer idea.
“and to the tranny – just in case yr gonno go off an another ‘it’s all about me’ tangent – I’m a poof!”
Lovely.
Sorry, Emily S – it’s been disemvowelled now.
Thanks, tigtog… That’s kind of you! :)
I actually find the more I read of Germaine Greer’s work, the more I dislike her.
When I hadn’t read anything, the public persona of loud, outspoken and unapologetic was really appealing. I really wanted to like her, but just can’t.
Reading her stuff, well, mixed to say the least. I think over time she’s gotten increasingly likely to express her own rage chiefly at other women, and that’s quite disturbing. Her Guardian column is frequently an exercise in wtf lulz? She’s funny, to be sure, but the cost of that wicked wit is pretty much any chance of any real insight. Everything’s very polarised with her.
So no, I don’t think she *is* much of an academic, or a public intellectual. She’s an often-witty polemicist whose work is, in my opinion, ultimately not very helpful to anyone at all. Agent provocateur is extremely generous really, given that many of her views now dovetail nicely with the most retrogressive women-hating views around.
Respect for the galvanising effect the Female Eunuch had, but I kinda agree with “did some good despite herself” verdict in one biography I read.
And yeah, her trans stuff is.. uh.. special, and rather relevant to her legacy. It’s far from theoretical – she rather famously outed (trans) professor Rachel Padman to the UK tabloid press in a concerted effort to get her fired. Nasty, nasty stuff.
I read The Female Eunuch when I was eighteen, in my first year of uni (although not for any course I was studying– just of my own accord). At that stage, I was someone who wanted to identify as a feminist, but I was scared by all of the straw feminists out there. Greer did a lot to allay those fears. One of the things I remember most about that book was her positive attitude that women can change things. Unfortunately, I think this played into a preconception I had at the time that ending sexism is solely the responsibility of women (because we can’t ask that poor little menz to do anything), but I can’t blame Greer for my own mindset, and it felt very empowering (and I’m sure it still would, if I re-read the book) to have someone talking about women as powerful, active beings.
I also admire her willingness to speak her mind and cause a bit of fuss, even if I don’t agree with everything that she says. It’s nice to see a woman who doesn’t apologise for having opinions and talking about them.
Having said that, of course, I agree with everyone who has said that her views on trans* people and intersex people are simply… ugh– not to mention under-researched to an extent that is indefensible for someone who works as an academic. It doesn’t matter if her field is literature and anthropology– my field is literature, and I know how to search scientific journals if I need to.
Honestly? I don’t really take Greer seriously and didn’t think that many others did either. So I guess you learn something new every day. Not judging! Just saying.
I was not at all impressed with this essay (which I think is from On Rage? Or a summary? I’m not sure which). And if the other stuff she’s accused of saying is true . . . and hey, maybe it was taken WILDLY, WILDLY out of context . . . well then. (Discussion here.) Then there’s the transgender stuff, the fact that I once read a (feminist) review of a speech she gave about how the Gardasil vaccine is bad because it encourages sex with underage girls (what?), and now to hear the (entirely contradictory) support of arranged marriage . . .
I’m not going to throw her books across the room. I just have huge piles of books to read as it is, and won’t be spending any time adding hers to the stack. Honestly, when the anti-trans stuff starts, I just shut off. Maybe that’s short-sighted, but it’s honest. I view it as bigotry, and it takes a hell of a lot of other good to get me to have any time for the person spouting it. Unfortunately, there seems to be an awful lot of other bad floating around, so . . .
I think you’ll find, James, that my comment addresses yours. (Oh jeez, just noted that tigtog’s pointed this out) Adressing your point and continuing was including you into the space and conversation rather than screaming “Look. A dude! HERE!!Quick, come take a look”.
It was adressed fleetingly mind you, given the point is Greer, and the way her real words are often not engaged with and not “a DUDE pointed this out not a woman: compare and contrast”. Anyway, I’ve just seen the disemvowelled section so think I may have had enough explaining myself to you right now thanks.
Sheesh. I was struggling with this thread last night as I do love Germaine as a public figure and I felt like I’d skipped over that love and the joy she brings to me when she says something outrageous and into the bad stuff.
A woman unafraid to get in people’s faces and make an effort to stay there, to unsettle and disturb, to unapologetically be loud and opinionated and sexy and scathingly funny to boot means that I adore and admire her for that role which is much needed in Australia.
However, as many have pointed out her thinking and writing on trans issues is ill-informed and bigoted, and no matter how much I love her, and wanna be her when I think of the outrageous things she’s done and said to unsettle Aussie masculinity/a conservative public – I don’t love that, or want to be that, or to support that in her in any way. It’s frightening and dangerous and mean and unnecessary. As tigtog says, it SHOULD be possible to discuss her strengths and flaws.
I hate it when she’s being attacked by people who are deliberately misconstruing her arguments (and I think it’s a common tactic employed against feminists and left wing figures), missing the point etc etc…but with the trans stuff, it IS her actual words, arguments and points which are bigoted, dangerous and ultimately violent. I can’t back that play no matter how much joy she brings me in other areas. And I don’t want to be told that that means I “don’t love her”.
I do love her, and I think more loud-mouthed, opinionated, quick witted, fiery, fiesty feminists are desperately needed in public spaces in Australia…but she is still accountable for the ethics of her views, and in this area I think she’s not just wrong, but is causing damage, distress and violence.
If you thought the Hutchison’s piece was bad the Devine one was utter, envious horror. I’ve just written a post on it after seeing GG speak last night in Melbourne.
Perhaps it is easier to denounce a woman for not being a real woman because she hasn’t had children or lived in ‘domestic bliss’ with a man (from Devine) than actually address the issue of our own transgressions against the custodians of this land. Greer was spot on when she said that The Apology was for us, the white people, to make us feel better. An uncomfortable truth. But Hutchison and Devine don’t actually debate her thesis, examine her call for a treaty if we truly want to heal the wounds, no it is much easier to attack her for being attention seeking and not a real woman.
another outspoken females last blog post..the Greer hat trick
Yeah, see THAT’s the shit I hate! It’s SO nasty, SO destructive…I love Greer for the fact she’s able to sail those storms (and other storms from more reputable dissenters), I think I would collapse in an exhausted heap. I couldn’t bear to read Devine’s character assasination – written by someone WITH no character it was just going to be too much for me. I did get to the bit where she said Greer had contributed nothing to society…excuse me? What exactly has DEVINE ever contributed except to fuel the ignorant hatred of anything that questions the status quo.
FP: When I took a step back from these two articles I realised they said so much more about the authors than Greer. I got the feeling that Devine was radiating pure envy – of Greers standing, attention and what she can get away with. As for Hutchison, she’s got her own shit to deal with. I’d like to see her take on Devine over the issue that a woman without a man remains emotionally stunted. Now that could be fun!
There was this Greer quote on Andrew Bolt’s blog yesterday, I think. It was meant to be critical of her, but it made me like her a hell of a lot – possibly may make me buy her latest book.
I’m not sure whether Germaine sets out to be a controversialist, but she certainly succeeds. In a strange way, I like that she defends the apparently indefensible, and comes across as a ‘bigot’ – I think it’s demonstrative of a courageous commitment to utter intellectual honesty that is rare, exceedingly rare.
I see where you’re going there Tim, and I do admire so much about her, and generally speaking like her courting controversy in the name of challenging the status quo.
If I’ve misinterpreted your comment, in taking you to say that her indefensible stance on trans issues is a commitment to intellectual honesty please let me know.
Because if so, I’m not sure that misrepresenting or misunderstanding her ‘evidence’ to back up an offensive and dangerous argument which causes real harm to real people (and seems here to reinforce the status quo of trans-fear/trans-hate) can be seen as intellectual ‘honesty’.
I don’t think Greer’s opinions are indefensible, that’s what I’m driving at. She argues powerfully, if not convincingly, about a number of different topics, and it’s simply because she shows that such topics can be argued about – that they are a point of contention – that she stirs up controversy.
Examples: her tract from some years back about the physical beauty of teenage boys. Her Quarterly Essay, ‘Whitefella Jump Up’, arguing for the necessity of an ‘Aboriginal’ viewpoint of Australia. Her stance on transexuals.
I think it’s a mark of her honesty, the way in which she approaches each of these issues and applies a critical eye to them. This is rare; there are few writers and thinkers who do this consistently. It’s often the assumption that certain thoughts, or arguments, or positions on these issues are ‘indefensible’ that really needs to be challenged.
But as Lauredhel has noted at 17, her knowledge of intersex issues which she uses as a platform for her views on transgender/transexual identities/bodies/individuals/issues is really quite inadequate and misguided.
So it doesn’t appear that in this particular situation she *has* applied a critical eye to it. This is my objection.
I have no problem with the other issues you raised. I have a problem with her using spurious claims and grounding them in science as a platform which then encourages dismissal of genuine experiences and needs of human beings and encourages misguided attitudes and bigotry. It isn’t the idea that we cannot *discuss* a subject because it is *taboo* – it’s that she doesn’t actually seem to understand the things she grounds her arguments in in this matter.
I think she understand quite a lot about the construction of gender. I’d even venture to say it is her area of expertise. I don’t know that science has all the answers here, or even much right to be listened to on every aspect of gender assignment, how it is decided, and what it means, since it’s got a bad track record in that department. I agree with Greer that gender assignment is not rational or objective, it’s not uncontroversially based in observation of nature.
If the subject was racial identity rather than gender identity, we might be more sympathetic to her position. everyone here knows that people of different ‘races’ are negligibly different genetically (though science has only recently acknowledged this) but how would we deal with it if a ‘white’ person had herself reassigned ‘black’? I don’t like to engage in this sort of casuistic reasoning but this is the form of the position I understand Greer to be holding and proposing.
I don’t personally agree with her position but I understand it, and I don’t feel the need to call her evil or mean or frightening (although she did frighten me when I met her last year) or say ‘ugh’ because she holds it.
And I don’t think anything Germaine Greer says on this topic will encourage bigotry. It doesn’t appear to have had that effect on any of the people commenting here.
[A pre-note: Race is perhaps not the best analogy to use for gender, especially in the here and now, because the idea of rigid binaries has been thrown out by most people when it comes to race; but the stark gender binary is still a dominant idea. It's also an analogy I try to be very careful with, since I'm white myself, as well as gender and race functioning differently. I hope people can bear that care in mind while reading/discussing these analogies.]
A closer analogy to what she is saying about intersex people would be the situation of a multiracial person (or, perhaps, a black person with a single white great-great-grandfather), calling herself “black” – and Greer objecting to that self-identity on the grounds that she wasn’t a “real” black person, insisting that she was a “spurious” or “damaged” black person, claiming that her claim to blackness damaged “real black people’s” claim to blackness.
Greer calls female-identified people with intersex conditions “failed males”, “damaged males”, and “spurious females”, and insists that they cannot be girls/women on purely chromosomal grounds. I can agree with her on some practical issues – like, for example, her opposition to imposing genital surgery on intersex babies – without agreeing with this premise.
“…her tolerance of spurious femaleness, her consent to treat it as if it is the same as her own gender identity weakens her claim to have a sex of her own …”
I just can’t see this as any different, in essence, from straight conservatives insisting that homosexual marriage will somehow magically damage their own marriages.
I thought carefully about the analogy.
Another parent at my kids’ primary school was a woman who looks not just white, but Irish white, who was the mother of two children who had strong Arnhem Land aboriginal looks. Like many others I presumed that they got their looks only from their father. I knew she had been adopted into her husband’s tribe, but thought this was her only personal claim to aboriginality. It was not until I had known her for several years that I met other members of her family and realised that she herself was of indigenous descent, with full siblings who appeared obviously Koori.
So is she a blackfella, because she was born into a blackfella family, or is she a whitefella, because her skin is as pale as mine? Most people looking at her would definitely assign her as whitefella, but I don’t think that’s how she feels about herself.
I was thinking more of medical reassignment – as if Asian people had surgery and took drugs to make themselves Caucasian. That’s how I read Greer as viewing sex reassignment. I don’t share her anger about it.
OK, I think I understand your point better now. Still, views on race are complicated by the histories of people like in my example, and views on gender are also complicated by people whose subconscious view of themselves doesn’t matter the gender assignment given them based on their appearance at birth. Those challenges to rigid views make some people very angry, and others of us far less so.
My own prediction is that we will see more and more surgical and pharmaceutical alterations to natural appearances over the coming decades, many if not most will be for purely decorative considerations, and recreational self-decoration at that. I suspect that our current angst and anguish over changing one’s body will seem rather quaint in a few generations.
Of course it does – my mother helped me transition, and I’m still on good terms with her.
Plus, that whole line about trans women refusing to change sex if we were required to have uterus and ovaries? I’ll be first in line when the ovary revolution comes. Her assertions are meaningless when real people are there saying “This isn’t my life at all.”
Also: I don’t think her writings on transsexual people are even theoretically defensible, to be honest. People shouldn’t be used as rhetorical points.
Right, after that I went off and found Greer’s comments on trans people and the intersexed as I wasn’t aware of them, and now I’m quite appalled.
As for being theoretically defensible…yeah, I guess so, if you’re stuck in the theoretical understanding of forty years ago, sure. For someone who’s so keen on women not being put into boxes, she sure has a binary understanding of gender and sex.
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