Can someone explain what Greer's view is about what makes someone a woman (or a man)?
My former colleagues at another university in Middle East have also been moved to online teaching indefinitely, with the students…
20 responses to “More on the Germaine Greer controversy at Cardiff”
-
I assume someone actually expert will step up to answer this fairly soon. But in their absence: as I recall, the basic argument of the Female Eunuch was that society's conception of womanhood was defined in a very male-centric and very surface way, through physical attractiveness, mannerisms, secondary sexual characteristics, style of clothing. Greer argued for a much more woman-driven conception of womanhood, and in particular (again, as I recall) focussed on women's ability to bear children. (She sees society's taboo attitude to menstruation, for instance, as an attempt to efface (what she sees as) a central part of womanhood.) Her titular "female eunuch" is (what we'd now call) a M-to-F trans person; Greer regards that person as exemplifying the bad male-driven conception of womanhood, because they have all the outward features of womanhood but not the more inward features. She's not actually very interested in trans issues in the book (or, I think, in general); she's just using them to illustrate her broader point.
None of this is to endorse (or indeed to reject) her position. And, to repeat, people should ignore this amateur's comment as soon as someone actually knowledgeable comes along!
-
She is simply a biological essentialist. She thinks that you have to be born with a certain set of genes and organs to be a man or woman. She shares that idea with the right wing. Also, and this is more speculation, her feminism is strong enough that she doesn't want any ( in her view) honorary woman. Also, she has no particular concern that her views will not be used by bigots to justify opposition to the trans community. Finally, she is fearless and doesn't care what people think. Never has.
-
It is not clear to me that Greer must be endorsing a biological essentialist view of gender. One can simultaneously maintain that gender is a social construct and deny that one can self-determine one's gender. But one thing is clear: she thinks that if a biological male sincerely claims that "he" is a woman and if "he" undergoes surgery and/or hormone therapy to have "his" body have the apparent characteristics typically associated with biological females, this does not make "him" a woman. (Greer seems to be much more concerned with man to woman transitions than woman to man transitions). She makes an analogy to trans-speciesism, which she thinks is absurd. This suggests the biological essentialist interpretation. But I imagine she would make a similar analogy to trans-racialism as well (e.g. the Dolezal case).
-
There was a piece discussing this in the New Yorker a while back, which I found informative and even handed, though I am also no expert in this area. Here's the link:
-
I kind of doubt that Greer's views about what makes someone a man or a woman is based on any arguments she made many years ago. No doubt those arguments didn't in any way envision the rise of transgenderism as an issue. Her views appear to stem more from her conception of feminism as a movement, in which she sees the intrusion of males into that realm as sabotaging the cause — and that is how she views such figures as Caitlyn Jenner.
As for the biological essentialism question, well, who are the biological essentialists here, anyway? Perhaps the best argument for the claim that someone born genetically and anatomically a male is really female is that their brains were so wired from birth that they identified as female. At minimum, this is by far the most effective argument politically, and is very commonly employed. And to a point, it is a reasonable one: whatever it may be about the structure of the brain that inclines a typical woman to act, think, and feel like a woman may, in a quirk of development, come about in the body of an individual genetically and anatomically male. But of course what's not so good about that possibility is that it too can be characterized as embodying "biological essentialism". It is indeed perhaps the most damaging kind of biological essentialism for feminism as a movement, because it entails a very basic biological difference between men and women in terms of mental traits.
And, from the standpoint of feminism, the impact of transwomen is little improved if one insists instead that there are no such basic biological differences in mental dispositions between men and women, and attributes any such differences that arise to culture. In that case, how can an individual who has been regarded and treated as a man throughout his/her life, and enjoyed the advantages thereof, possibly understand or represent the concerns of the typical woman, who has not? How can Caitlyn Jenner represent them, rather than undermine them?
Now I'm not sure that Greer has stated her views exactly in this way. But I think it's one reasonable way of interpreting them, or at least explaining them: she sees transgenderism as inflicting great harm on the feminist cause.
-
That New Yorker piece is very helpful, thanks for supplying that link. It strongly suggests that the basis for her hostile remarks is not to be found in biological essentialism (whatever precisely that doctrine is) but in certain premises of one kind of radical feminist critique of gender as a kind of caste status.
-
The Greer remarks and your reference to "caste status" bring to mind this comment in a footnote from Christine A. Littleton's 1987 article, "Reconstructing Sexual Equality":
"Pro-feminist men play an important role in disseminating and implementing feminist ideas. But as to whether men can speak as feminists — i.e., speak from the perspective of women's experience — my own position is as follows: I take the experience of living a goodly number of years as a woman to be a necessary, but not sufficient, prerequisite of feminism. Ergo, on my definition, men would have to give up their class status in some nontemporary way in order to meet the minimum qualifications. This does not appear to me to have occurred to any significant degree."
-
This topic is not mentioned In Germaine Greer's The Female Eunuch (1971), as least based on my quick skimming through my copy (it's briefly mentioned in a 1999 foreword). The topic is, however, discussed in Chapter 2 of Greer's The Whole Woman (2000). As David Wallace hints above, one of Greer's central ideas is that femaleness has been defined negatively, as not-male, etc., and not as "a sex of its own" (see quotes below in connection with MTF transsexuals), which she opposes, and hence the word "eunuch" in the 1971 book. This explains her current repeated insistence that losing a penis does not make one a woman. The following seven quotes are taken from The Whole Woman, 2000, Ch 2, "Pantomine Dames".
"The insistence that manmade women be accepted as women is the institutional expression of the mistaken conviction that women are defective males. The biological truth is the opposite. Men are defective females." (p. 81)
"Sex-change surgery is profoundly conservative in that it reinforces sharply contrasting gender roles by shaping individuals to fill them." (pp. 81-2)
"Male-to-female (MTF) transsexuals in Europe and America may now draw attention to their special status as part of a campaign to achieve full civil rights, that is to be accepted as women." (p. 85)
"Femaleness is not the other side of the Rorschach blot of maleness, but a sex of its own, with a sexuality of its own and a whole spectrum of possible expressions, many of which take no account of maleness at all." (p. 85)
"Woman is not placed on earth for the use of men any more than men are placed on earth for the use of women. Both could do without each other if it were not for the pesky business of sexual reproduction. Though they stress their role in 'the sex act', MTF transsexuals have so far shown no more interest in reproduction than men do." (pp. 85-6)
"A good-hearted woman is not supposed to mind that her sex is the catch-all for all cases of gender ambiguity, but 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 and tacitly supports the Freudian stereotype of women as incomplete beings defined by their lack of a penis. Women's law of choosiness about who may be called a woman strengthens the impression that women do not see their sex as quite real, and suggests that they too identity themselves as not-male, the other, any other." (p. 92)
"Whatever else it is gender reassignment is an exorcism of the mother. When a man decides to spend his time impersonating his mother (like Norman Bates in Psycho) it is as if he murders her and gets away with it, proving at a stroke that there was nothing to her. His intentions are no more honourable than any female impersonator's; his achievement is to gag all those would would call his bluff. When he forces his way into the few private spaces women may enjoy and shouts down their objections, and bombards the women who will not accept him with threats and hate mail, he does as rapists have always done". (p. 93)
-
I think one thing these comments show is that even if Greer (or any other similarly inclined feminist) is ultimately wrong, her views are not prima facie absurd. There are substantive claims being made on both sides. In fact, this seems like an especially fertile area for discussion. I'm sure a lot could be learned by engaging the arguments she makes (or could make) and it is a shame that these discussions are being stifled. To dismiss her a bigot and demand she not speak are not things we should support.
-
Lexington was too polite to press the point home in this way, but his/her two central paragraphs constitute a very neat reductio ad absurdum.
-
It's unfortunate that (some of) Greer's language is so abrasive. The emphasis on surgery ("lop your dick off", etc) also seems misplaced – the debate at one time might have been about whether a post-operative transexual qualified as a woman, but these days many m-f transgender people are pre-op, undecided-about-op or probably-never-will-be-op. (Greer presumably finds this even more absurd.) Incidentally, I remember Jan Morris writing about how, as James Morris, he was convinced from an early age that he'd been born in the wrong body, but also writing about feeling distinctively 'male' emotions & sensations – and, after hormone treatment and surgery, being surprised by distinctively 'female' emotions. Although I'm ctually becoming a woman was a long
The core question is how we deal with the difference between somebody born physically female and somebody born physically male who identifies as female – because there certainly is a significant difference, both in the two groups' life experiences and in their attitude to being female (which one group mostly takes for granted & the other has a passionate engagement with). It seems to me that it's reasonable to say – as Greer does – that, while transgender people should be able to live as women, what they are is transgender; this seems to respect their chosen identity and their difference from both (non-transgender) men and women. The problem is that (many) trans people demand the 'is' as well as the 'as', & see Greer's position of respectful disagreement as mortally offensive, even threatening. Although – as the New Yorker piece suggests – the balance of actual threats currently seems rather the other way.
The New Yorker piece also sets out the 'caste' model of feminism rather well, which highlights another reason why the idea of identifying as a woman (or a man) is so contested. Sex and gender are two binaries, linked by power: biological-women are oppressed by biological-male dominance, and one of the forms this oppression takes is socialisation as social-woman, or rather as 'woman-the-opposite-of-man' (soft not hard, weak not strong, emotional not rational, caring not aggressive and so on). So for someone like Greer the gender binary needs to be undermined, overthrown or ignored, but on the basis of upholding the sex binary: it's women (the biological category) who need to be liberated from being forced to be women (the social category). Some transgender, 'non-binary' or genderqueer people seem to conflate the two binaries and lose the dimension of power, so that everything – clothing, social roles, body parts – is or should be available to everyone, and the oppressors are those who question this exercise of self-expression. The result is that the gender binary is sometimes challenged and sometimes affirmed. This, at any rate, is my reading of (for example) the food blogger Jack Monroe's recent announcements that she is transgender and no longer wishes to be referred to as (the name of her blog) "A girl called Jack". Wearing 'masculine' clothing and having female partners falls squarely within a recognisably feminist challenge to patriarchal gender roles; describing herself as having 'hard edges' and standing in a 'masculine' way, or considering a double mastectomy so as to de-feminise herself, seems more like a reaffirmation of those gender roles, including their valorisation of the masculine.
-
Curses. End of first paragraph of previous comment: "Although I'm ctually becoming a woman was a long" should (of course¡) read
Although I'm sure Jan Morris considered herself a woman, for James Morris actually becoming a woman was a long and gradual process, with physical as well as mental aspects.
-
"Pantomime Dames
The only way a man can get rid of healthy genitals is to say that he is convinced that he is a woman. Then another man will remove them and gladly. In order to justify sex-change surgery a new disorder called gender dysphoria has come into being. The disease has no biological marker; its presence is discerned by a history of inappropriately gendered behaviour, social disability and affective disorder. Thought there is some research linking gender dysphoria with other affective disorders, transsexuals themselves emphatically insist that they do not suffer from any mental disease.
Governments that consist of very few women have hurried to recognize as women men who believe that they are women and have had themselves castrated to prove it, because they see women not as another sex but as a non-sex. No so-called sex-change has ever begged for a uterus-and-ovaries transplant; if uterus-and-ovaries transplants were made mandatory for wannabe women they would disappear overnight. The insistence that manmade women be accepted as women is the institutional expression of the mistaken conviction that women are defective males. The biological truth is the opposite; all biologists know that males are defective females. Though external genitalia are the expression of the chromosomal defect, their removal will not alter the chromosomal fact, any more than removal of the tails of puppies will produce a tailless breed. 'Sex-change operations' can only be carried out in Swift's Laputa."(Germaine Greer, The Whole Woman, 1999, 80-1)
So she defines womanhood solely in terms of genetic femaleness, such that a true sex change would require a gene change.
I wonder how many MtF transsexuals think "that women are defective males." Not many, I think. And having a uterus and ovaries cannot be a necessary condition of being a woman, since a surgical removal for medical reasons doesn't turn a woman into a nonwoman. So a transwoman's lack of a uterus and ovaries cannot mean that she is not a woman. -
I've probably said enough on this thread, but I will point out to Myron that Greer doesn't assert (in the passage quoted) that transexuals believe that women are defective males, or that having a uterus and ovaries is a necessary condition of being a woman.
-
Here's a half-boiled (not even half-baked) theory about trans-women.
Trans-women were brought up as men, with all the sense of entitlement that boys are raised with. At present we males (or at least the more socially aware of us) feel a bit guilty about those entitlements, which is just, but less pleasant than feeling righteously entitled.
Solution: one becomes a woman. No more guilt feelings about being an oppressor, since one is now a member of the oppressed, but one, now a trans-woman, brings to one's new-found femininity all the sense of male entitlement one was raised with and learned to enjoy as a child. However, the rules of the game having changed, one now considers oneself entitled exactly because one has no "privilege", having no privilege being a privilege of sorts under the new rules of the game.
I'm not claiming that trans-women consciously want to recuperate their childhood sense of male entitlement, but it just could play a role.
Maybe that's one of the reasons the trans-crowd is so intolerant: they reproduce the traditional paternal intolerance (which is so rare in women), but so common in traditional powerful male figures. A certain number of feminists ally themselves with trans-women because they can thus share in, as allies, male power with a clean conscience (the males now being (trans) women by definition).
More
1 of 68
Collapse all
Print all
In new window
a half-boiled theory about transwomen
Inbox
xs. wallerstein
16:28 (47 minutes ago)
to Brian
Here's a half-boiled (not even half-baked) theory.
Trans-women were brought up as men, with all the sense of entitlement that boys were traditionally raised with. Now, we men or males no longer feel so entitled, which is just, but less pleasant than feeling entitled. What's more, we (or least the more socially aware) males feel a bit guilty about being male; and guilt feelings aren't especially pleasant either.
Solution: one switches to being a woman. No more guilt feelings since one is no longer an oppressor, but a member of the oppressed, but one (now a trans-woman) brings to one's new found femininity all that sense of entitlement which one, as a male, learned to enjoy as a child, except the rules of the game having changed, one now considers oneself entitled exactly because one has no "privilege", having no privilege being a privilege of sorts in the new rules of the game.
I'm not claiming that transwomen consciously want to recuperate their childhood male entitlement, but it just could be that it plays a role. Maybe that's one of the reasons the trans-crowd is so intolerant: they reproduce the intolerance of traditional, powerful male figures, the intolerance that they were raised, as males, to exercise. Certain kinds of feminists flock to them because they can now ally themselves with male power with a clean conscience and enjoy feeling powerful.
More
1 of 68
Collapse all
Print all
In new window
a half-boiled theory about transwomen
Inbox
xs. wallerstein
16:28 (46 minutes ago)
to Brian
Here's a half-boiled (not even half-baked) theory.
Trans-women were brought up as men, with all the sense of entitlement that boys were traditionally raised with. Now, we men or males no longer feel so entitled, which is just, but less pleasant than feeling entitled. What's more, we (or least the more socially aware) males feel a bit guilty about being male; and guilt feelings aren't especially pleasant either.
Solution: one switches to being a woman. No more guilt feelings since one is no longer an oppressor, but a member of the oppressed, but one (now a trans-woman) brings to one's new found femininity all that sense of entitlement which one, as a male, learned to enjoy as a child, except the rules of the game having changed, one now considers oneself entitled exactly because one has no "privilege", having no privilege being a privilege of sorts in the new rules of the game.
I'm not claiming that transwomen consciously want to recuperate their childhood male entitlement, but it just could be that it plays a role. Maybe that's one of the reasons the trans-crowd is so intolerant: they reproduce the intolerance of traditional, powerful male figures, the intolerance that they were raised, as males, to exercise. Certain kinds of feminists flock to them because they can now ally themselves with male power with a clean conscience and enjoy feeling powerful.
More
1 of 68
Collapse all
Print all
In new window
a half-boiled theory about transwomen
Inbox
xs. wallerstein
16:28 (46 minutes ago)
to Brian
Here's a half-boiled (not even half-baked) theory.
Trans-women were brought up as men, with all the sense of entitlement that boys were traditionally raised with. Now, we men or males no longer feel so entitled, which is just, but less pleasant than feeling entitled. What's more, we (or least the more socially aware) males feel a bit guilty about being male; and guilt feelings aren't especially pleasant either.
Solution: one switches to being a woman. No more guilt feelings since one is no longer an oppressor, but a member of the oppressed, but one (now a trans-woman) brings to one's new found femininity all that sense of entitlement which one, as a male, learned to enjoy as a child, except the rules of the game having changed, one now considers oneself entitled exactly because one has no "privilege", having no privilege being a privilege of sorts in the new rules of the game.
I'm not claiming that transwomen consciously want to recuperate their childhood male entitlement, but it just could be that it plays a role. Maybe that's one of the reasons the trans-crowd is so intolerant: they reproduce the intolerance of traditional, powerful male figures, the intolerance that they were raised, as males, to exercise. Certain kinds of feminists flock to them because they can now ally themselves with male power with a clean conscience and enjoy feeling powerful.
-
There was also this story — should a transexual be able to take up a position in
a women only higher education institution:http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/TSsuccesses/RachaelPadman.html
Greer argued strongly against such an appointment in Cambridge. In this case
she clearly went beyond the argument of the definition of "is" -
Imagine all of the half-boiled theories we could concoct for the deep psycho-social explanations for those who enjoy armchair psychoanalyzing transwomen in unflattering terms. Perhaps they are all self-hating men and man-hating women responding to a history of abuse or other childhood trauma involving men.
I don't think such an exercise would make for a productive exchange of ideas, nor does it seem consistent with treating those interlocutors as genuine conversation partners and members of our intellectual and social community. Why, then, should we be any more prepared to entertain such unwarranted and disrespectful speculation about the psychology of transwomen?
-
Derek Bowman,
I don't feel that your psychoanalyzing my motives is disrespectful and actually, if you dug deeper, I might learn something about myself from your analysis. Also I don't see that I analyze trans-women in unflattering terms, although I don't do it in flattering terms either. I analyze everyone, including myself, in similar terms. I believe that the same psychological mechanisms function in all of us, even those of us who consider themselves to have the most "lofty" motives.
Now those of us who are wholly unconscious about our motives do tend project their own inner conflicts or hang-ups onto the world and do tend to make a "mess" of things.
Finally, I suppose it's the blog administrator who decides what's "a productive exchange of ideas".
-
I think Professor Bowman's point is important. The idea of innate gender identity is obviously in tension with a lot of radical feminist thought. I think this could be an incredibly interesting conversation, and I don't think the answer is obvious. BUT, unfortunately, a lot of the radical feminist writing specifically addressing the issue (Sheila Jeffrey's 'Gender Hurts,' Greer in 'The Whole Woman') involves incredibly demeaning pseudopsychology and serious lack of engagement with the relevant research, especially with the work of transgender scholars. ('The Whole Woman' gets more of a pass on the latter because of when it was published, but Greer's public comments have kept the line.) They also frequently use obviously pejorative language. Given that they are discussing an incredibly marginalized, at-risk group, it's no surprise that it starts seeming hateful rather than scholarly. Their position that trans women aren't women is based on preexisting theoretical commitments, not just transphobia. But they often don't act like it.
-
If this conversation is going to continue, let me make a little apology first.
My comment #15 above should be directed towards online trans-women activists and their supporters, not towards trans-women in general and thus, I apologize because it seems that it was directed towards trans-women in general, whom, I imagine, have very diverse conscious and unconscious motivations and who are, as CP points out, an incredibly marginalized at-risk group and who merit all our solidarity and support.
However, as is outlined in the article published in the blog entry above entitled, "A Good Piece in the Guardian on the Greer Controversy", online one finds a group of trans-women activists and their supporters who use methods and strategies which remind one of those used by Maoist indoctrination camps and I see no good reason not to criticize those methods and strategies and to wonder about the conscious and unconscious motives of
people who exhibit such a pronounced need to silence their critics and to impose their discourse as the "Ideologically Correct Little Red Book of True Revolutionary Thought".—–
KEYWORDS:
Primary Blog
Leave a Reply to Derek Bowman Cancel reply