Let’s not beat about the bush, although that’s not the happiest phrase in the light of what I’m about to say. Germaine Greer’s views on transgender people are based on the kind of quasi-Freudian cod-psychology you’d think a feminist critic would find embarrassing. In 1999’s The Whole Woman, she wrote that “when a man decides to spend his life impersonating his mother (like Norman Bates in Psycho), it is as if he murders her and gets away with it”. Today, her views have the same thrust – that it’s not possible to change from a man to a woman – although their expression is usually less aggressive. She told Newsnight on 23 October, for example, that she will use whatever pronouns people ask for, and would not try to limit sex reassignment surgery for those who want it.
Still, this is normally the point where I start humming “Bridge Over Troubled Water”. In the age where Caitlyn Jenner is set to be crowned Glamour’s Woman of the Year, after living as one for less than 12 months, Greer is wildly out of step with public opinion. But then, when was she ever not? She is a controversialist, a provocateur – she has never wanted to be an unsung foot soldier of the feminist movement; she always wanted to be its Camille Desmoulins. I’ve just finished reading Gloria Steinem’s memoir, and it’s full of warm references to other feminists. A Greer autobiography would be unlikely to strike the same sisterly tone.
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