Feminist writer Germaine Greer has been glitter-bombed at a book-signing today in New Zealand for her comments about trans women, including a 2009 column which said they ‘seem to us ghastly parodies’ and claimed being trans was a ‘delusion’.

The Queer Avengers group took exception to Greer’s brand of what it termed “transphobic feminism” and delivered the glitter in a move more often seen deployed on homophobic politicians in the US.

Germaine Greer unsuccessfully opposed the election of a trans woman to the staff at the women-only Newnham College, Cambridge in the 1990s and the group highlighted her opposition to regarding trans women as women.

In her 1999 book, The Whole Woman, she wrote: “Governments that consist of very few women have hurried to recognise 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 man-made women be accepted as women is the institutional expression of the mistaken conviction that women are defective males.”



Germaine was left showed in glitter. (Photo: Alastair Reith for Newswire.co.nz)

In 2009, Greer wrote in the Guardian that being trans was a “delusion” and that trans women “seem to us to be some kind of ghastly parody, though it isn’t polite to say so”.

She said: “We pretend that all the people passing for female really are. Other delusions may be challenged, but not a man’s delusion that he is female.”



The feminist writer was unimpressed by the glitter-bomb. (Photo: Queer Avengers)

Stacey of the Queer Avengers said: “Transphobic feminism is so 20th Century.

“It wasn’t okay then and it’s not okay now. Women’s liberation must mean the right to refuse imposed gender roles, to fight for diverse gender expression.”

The Queer Avengers also handed out leaflets saying “transphobia is bullshit”, a reference to Greer’s 1972 arrest for using the swearword in a speech in New Zealand.