LONDON — Students at Cardiff University have begun an online petition trying to bar Germaine Greer, the Australian feminist author, from speaking there next month because of her views on transgender women.

Ms. Greer’s views are well known, but the campaign to bar her from giving a lecture has raised the issue of academic censorship, and the university swiftly rejected the petition in the name of free speech.

Ms. Greer, 76, who is best known for her best seller, “The Female Eunuch,” has prompted outrage and protests in the past because of her comments. In a column in 2009 she wrote that transgender women seem like ghastly parodies and that a transgender woman was essentially “a man’s delusion that he is female.” According to Varsity, Cambridge University’s student newspaper, she suggested in January that transgender women do not know what it is like to have a vagina.

The petition was initiated on Friday by Rachael Melhuish, women’s officer at the Cardiff University Students’ Union. The petition states that Ms. Greer has “demonstrated time and time again her misogynistic views towards trans women, including continually ‘misgendering’ trans women and denying the existence of transphobia altogether.” The petition had received about 880 signatures by noon on Saturday.