Germaine Greer defied a fierce campaign to stop her delivering a university lecture on the grounds that she has expressed transphobic views by going ahead with the event, which was conducted under high security.

During the lecture at Cardiff University, Greer insisted in the bluntest of terms that she did not accept that post-operative men were women. “I don’t believe a woman is a man without a cock,” she said. “You can beat me over the head with a baseball bat. It still won’t make me change my mind.”



Greer quoted the BBC Strictly Come Dancing judge Len Goodman, who said when judging an unconvincing rumba that just because someone told him his pencil was a hammer, it did not change the fact that it really was a pencil.

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She also referred to a Will Young pop video featuring a naked trans man walking down a street, claiming that if an elderly woman had done that she would have been thrown into a waste disposal unit.

Greer added: “Being a woman is a bit tricky. If you didn’t find your pants full of blood when you were 13 there’s something important about being a woman you don’t know. It’s not all cake and jam.”

More than 3,000 people signed a petition arguing that Greer should not be allowed to deliver her lecture on women in political and social life because her opinions on trans people were so offensive. She hinted she would stay away if the university could not guarantee that people would not throw things at her.



Uniformed police officers stood guard outside the lecture theatre and security officials guarded the doors inside, but in the end only about a dozen people turned up to protest peacefully. Greer told the audience that campaigners had been “trying to frighten me off”, but added: “Here I am.”

She did not mention the issue during her lecture, entitled Women & Power: the Lessons of the 20th Century, but during questions was asked about the controversy. Greer said: “They [trans people] are not my issue. It should be perfectly clear why not. I think 51% of the world’s population is enough for me to be going on with. I do agree that calling people names may add to their misery but it happens to old women every day.”

Referring to the Will Young video, Greer said: “Try doing that if you were a 76-year-old woman. They would throw a blanket over you. They would throw you in a waste disposal unit. People are intolerant.”

Greer said five women had approached her as she travelled to Cardiff to back her stance on trans women. “They said: ‘I’m so glad that someone is saying what we think. We don’t think that post-operative male transexuals are women but we are not allowed to say so’. I will say so because I don’t believe they are women. That’s not tantamount to calling them names. I also happen to believe that the surgery is unethical.”

When it was pointed out that trans people were being killed in the US because of their sexuality, Greer replied: “We have two women a week being murdered in England by their partners. They are not my fault and the transexuals in America aren’t my fault either ... If you want to turn me into a demon you have to have some evidence ... I don’t accept post-operative males as females.”

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Protesters outside included present and former Cardiff University students who criticised the institution for paying Greer for the lecture. Mair Macey, a former Cardiff University student who now works for HMRC, said: “I really care about transgender people. Having Greer here reflects badly on the values of the university. There is no way she should be invited to give a distinguished lecture.”

Author Elwyn Way said: “We don’t think she should be given a platform like this and go unchallenged.” Way said trans people were suffering emotional and physical violence and needed to be protected rather than vilified.

Payton Quinn, who organised the demonstration, said Greer had made “incredibly inflammatory” remarks about trans women in the past. A flyer distributed by the protesters featured two Greer quotes from Guardian articles. In one she wrote: “Nowadays we are all likely to meet people who think they are women, have women’s names, and feminine clothes and lots of eyeshadow, who seem to us to be some kind of ghastly parody, though it isn’t polite to say so.”

The saga has caused a fierce debate about free speech and the practice of “no-platforming” speakers whose views might make them unpopular. Quinn said she was frustrated that the free speech issue was overshadowing what she saw as the more salient problem: Greer’s views.

Tickets for Greer’s free lecture were snapped up quickly. But Rachael Melhuish, women’s officer at the university’s students’ union, began a petition on change.org calling for the lecture to be halted, alleging that Greer had “demonstrated misogynistic views towards trans women, including continually misgendering trans women and denying the existence of transphobia altogether”.

Asked about the petition last month, Greer told the Guardian: “It strikes me as a bit of a put-up job really because I am not even going to talk about the issue that they are on about. What they are saying is that because I don’t think surgery will turn a man into a woman I should not be allowed to speak anywhere.”

She declined to give interviews before or after the lecture.

During a wide-ranging and generally very well received hour-long talk, Greer spoke about the suffragette movement, the “nightmare” of the corporate world, equal pay, systematic sexual abuse of vulnerable girls and abortion.

She paused when she spotted a microphone in the audience and demanded to know if the woman holding it was recording the lecture. The woman told her she was a helper and the microphone was to ensure that people could be heard during the question-and-answer session.

Greer explained that she had asked because she said she was being “pursued” by the Guardian over the revelation that in the 1970s she wrote a 30,000-word love letter to the writer Martin Amis.

The academic, who is objecting to the letter being published as a book, explained that she did not want its contents to be revealed because some of those mentioned in it were fathers and grandfathers. She said: “The last thing they need is a piece of Grier-ism from the 1970s.” She added: “It will all come out in the wash. I hope I’m dead by then.”



