Germaine Greer, the influential Australian academic and author, is used to courting controversy — from the publication of The Female Eunuch, her 1970 feminist treatise, to posing nude in photo shoots.

But she may not have expected, in an appearance on the ABC's Q&A program last night, to have an old controversy dredged up on live television.

Last year, students at Cardiff University accused the famous feminist of sprouting hateful and marginalising views of transgender people and putting forward the "problematic" view that "post-operative transgender men are not real women".

A petition circulated calling on her to abandon a public address in Wales, something she refused to do.

On Monday night, audience member Steph D'Souza — clearly a fan of the author's influential work — confronted her about it.

"I find really confusing views you've expressed that transgender women are not real women. Why do you believe there is such a thing as a real woman? Isn't that the kind of essentialism that you and I are trying to resist and escape?

Greer's immediate response was: "This is so difficult." The 10-odd minutes of in-depth discussion that followed, about what constitutes sexual identity, seemed to bear that out.

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Greer: "I agree that when I first was thinking about what is a woman, I fell for the usual view that women were people with two Xs and men were people with an X and a Y ... and I now realise ... that this was wrong."

"But the interesting thing to me is this: That if you decide, because you're uncomfortable in the masculine system — which turns boys into men, often at great cost to themselves — if you're unhappy with that, it doesn't mean that you belong at the other end of the spectrum."

Host Tony Jones asked: What if you know you've been born the wrong sex?

"You can't know," Greer replied, to which Labor senator Lisa Singh, also on the panel, responded: "How can you say that?"

Greer: "You don't know what the other sex is like." Singh: "But to a transgender person, they know that. They feel that within their own identity."

The back-and-forth continued.

Greer later said the difficulty for her was that women were constantly being told they were "not satisfactory as women", and that the crowning of Caitlyn Jenner as Glamour Magazine's woman of the year "makes the rest of the female population of the world feel slightly wry".

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She summed up her position fairly succinctly.

"If you're a 50-year-old truck driver who's had four children with a wife and you've decided the whole time you've been a woman, I think you're probably wrong," she said.

Another panellist, Joseph Tawadros, ARIA award-winning oud virtuoso and owner of the best facial hair on the Q&A set, was forced to respond.

"As a very ugly woman I totally disagree with you," he said, fulfilling his role as the night's comedic relief.

On a serious note, he added: "Society is moving very quickly. There's still lot of people that don't understand transgender. I don't understand all the aspects of transgender people but I just have to respect that."