Feminist: Transgenders 'Start Off as Ken, Then They Want to Become Barbie'

By Mairead McArdle | December 7, 2015 | 12:33pm EST
Feminist author Germaine Greer. (AP File photo)

Feminist author Germaine Greer is skeptical of transgenders who change their sex from male to female.

"They started off as Ken, and then they want to become Barbie," she told the Update.

Greer said she isn't convinced by transgenders who marry as men but "believe they've been women all along."

"I'm sorry," she said. "You can hold a knife to my throat. I don't believe you."

“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,” Greer, author of The Female Eunuch, wrote in a 2009 oped for The Guardian.

The Australian-born feminist expressed sympathy and sadness for the wives of the transitioned men whose marriages are then annulled.

"The wife is dumped and the children are bastardized and that's the law. I can't get over that," she said, pointing out that these women, who married "in complete innocence”, are often left without means to provide for themselves and their children.

Greer said she has received letters from such women describing their plight.

She noted that the United Kingdom’s Gender Recognition Act of 2004 currently provides a fast track to annulling a marriage if one party wants recognition of his or her new acquired gender.


Greer mentioned “intersexphobia,” the discrimination against people with biological sex traits that are not typically male or female, saying that it is unethical to operate on children whose genitalia is ambiguous.

"To operate on them is completely unethical, because they then have to deal with the sequelae of that operation, which they never had a chance to choose," she said.

"If you're talking transphobia, in my mind, that's it. That's it right there. Intsersexphobia."

Related: Feminist Germaine Greer: 'I Don't Think Post-Operative Transgender Men...Are Women'

Related: 'The Concept of Motherhood is Emptied Out... It's Gone'

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