IN A move that is sure to add false legitimacy to transphobia Germaine Greer was awarded the Iconoclast of the Year Award by The Oldie Magazine.

Greer, 76, hit the headlines in October when she met with accusations of misogyny over comments about trans women after she’d been booked to speak at Cardiff University.

Her dangerous opinions on trans women first appeared in a chapter of her 1999 book ‘The Whole Woman’ entitled ‘Pantomime Dames’ in which she denounced transgender women as "men who believe that they are women and have had themselves castrated."

In a BBC Newsnight interview last year she accused trans women of misogyny after Caitlyn Jenner was named as one of Glamour magazine’s Women of the Year.

“I think misogyny plays a really big part in all of this," Greer told the BBC, "that a man who goes to these lengths to become a woman will be a better woman than someone who is just born a woman.”

But gender dysphoria is not something that we choose, it is an intrinsic part of our very souls and to deny it led me and many other trans women to a lifetime battling self harm and suicidal feelings.

As well as being deeply hurtful and dismissive of transgender people’s very real pain Greer’s bigotry attempts to lend a factual sheen to transphobia and this award is an obscene validation of dangerous hate speech disguised as intellectual thought.

The thought of the feminist Greer andJeremy Clarkson uniting against a shared enemy is truly bizarre.

Where once her views were at the vanguard of feminist thought she increasingly looks as out of touch with the times as the sexists, homophobes and racists of the 60s and 70s.

  • Sophie Cook is a photographer and is the first transgender woman to work in the Premier League.