Feminist writer mocked for her bizarre definition of 'woman' on Piers Morgan's show
Controversial Australian feminist writer Clementine Ford has found herself mired in another culture war, this time over her definition of what it means to be a woman.
Asked 'what is a woman?', by TV host Piers Morgan, Ford at first refused to offer an answer.
'Piers, I'm not going down the path of debating trans women with you,' she said.
'Trans women are women,' she added, before Morgan clarified: 'I didn't mention trans women, I asked you what a woman is.'
Eventually, Ford trotted out a uniquely open-ended definition when she claimed: 'A woman is someone who has at least at one point in her life felt scared of a man.'
Ford's answer left Morgan's debate panel stunned.
'Sorry?' a bemused Morgan eventually said.
'But you guys never want to talk about that,' Ford continued before another panellist Andrew Wilson took to the offensive and said: 'That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard'.
'So any man who's ever felt afraid of another man is a woman? What are you talking about?'
Ford, a former columnist for the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, clarified she had been misunderstood. 'That's not what I'm saying', she said.
Ford soon fired back when she asked Morgan why he was 'so obsessed with this definition of what a woman is'.
Morgan said: 'I have a 13-year-old daughter, I have seven nieces... and some of them are very good at sport... the idea that they would one day have their dream of potentially an Olympic place or a team [Great Britain] place or whatever it may be... taken from them by a biological male, I think is completely outrageous.'
'And by the way, so does most of the world now which is why there has been a reversing, screeching U-turn on this particular subject,' he said.
'But I come back to my question to you, your inability to say what a woman is and yet here you are lecturing women on how they should behave as women is completely perverse.'
'I think that reducing women specifically to your biological decider of what you think women is,' Ford said
Morgan then raised the issue of chromosomal difference, to which Ford replied: 'I'm sure I'm not the first person to tell you about intersex people.'
Before she could finish her question, Wilson claimed intersex people - individuals whose sexual characteristics do not fit the typical male-female markers - do not comprise a third sex.
'I didn't say intersex was a third sex but intersex people exist and intersex people can have a mixture of chromosomes,' Ford said.
It was not long before the conversation turned to Ford's controversial social media posts, including one since-disavowed tweet from 2020 in which she wrote Covid-19 was 'not killing men fast enough'.
Ford described the tweet as 'misguided' and claimed she had since apologised for it.
Prompted by Morgan, Ford then admitted to having previously tweeted: 'All men must die'. She claimed it had been written 'as a joke'.
'I've also said that men should be fired into the sun,' she said before she repeated she had apologised for the 'glib' remarks she would 'never say again now'.
Ford previously challenged Morgan's repeated use of the incendiary 'what is a woman' question in a 2023 blog post titled: 'What Is A Woman? The Insidious Misoginy of Piers Morgan'.
'Like all of the bigots currently jumping on the transphobic shuttle to Ding Dong station, Morgan wants you to believe this is about fairness and equality,' she wrote.
'Specifically, fairness and equality in women's sports. You know, that highly regarded field of 'women's sports' that conservatives have traditionally always championed, and have certainly never, ever suggested shouldn't receive equal pay because 'women's sport is boring and they're not as good as the men".'
In the blog post, Ford hinted at the answer she went on to deliver on Saturday when she said: 'Preview: my answer has nothing to do with biology or bodies, but DOES force them to address the danger ALL women face at the hands of men.'
Ford rose to prominence with the publication of her 2016 book 'Fight Like a Girl' published by Allen & Unwin.
Following the publication of her second book: 'Boys Will Be Boys: Power, Patriarchy and Toxic Masculinity' in 2018, she resigned from the Australian mastheads claiming she had faced internal backlash after calling then Prime Minister Scott Morrison a 'f***-ing disgrace'.
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