Camille Paglia on the Transgender Mania

This is the first in a series of curated “Dissenter” posts. These posts present prominent dissenters’ views of American cultural flash-points.

Below is a transcription of some of author and professor Camille Paglia’s comments at an event called the Battle of Ideas.

• Paglia discusses her own “transgender rebellion” before denouncing those involved in transgender treatments on children as participating in a “a crime against humanity.”

• She describes androgyny as a feature linked throughout history to the unraveling of civilizations and as a sign that a culture no longer believes in itself.

The presenter begins, followed by Paglia’s comments.

Presenter: There is something weird, despite that about the transgender question, right?

There is something going on that's beyond the very . . . the sort of liberation of fluidity. Something else seems to have happened, where many young people in this country, right -- there's [a] percentage increase in the number registering for clinical interventions on transgender questions, has increased enormously. 

There's a certain fashion in schools of some sort, and it's a nerve wracking business. 

If you're gonna get no-platformed in this country at university (you know, Germain Greer-like, regardless of what one thinks of Germaine Greer), the point is you only have to touch on this question . . .

Iam McEwen who is completely right on liberal novelist, dared to say the slightly wrong thing and suddenly he kind of has to apologize and is kind of ridiculed and shamed. 

I don't want to get you to say anything you don't believe, but I'm interested in it because I want to be for liberation. I'm not gonna stop anyone dressing how they will. But there's something weird about lots of young women wanting young men and lots of young men wanting to be women. I don't feel as though it's a great step forward myself. Thoughts? 

Camille Paglia: Well, I say in the introduction to my new book, my new collection, my particular transgender rebellion came at a time when there wasn't . . . these ideas in the air, that the moment you are dissatisfied with the limitations of your present gender definition, that there is this enormous mechanism waiting to alter your body, to halt puberty, to slow your puberty down. 

People, all very well meaning and very sympathetic, are there to provide surgical intervention and potential permanent changes in your body with which there's no going back, okay? For me, a sex change operation opens one door but closes many others.

I personally believe that anyone who collaborates in an intrusion into a developing child's body and mind is guilty of child abuse, a crime against humanity, because that child is not prepared to make such a decision. I think that such decisions about sex reassignment surgery must wait until one attains a majority which would be a minimum of age 18. 

I'm very concerned with this because I think that it's become a fashion, okay? That the transgender definition has become a kind of convenient label for young people who may simply feel alienated, okay, culturally, for many other reasons.

So that in the 1950s they might have become a beatnik, in the 1960s they might have become a hippie and taken mind-expanding drugs. 

And so today you're encouraged to think that your alienation is because you are not totally identifying with your particular inherited gender definition. So I'm very concerned about this.

“I think that a lot of it . . . has to do with the assault on masculinity.”

I think that a lot of it I think that the collaboration of the bureaucratic machinery with it has to do with the assault on masculinity. Okay? 

‘Ah, you see, gender doesn't really exist. It's not really polarity.’

Everything is all about expanding women's rights but also terminating men and defining men out of existence. ‘Masculinity is, by definition, toxic. Masculinity doesn't exist. You see, this is the proof of it.’

But now, I began all my studies. . . my book, Sexual Personae began as a dissertation, at Yale Graduate School, on androgyny.

I've always been fascinated, attracted to the subject of androgyny, and that's what Sexual Personae is. I explored it in history, but the more I explored it, I realized that historically, the movement toward androgyny occurs in late phases of culture, as a civilization is starting to unravel. You can find it again and again and again through history.

In the Greek art, you can see it happening all of a sudden. The sculptures of handsome, nude young men athletes that used to be very robust in the Archaic period suddenly began to seem like wet noodles toward the end. 

And the people who live in such periods, a late phase of culture, whether it's the Hellenistic era, whether it's the Roman Empire, whether it's the Mauve Decade of Oscar Wilde in the 1890s, whether it's Weimar Germany.

People who live in such times feel that they're very sophisticated. They're very cosmopolitan, okay? ‘Homosexuality, heterosexuality, so what? Anything goes.’, And so on. But from the perspective of historical distance, you can see that it's a culture that no longer believes in itself.

And then what you invariably get are people who are convinced of the power of heroic masculinity on the edges, whether they're the Vandals and the Huns or whether they're the barbarians of ISIS. You see them starting to mass on the outsides of the culture, and that's what we have right now. 

There is a tremendous and rather terrifying disconnect between the infatuation with the transgender movement in our own culture and what's going on out there.

I'm concerned. I feel it's ominous. I question whether the transgender choice is indeed genuine in every single case.

But again, what concerns me is when well meaning adults believe that they're helping people by making easier some permanent change in the body from which there is no going back. 

For example, Brown University, one of the Ivy League schools in the United States, put sex reassignment surgery on its student insurance program so that they can get a sex change in college.I thought, “Oh, my Lord. Okay, I feel that’s evil.”

Because what it does to young people today, facing an uncertain job market, what it says people who are questioning their gender while they're at Brown University, suddenly feel ‘Well, it's like economically better judgment for me to move now on this rather than to wait till I don't have a job and live in my parents' basement’

And the adult community, trying to be understanding is, I think, involved in possibly making a permanent change in someone's life that could have tragic consequences.

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