Camille Paglia: 'Gender reassignment surgery... has become a fashion!'

On 22 October 2016, Lesbian intellectual and social critic, Professor Camille Paglia, said this at the 'Battle of Ideas' conference:

"Gender reassignment surgery... it's become a fashion... The transgender definition has become a kind of convenient label for young people who may simply feel alienated culturally... So, today you're encouraged to feel that your alienation is because... you're not totally identifying with your particular inherited gender definition...

I think that a lot of it... the collaboration of the bureaucratic machinery with it, has to do with THE ASSAULT ON MASCULINITY... 'Gender doesn't really exist'... Everything's always about expanding women's rights but also terminating men's and defining men out of existence. 'Masculinity is, by definition toxic.'

I've always been fascinated and attracted to the subject of androgeny... exploring history, but the more I explored it, the more I realised that, historically, the movement towards androgeny occurs in late stages of culture, as a civilisation is starting to unravel. You find it again and again and again in history.

People who live in such periods... the Hellenistic period... Weimar Germany... people who live in such times feel that they are very sophisticated, they're very cosmopolitan, and homosexuality, heterosexuality, so what, anything goes and so on. But, from the perspective of historical distance, you can see it's a culture that no longer believes in itself and then what you, invariably, get are people who convinced of the power of heroic masculinity on the edges, whether they are the Vandals and the Huns, or whether they are the barbarians of ISIS. You see them starting to mass on the outside of the culture. And that's what we have right now.

So 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 genuine in every single case...

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 elite Ivy League schools in the United States, put sex-reassignment surgery on its insurance programme so that they can get a sex change in college...

I feel that's evil."

If I've said it once, I've said it a thousand times: it's not just us telling it as it is nowadays, is it?

Anyway, for all you special snowflakes out there, snuggled up in your safe, antiseptic places, never in a million years will you listen to me but I guess your programming won't allow you to ignore a lesbian and liberal icon of this stature.

And that is a very good thing indeed.

On this occasion, Camille Paglia was the teller of a common sense tale that the snowflake maker would rather she had kept to herself.

For this, Camille, we thank you.