Camille Paglia's rant
IN PRINT / Author chides transgender rights movement, pop culture and even Lady Gaga
Aidan Johnson / National / Wednesday, November 21, 2012
http://www.xtra.ca/public/National/Camille_Paglias_rant-12829.aspx She cites the modern transgender rights movement as an example of reactionary queer thinking.
"I identify strongly with drag queens and transsexuals, particularly as they were in the '60s. They were fierce and powerful. They were street warriors," she says. "Some might have had bits and pieces of [sex-change] surgery. But the focus now is on 'transgender,' which has gotten rigidly ideological."
Paglia recalls speaking at a gender issues debate at Yale University earlier this year. Many members of Yale's transgender student group attended. They struck her as uninterested in the history of gender expression in art and culture and "fixated on angry slogans."
"The movement has denied them a true education. It pains me, because I've struggled with gender identity my entire life." (Paglia has written that she might have been a female-to-male transsexual had the option existed in her 1950s youth but that she is now comfortable with her "permanently ambiguous sexual identity.")
"My point is that the transgender movement's focus on manipulating the physical, through surgery, is too often a way of avoiding introspection. We have an obligation as human beings to engage in self-examination – to seek self-understanding, apart from the social and the physical.
