The feminist thinker has a fight on her hands Camille Paglia has joined the ever-growing list of women in the metaphorical stocks being pelted with accusations of transphobia. A number of blue-fringed students at her university are demanding she be fired for her statements criticizing some women who bring charges of sexual assault, and because of her comments about transgender people. ‘I am highly skeptical about the current transgender wave, which I think has been produced by far more complicated psychological and sociological factors than current gender discourse allows’, she said in 2017.
Why are they bringing this up now, you may ask? Why ever not? I am still hounded and bullied by the cabal for a comment piece I wrote in 2004. The trans extremists never forget, and, as sporting legend Martina Navratilova recently discovered they certainly do not forgive.
If someone had told me five years ago that I would write a column in defense of Camille Paglia, I would have laughed. She has spent decades slating feminists like me who campaign against rape, murder and domestic violence, and she says rude things like lesbian sex is boring because of the absence of a penis.
Had Paglia restricted her remarks to a vilification of the #MeToo movement, say, all would be fine. There might be grumbles. But say one word outside of the agreed text about transgender people, and it’s off with your head.
In the current climate: in which the trans-Taliban appear to be able to wield such power that they can put people (almost all women in fact) in fear of losing their jobs, livelihoods and reputations, even a woman who they should adore comes under fire.
As usual, the extremists have scored an own goal. As far as trans-activists are concerned, what’s not to like about Paglia? She adores men dressing up as women, and argued in her bestseller Sex, Art and American Culture, that men who do so display strength, not weakness. Such comments ought to appease the trans-bullies, but no matter who you are, or what you have said and done throughout your life to stand up for the rights of oppressed minorities, one deviation and you are done for.
Now that the trans-cabal have attacked her, Paglia will doubtless soon join the ever-growing legion of women who did not have a jot of prejudice in their entire bodies towards transgender people, got a good kicking for not towing the woke-Stasi line, realized what a hate filled movement extreme transgenderism is, and exploded. Paglia is not the sort to be cowed and her university president, David Yager, has already shown courage by standing up for her freedom of expression.
But the trans-bullies don’t give up. They never do. Pretty much every week I am contacted by women who are in fear of their jobs because they have dared to question some of the more extreme transgender ideology.
Countless feminist academics, in the UK and elsewhere have had their jobs threatened for daring to say that ‘trans women are trans women’ as opposed to repeating the cultish mantra from Stonewall that trans women are actual women. In 2008, I became the very first individual to be no-platformed by the NUS, alongside five fascist groups, for alleged transphobia, (conference motion read, ‘Julie Bindle (sic) is vile)’. I have seen how universities have caved in to demands from the wokeing-class heroes calling for the culling of any woman that has the audacity to name a penis as a male body part.
To the trans-Taliban I say this: carry on exactly as you are, and soon you will turn everyone against you. What you have long claimed to be the case – that you are universally vilified – will become a self-fulfilling prophecy.