Camille Paglia: Using Puberty Blockers on Children ‘Is a Crime Against Humanity’

NEW YORK, NY - APRIL 18: Andy Cohen and Camille Paglia attend TimesTalks Presents Camille
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Using puberty-blocking drugs on pre-pubescent children in order to stultify their sexual development “is a crime against humanity,” said Camille Paglia, professor of humanities and media studies at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. She offered her remarks on Tuesday’s edition of Dennis Prager’s eponymous radio show while discussing her latest book, Provocations: Collected Essays on Art, Feminism, Politics, Sex, and Education.

Paglia highlighted left-wing denial of the biological origins of sex, including left-wing framing of sex as an arbitrary and subjective social construct. “These ideas aren’t based on any actual study of biology,” she said.

Paglia noted much of the news media’s ambivalence towards the aforementioned experimentation on children:

I think that experiments of unproven drugs — drug protocols — on children is a crime against humanity, and it should not be tolerated. It amazes me there is hardly any media attention to this matter. I think the future will look back with surprise and shock at the ethical indifference of the major media right now in the United States to this going on. It is simply not right. These drugs have not been fully tested, and we’re using children as experiments? Boys forever are going to have, in adulthood, a child’s size penis? I cannot believe that this is happening without protest.

“Don’t imagine that the child knows his or her future identity at age three, or ten, for that matter,” added Paglia. “Flash-freezing a child’s development through the introduction of drugs — pre-puberty, on and so on — seems to me, should be recognizably, not just wrong, but horrific.”

LISTEN:

Paglia reflected on her own gender dysphoria, speculating on how her maturation may have unfolded differently had she been exposed to ubiquitous contemporary left-wing characterizations of sex as a purely social construct:

If all of this was in the air when I was young, I would have become absolutely convinced that I was really a man, and I think I would have probably been vulnerable to that fantasy until my mid-twenties, probably. And completing my massive 700-page book Sexual Personae, in a sense, exorcised that. … Right from the start, in 1990, I was describing that book as a transgender construction. It’s a voice. It’s an other self. I’ve never felt female, but I don’t feel male, either. … I would have been obsessed.

“I feel that — and I’ve said this publicly — prescribing puberty blockers to children is a violation of human rights,” determined Paglia.

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