One skeptic is Camille Paglia, the formidable cultural critic and dissident feminist. “Transgenderism has taken off like a freight train and has become nearly impossible to discuss with the analytic neutrality that honest and ethical scholarship requires,” she said in an interview with FeministTimes. “I am concerned about the current climate, inflamed by half-baked postmodernist gender theory, which convinces young people who may have other unresolved personal or family issues that sex-reassignment surgery is a golden road to happiness and true identity.”
You’ve got to be brave to say that these days. Today, anyone who dares to question the march of transgender rights is labelled as transphobic.
Try going on Tumblr and expressing that kind of opinion. You'll be barraged with BigotHaas.
But here's the really important point:
But today, people demand affirmation for their “personal truth,” no matter how distorted that truth might be. Transgenderism is not so much the “next civil rights frontier,” as Time magazine declared it, as a way for intimidated liberals to declare their bona fides. Enough is enough. And for God’s sake, leave the kids alone.
We've so sold out to subjectivism, we so lack objective standards of knowledge, that we (as a society) lack the means to question personal narratives.
Personal narratives sold feminism and gay rights. It was to be unquestioned. If you questioned, you were a hater. They couldn't be wrong, lying or confused. People weave narratives and thoughts about themselves that aren't necessarily true.
But we've waded so deeply into subjectivism and philosophical relativism, that we don't know how to question, nor do we think we have the right to question. That would be imposing our own values.
