Tea at Trianon: Camille Paglia on Gender Dysfunction

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Wednesday, September 13, 2017

Camille Paglia on Gender Dysfunction

From LifeSite:

Paglia says her feminism is the result of her "childhood experience as a fractious rebel against the suffocating conformism of the 1950s." She said that universities and the mainstream media are the new centers of conformism that are "patrolled by well-meaning but ruthless thought police." Paglia said in the video that she is concerned by the "popularity" and "availability" of sex reassignment surgeries.

"Parents are now encouraged to subject the child to procedures that I think are a form of child abuse," she said. These include "hormones to slow puberty" and "actual surgical manipulations" of children and teenagers.

"I think that this is wrong," she said. "People should wait until they're of an informed age of consent. Parents should not be doing this to their children. And I think that even in the teenage years it's too soon to be making this leap. People change, people grow, and people adapt."

Paglia said she suffered "gender dysfunction" as a child, dressing in men's clothing "as often as I could."

"But I still believe that there are fundamentally two sexes that are biologically determined," said Paglia. She wrote her dissertation on androgyny.

Reproductive biology is clear that there are only two sexes, Paglia said, and only a "very small," "minute" number of people are born with genetic abnormalities that make their "gender...ambiguous." It seems she is referring to hermaphrodites.