The Provocations of Camille Paglia
Paglia is one of those conservatives who is incredibly transphobic and hides it behind the facade of being a “provocateur.” She has defended the completely absurd belief (in this case, proposed by Sheila Jeffries) that cross-gender hormone therapy is a conspiracy by big pharma to get trans people taking hormones for life, among other things:<p>“In it she [Jeffries] argues among other things, that the pharmaceutical industry, having lost income when routine estrogen therapy for menopausal women was abandoned because of its health risks, has been promoting the relatively new idea of transgenderism in order to create a permanent class of customers who will need to take prescribed hormones for life.”<p>From <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.washingtonexaminer.com&#x2F;weekly-standard&#x2F;camille-paglia-on-trump-democrats-transgenderism-and-islamist-terror" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.washingtonexaminer.com&#x2F;weekly-standard&#x2F;camille-p...</a><p>Bioidentical estradiol is a generic medication with many manufacturers and costs very little. There is not very much money to be made manufacturing it. More profitable would be the GnRH agonists, frequently used as the puberty blockers which she claims are so potentially dangerous. However their benefit is clear, and furthermore there is an entire field of medical research devoted to understanding the impacts of those drugs, and so far nothing in the evidence suggests blockers are significantly risky at all, let alone anywhere near as dangerous as the increased risk of suicide that trans kids have going through the wrong puberty.<p>Source for much of this: I’m a trans woman, also a pharmacology, psychiatry, and endocrinology nerd. I’m not taking hormones for life because I “need” to, I’m doing it because I want to, as is every other trans woman I know. If that changes, I can stop. It’s as simple as that.