Camille Paglia: historically, transgender movements occur as "civilization is starting to unravel"

The more I explored it I realized that, historically, the movement towards androgyny occurs in late phases of culture.  As a civilization is starting to unravel...  The people who live in such periods, whether it's the Hellenistic era, whether it's the Roman empire, it's the Mauve Decade of Oscar Wilde in the 1890s, whether it's Weimar Germany.  People who live in such times feel that they're very sophisticated, they're very cosmopolitan.  Homosexuality, heterosexuality, so what, anything goes and so on.  But from the perspective of historical distance you can see that it's a culture that no longer believes in itself.  And then what you invariably get are people who are convinced of the power of heroic masculinity on the edges, whether they the Vandals and the Huns, or whether they're the barbarians of ISIS.  You see them starting to mass on the outsides of the culture, and that's what we have right now.

~ Camille Paglia, video: "Lesson From History: Transgender Mania is Sign of Cultural Collapse" (4:16 mark), December 29, 2016