Comments: Author Ian McEwan said there was a sense of 'victimhood' regarding transgender issues

Acclaimed author Ian McEwan has waded into the transgender row after warning of a 'troubling wave' of political correctness.

McEwan, 67, was speaking at a student society lecture at the Royal Institution in London, when he was invited to ponder on how the notion of self has evolved throughout history.

The writer of Atonement, and winner of the Man Booker prize for Amsterdam, upset some when he said that a person's identity was constrained by biology and social norms.

However, he claimed that now people are treating the idea of identity like a commodity.

He said: 'The self, like a consumer desirable, may be plucked from the shelves of a personal identity supermarket, a ready-to-wear little black number.'

McEwan is not the first high profile personality to offer controversial views on transgenderism.

Feminist Germaine Greer and writer Julie Bindel have also caused upset in the last 18 months.

Greer in particular said: 'I don't believe a woman is a man without a c***.'

Arguably the issue of body or gender dysmorphia was thrust into the spotlight when former US Olympian and star of Keeping Up with the Kardashians, Bruce Jenner, revealed that he had undergone sex reassignment surgery.

The former Olympic gold medal-winning decathlete was featured on the front page of Vanity Fair after his transformation and has spoken numerous times on the issue since, with many supporting her courage and style.

McEwan said that the identity crisis people with gender dysmorphia suffer is a 'bitter conflict' but warned that there was a sense of 'victimhood' sweeping through American universities and, to a lesser extent, on British campuses.

His speech was said to be well received by the audience, however one woman said his comments were 'offensive' and asked him to be more specific, reports the Times.

Views: Germaine Greer has courted controversy with her comments on transgender issues and Caitlyn Jenner arguably pushed the issue into the spotlight after undergoing her transformation from Bruce

He replied: 'Call me old-fashioned, but I tend to think of people with penises as men.

'But I know they enter a difficult world when they become transsexuals and they tell us they are women, they become women, but it's interesting when you hear the conflict between feminists now and people in this group.'

Not all have been impressed with McEwan's comments, Stonewall, the gay and transgender rights charity, has urged the writer to apologise for a speech it calls 'hurtful and dangerous'.

While human rights activist Peter Tatchell, said the author should not comment on how people wish to determine their gender.

However, he did say that the 'holier-than-thou rivalry' at universities was unhelpful.

He said: 'There seems to be a league table of oppression, where some people fight other people to claim the title of most oppressed.'

Following the publication of a number of articles that reported Mr McEwan's comments, he made the following statement:

'I'm surprised that a couple of sentences of mine during a short q&a session at the end of my lecture should have caused a stir. My subject was the literary representation of the self in the work of Montaigne, Shakespeare, Pepys, Boswell and others.

In response to a question, I proposed that the possession of a penis or, more fundamentally, the inheritance of the xy chromosome, is inalienably connected to maleness. As a statement, this seems to me biologically unexceptional. However, biology is not always destiny.

That the transgender community should want or need to abandon their birth gender or radically redefine it is their right, which should be respected and celebrated. It adds to the richness and diversity of life. It's an extension of freedom and the possibilities of selfhood.

Everyone should deplore the discrimination that transgender communities have suffered around the world. That the community should sometimes find itself in conflict with feminists (over changing rooms, trans beauty pageants, access to women's colleges) - well, that's a conversation on which I can shed no useful light.

As for 'victimhood', my remarks concerned the charged atmosphere at many US campuses, where students are seeking 'safe spaces', 'trigger warnings' and the 'no-platforming' of speakers with views contrary to their own.