Transgender Caitlyn Jenner accepts ESPY's Arthur Ashe Award for Courage on July 15, 2015 in Los Angeles. (AP photo)

(CNSNews.com)--Best-selling feminist author, social critic and self-described "transgender being" Camille Paglia said in an interview last month that the rise of transgenderism in the West is a symptom of decadence and cultural collapse.

“Nothing... better defines the decadence of the West to the jihadists than our toleration of open homosexuality and this transgender mania now,” Paglia said during an October 22 interview on the Brazilian television program Roda Viva.

Paglia also said during the interview that “transgender propagandists” are overstating their case.

“I think that the transgender propagandists make wildly inflated claims about the multiplicity of gender,” she said.

“Sex reassignment surgery, even today with all of its advances, cannot in fact change anyone’s sex, okay. You can define yourself as a trans man, or a trans woman, as one of these new gradations along the scale. But ultimately, every single cell in the human body, the DNA in that cell, remains coded for your biological birth.

“So there are a lot of lies being propagated at the present moment, which I think is not in anyone’s best interest.

"Now what I’m concerned about is the popularity and the availability of sex reassignment surgery, so that someone who doesn’t feel that he or she belongs to the biological birth, gender. People are being encouraged to intervene in the process.

"Parents are now encouraged to subject the child to procedures that I think are a form of child abuse. The hormones to slow puberty, actual surgical manipulations, etcetera. I think that this is wrong, that people should wait until they are of an informed age of consent.

“Parents should not be doing this to their children and I think that even in the teenage years is too soon to be making this leap. People change, people grow, and people adapt."

Paglia went on to talk about her book Sexual Personae and how the emergence of transgenderism signifies the end of Western culture. “Now I am concerned about this… In fact, my study of history in Sexual Personae, I’m always talking about the late phases of culture.

“I was always drawn to late or decadent phases of culture. Oscar Wilde is one of the great exponents of that in the late 19th century. He’s one of my strongest influences from my earliest years.

"And I found in my study that history is cyclic, and everywhere in the world you find this pattern in ancient times: that as a culture begins to decline, you have an efflorescence of transgender phenomena.That is a symptom of cultural collapse.

"So rather than people singing the praises of humanitarian liberalism that allows all of these transgender possibilities to appear and to be encouraged, I would be concerned about how Western culture is defining itself to the world.

"Because in fact these phenomena are inflaming the irrational, indeed borderline psychotic opponents of Western culture in the form of ISIS and other jihadists, etcetera," Paglia said.

"Nothing... better defines the deadence of the West to the jihadists than our toleration of open homosexuality and this transgender mania now."