Author and social critic Camille Paglia. (latercera.com)

Liberal Camille Paglia, an academic, best selling author, and public intellectual, said there are "a lot of lies being propagated" about the transgender issue, with "wildly inflated claims" about gender and the false idea that sex-reassignment surgery can change someone's sex. It cannot, said Paglia, who added that people who encourage transgenderism in children are committing "child abuse."

“I think that the transgender propagandists make wildly inflated claims about the multiplicity of gender," said Paglia during an interview on Roda Viva Internacional.

"In sex-reassignment surgery, even today, with all of its advances, cannot, in fact, change anyone’s sex," she said. "You can define yourself as a trans man or a trans woman or 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," she said, "which I think is not in anyone’s best interests."

Paglia then remarked that encouraging gender fluidity or transgenderism in children is abusive, adding that people need to grow and develop before possibly making drastic, life-changing decisions about gender.

“What I’m concerned about is the popularity and the availability of sex-reassignment surgery to someone who doesn’t feel that he or she belongs to the biological birth gender, and people are being encouraged to intervene in the process," said Paglia.

"Parents are now encouraged to subject the child to procedures that I think are a form of child abuse, either with hormones to slow puberty, actual surgical manipulations, etcetera," she said.

"I think this is wrong, that people should wait until an informed age of consent," said Paglia, author of the best seller Sexual Personae. "Parents should not be doing this to their children."

She continued, “I think that even in the teenage years is too soon to be making this leap. People change, people grow, and people adapt.”

Paglia, 70, is a professor at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. She is the author of seven books. She frequently comments on current affairs and lectures in myriad venues in the United States and abroad.