Weldon attacks ‘frivolous’ sex changes
FAY Weldon has risked the wrath of the transgender lobby by claiming that some men change sex for frivolous reasons such as fashion and clothes.
The author, 85, suggested that many men do not treat the issue as a serious business and transition to the female sex because it is easier to be a woman in today’s society.
Miss Weldon, whose sequel to her 1983 novel The Life And Loves Of A She-Devil has just been published, added that women who change sex have a ‘really hard time’.
The author, who was interviewed on BBC2’s Newsnight on Wednesday, said she did not consider her comments to be offensive.
She said: ‘There are lots of transgender people for whom this is a really serious business, but there is also a sort of undertow of frivolous people, who for the sake of fashion or what is going on or for the clothes or whatever, want to be the other gender.
‘Most of them being men wanting to be
women – the women who want to be men have a really hard time I think, because it’s a real serious business for them. I’m not dismissing this at all.’
Asked if she accepted her comments ‘offend a lot of transgender people’, she said: ‘I’m not offending transgender people or thinking there’s anything wrong with that.’
She added that she has tackled the subject in her latest novel, The Death Of A She-Devil.
‘I’ve written a comic novel about somebody who is a frivolous person who does it frivolously. Then you have to read it to see what happens,’ she said.
‘But I am not offending transgender people or thinking there is anything wrong with changing your gender, because I don’t.’
She added that she ‘tends to see women as the oppressive force at the moment’.