The collapse of the Roman Empire, and many other societies in antiquity, is often used as a political football. A great many people, normally with little to no academic support, will ascribe the decline of past societies to a current issue in their own society. Issues like immigration, feminism, particular fiscal policies, christian conservatism, casual sex and queer people are common punching bags.

When writers do this - ascribe the collapse of a past society to their idée fixe - it is intended as a critique of contemporaries. They are saying transgender people, or feminism, or christians are bad and are somehow tangentially responsible for a catastrophe in the far past. It is an attempt to colour those they oppose with apocalyptic tones. If transgender people are somehow responsible, purely by existing, for the destruction of Western civilisation once - then surely they will be again!

What they are not doing, however, is actually reading or engaging with the scholarship, the evidence or the primary sources with any academic honesty. They are not coming to a conclusion based on evidence, they are simply trying to attack transgender people.

Paglia's statements are simply that - a polemic attack on transgender people. She actively questions the basic assumptions behind transgender identity - that someone can be a gender other than that they were assigned at birth. She even goes so far as to ascribe transgender and queer people as the reason the West is targeted by ISIS. This, conveniently, ignores the fact that ISIS was first formed to terrorise the Iraqi Shia community, in the late 1990s, and then later to oppose the American occupation of Iraq.

In other words, whatever your thoughts on transgender people, Paglia is clearly not an academic voice on the history of late antiquity or transgender people. She is starting from the assumption that transgender people are inherently invalid, and that they are presently provoking jihadism. When she raises the idea of "decadence" and prior periods of 'transgenderism' in Western history - it is to fit this narrative.

Did self-identifying transgender people specifically exist and then result, or correlate with, the decline of Roman society? In a word, no. No scholars that exist consider transgender or gender non-conforming people to be a noteworthy part of the myriad causes for the Western Roman Empire's decline. It is that simple. Paglia's polemic is just that, a polemic. It has no basis in evidence.

Scholarship on gender non-conformity in the ancient past is a complex topic, and it is questionable that we should use a term like 'transgender' to describe past people who would not have identified as such. Whilst certain people in past societies may have presented or performed gender differently to the gender binary as we understand it - this does not mean that they were outside the bounds of gender performance in their own societies or that they had the same relation to their own society as present-day transgender people. By our own standards, yes there were people in the past who might be considered transgender - but that is by our standards - by their own societal norms they almost certainly understood their gender on different terms.