Yikes.

The Life & Loves of a She-Devil author Fay Weldon has really put her foot in it this time.

The 85-year-old was being interviewed by BBC Newsnight when she said that she believed some transgender people wanted to be female because it’s easier to be a woman in modern society.

“There are lots of sort 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 the clothes or whatever want to be the other gender,” she said.

“I’m not offending transgender people or thinking there’s anything wrong with that,” she added.

“The women who want to be men have a really hard time for them I think”.

Weldon deals with the subject in her new book, Death of a She Devil in which one character is trans.

Weldon told The Guardian she felt compelled to write the novel when “Germaine [Greer] got into trouble, as everyone does these days, for saying that just to get one’s genitals chopped off doesn’t make you a woman”.

In one section she writes: “Man now controls the best weapon woman ever had – the body he so envied, its very moods and subtleties. He can become her.”

Weldon, who has identified as a feminist, also took aim at the direction of the women’s movement, which she said had not lived up to her expectations.

Fay Weldon says trans people become women ‘for the fashion or the clothes’

”I don’t see men as the enemy any more. I tend to see women as rather the oppressive force”, she said.

In one section she writes: “Man now controls the best weapon woman ever had – the body he so envied, its very moods and subtleties…he can become her.”

Fay is the author of more than 40 novels, none of which you should ever read.

#BoycottTransphobia

(via The Telegraph)