Maybe We're Born With It. Maybe It's Make-Believe.
In an age of constructs, how can we tell what is human nature and what is performativity?
Just passing along a message from my landlord: Please consider subscribing — it’s free for the foreseeable future — or better yet upgrading to a paid subscription. Thanks!
THE FEMINIST FRENCH KITTEN
This must’ve been around 1991. Dad and I were sharing a checkered cab with crippled shock absorbers barreling down Second Avenue with regular denture-breaking judders induced by a warzone’s worth of cratered asphaltic concrete.
“One Dag Hammerskjöld Plaza, please — 48th and Second,” Dad said the instant after his ass had hit the backseat and he’d shut the door in one fluid motion, precisely the moment — not a nanosecond before or after — in unwritten New York protocol when you blurted your destination clearly and without hesitation, without receiving any acknowledgment from the driver beyond the meter being switched on.
Pre-GPS you were allowed to add a preferred route if you had privileged knowledge of traffic conditions; otherwise, it wasn’t worth triggering a road-rage-weary cabbie into thinking, “DO I TELL YOU HOW TO DO YOUR JOB, MISTER?” Yes, in all caps.
“You’re going to the U.N.?” I asked once my inner eye skimmed the grid faster than The Flash streaking through Google Street View and located where that was. If that was his destination, it would’ve been strange: To say that Dad, like most establishment New York Republicans, was ambivalent about the U.N. — despite Mum having been secretary to the Chinese ambassador before they married — is like saying Ann Coulter has mixed feelings about illegal immigrants. The sentiment comes from the same mindset.
“SSC&B. It’s their headquarters.” I didn’t know that; I assumed all major ad agencies were on Madison. “I’m consulting on a major brand and marketing overhaul for a cosmetics company.”
I assumed that meant one of two, Revlon or Estée Lauder, which is immediately narrowed down to one choice for a Republican apparatchik like Dad — Ron Lauder was a friend of his.
“Lauder?”
“Nope.”
“Oh. Err — Revlon?” I knew Ronald Perelman socially. No way Dad was consulting for him.
“Maybelline.”
“Hmm.” Maybelline was such a basic supermarket product that it might as well have been a Proctor & Gamble detergent.
That particular tone of “Hmm” really meant “ho-hum” coming from me. Dad said, “The new campaign is probably the most remarkable I’ve ever worked on. It’s very exciting.”
“Yeah? What’s the theme?
“I can’t tell you.”
“Oh, come on! Like I’m going to splatter it all over Page Six.”
“Nope.”
“Dad, nobody cares about fucking Maybelline’s new ad campaign! Just tell me.”
“All I can say is the strap is… remarkable. Focus groups have been through the roof.”
“Okay, well now you really have to tell me.” But I knew that even if I got out the duct tape, rope, pliers and the gnarliest, rusted old-school dental equipment from the prop master of Marathon Man, I’d never pry it out of a former Cold War spy, who was only “former” as in “former Soviet Union” — he was still in the game as much as Russia still existed as a country.
He’d rather bite down on the proverbial cyanide capsule embedded in a molar than reveal any secret, no matter how anodyne. Now that I replay the scene, the old goat was torturing his creative-professional son by withholding great professional creative.
A few months later, SSC&B rolled out “Maybe she’s born with it. Maybe it’s Maybelline.” It catapulted the brand from number two to number one worldwide and is considered by CBS Outdoor as the most recognizable strapline in the past 150 years.
Twelve years later, I was backstage before a Dior Couture show in Paris with a young German I was dating, watching superstar makeup artist Pat McGrath putting the finishing touches on models. Across the room, Alexander McQueen’s patron and muse Isabella Blow was perched on a high stool getting her lippy touched up by one of McGrath’s disciples.
I’d known Issie for about twenty years at that point, but I’d dropped out of her swim after she got weird on me in ‘87 and backed out of curating a freelance column for a magazine I was editing. I was fine with anyone not wanting to contribute or collaborate, except rather than beg off on a phone call, Issie summoned me to Natasha Fraser’s apartment for a full-on meeting, which I assumed meant she wanted to discuss the details and was excited to do it.
It was the opposite: Issie herself wouldn’t speak to me but sat on the opposite end of a shabby sofa while Natasha spoke for her.
I’m not sure I would’ve been more understanding had I known she was bipolar. Issie Delves Broughton, as she was still known then, was one of the most irreverently witty people I’d ever met. All the way to Natasha’s I’d envisioned giddily eccentric feature stories that I’d collaborate on and truly shake up the stodgy American supermarket-magazine world, the kind that are overly commonplace now. Now I felt like a two-week-old, half-chewed rotting fish being condescended to and nanny-castigated by another English aristocrat for daring to offer Issie work, while Issie bobbed her head in agreement and added pips of punctuation.
That was my final breakup with the English upper class. From then on they were all guilty of being supercilious flakes and untrustworthy until proven otherwise. They’ve never proven otherwise.
Backstage at Dior watching Issie having her lips lacquered red, I related an anecdote to the German lover: “My childhood friend Saskia and her fiancé Philippe threw a party at their apartment in '84 or '85. Issie came with her first husband Nick even though they’d divorced the year before. Late into the night, Saskia nudged my attention to watch Issie in the reflection of a wall of smokey mirrors in the bedroom that we could see from the living room.
“Nick was sprawled on the bed, big lusty smile. Issie approaches, hikes up her skirt above garters clasping fishnets, and straddles him. And Saskia says, ‘Face like a horse, but a body for days.’”
Being German, my companion barely registered amusement. instead, he casually tossed out: “Every woman has a second face — makeup.”
That line resonates evermore with me these days, as a response of sorts to arguably the single most destructive line in history, the opening sentence of French novelist and social theorist Simone de Beavoir’s The Second Sex, “One is not born, rather one becomes, a woman.”
As I’ve lamented in other essays, it was warped by critical theorist Judith! Butler — her early devotees at Harvard added an exclamation point; it’s too apropos of the hysterical lunacy she’s loosened on the Western world not to use it — and her fellow unhappy Furies into “Women are made, not born,” then expanded to create the radical gender-queer mess in which we find ourselves, which appears to have split the LGBT community apart, perhaps for good, in both senses: forever and for our betterment.
Not only is the nuance of the line lost in translation, it’s taken out of context with the rest of the book. Most Anglosphere postmodernist philosophers appear not to speak French and lack an understanding of the sensuality of the culture; in my experience, they’re cowed by its permissiveness and distinct rejection of Puritanical values that America has continued to impose on Mama Brittania and our cultural cousins in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, all of whom are suffering as a result.
Here’s the best way I can think of to describe the true spirit of what de Beauvoir intended:
Picture a woman with an unconventionally attractive, jolie-laide face, like Charlotte Gainsbourg, and a body for days like Issie’s. As a party enters the wee boozy-druggy hours, she breaks away from making small talk with 26-year-old Rupert Everett and idly saunters into a bedroom. Her gentleman-stud husband is lying on the bed, legs apart, eyes riveted on her, anticipation swelling the fine fabric of his trousers.
We watch in the mirror as she straddles him, hoisting her snug silk dress above the garters clasping her fishnets. She’s in control; he has no power.
Over the dissolving reflection,
NARRATOR (V.O.): “One is not born, rather one becomes, a woman.”
As the woman morphs into an equally curvy bottle of perfume,
FRENCH KITTEN (V.O.): “Second Sex. The new fragrance by Simone de Beauvoir.”
(Yes, Rupert was there — I just remembered that detail. Another Country was out in cinemas and he was the most desirable young man in the world. I totally blew it by getting drunk, then a tab or two of E and… loved-up Dutch courage and… *shudder*... hey, I was just a kid.)
In other words, what de Beauvoir intended was the complete opposite of how the ol’ lesbian matriarchy of critical theory has chosen to interpret it in order to ride roughshod over the West, whipping up the insanity raging out there, which has elicited an equal and opposite reaction from Republicans. But that’s more fine by them, a success in fact: What really motivates activists is keeping those outrage dollars flowing, in the name of protecting “at-risk teens in the Midwest,” who are now in more danger than they were when I was an out teen in high school in the 70s. I believe it’s only going to get worse heading into the 2024 elections.
Regardless of the translation, the rest of The Second Sex should make clear that de Beauvoir had no intention of that fateful line being extrapolated to justify anything remotely resembling constructs like 37 Baskin-Robbins flavors of gender. She was actually supporting the notion of a binary reality between the two — and only two — sexes. Here’s a quick summary pulled at random from the internet:
“The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir is a plea for equality in a society that no longer relies on the muscle dominance of men. The book argues that women are not inferior to men, but rather just different. While males excel in some areas of life, women do so in others.
De Beauvoir’s worldview is somewhat narrow, to put it politely. Her perspective strikes me as a French version of America’s World Series Syndrome, my label for the assumption that the rest of the world thinks like America and shares our Anglo-based values, culture, social structures, and demographics.
There are plenty of American subcultures that point to a long history of women’s parity with men. Quakers and Shakers are so strict about equality that it’s part of their religious doctrine; there are less than a handful of Shakers left, but two of them, a man and a woman, share authority over the community.
Anyone who has spent time in the agrarian heartland — which was seventy-five percent of America prior to the turn of the 20th century — knows there are few of the putatively oppressive gender roles that de Beauvoir saw all around her in Midcentury Paris. It’s simply impractical on a farm.
Contemporary feminists agree that by and large the struggle to force women into a culture where they can be mothers and hold down a man’s job in the corporate and professional world hasn’t been as successful as they’d hoped. Why they would want to work within the martinet conformity and freedom-depriving structures and systems of the corporate world is beyond someone like me, for whom that’s a type of hell.
Still, women’s roles have changed more than enough; at least women have the choice of the gamut of professions on top of those that they had prior to the last great social revolution in the 60s. As of 2019, 52% of management and professional jobs were held by women, and climbing at a steady rate. Women-owned businesses are also thriving. There is no shame in any of that.
“A true freak cannot be made. A true freak must be born.”
— Katherine Dunn, ‘Geek Love’
A SPECTRUM IS BINARY
I’ve tried on many different personas throughout my life, more than most people. A common observation from my oldest friends: “I don’t know anyone who changes himself so completely, over and over.” It’s not just my appearance — that’s more trend — it’s my way of thinking, even my accent. I attribute it to being raised as an outsider in my own family in a foreign country, and then living and working for much of my adult life abroad.
For the first five years of my life, I probably had a standard American accent. When we moved to Rome and I enrolled in the British school, it switched to Mid-Atlantic, weighted on the side of RP English.
I remember an unusual act of defiance one night with Dad when I was seven or eight — it wasn’t wise to provoke him needlessly; just being myself was provocation enough — and we were saying bedtime prayers. I’d had enough of how he pronounced the Lord’s name and interrupted the prayer.
“It’s God, Daddy. With an O, not an A.”
“Gaad.”
“No, Daddy: God.”
He didn’t change his pronunciation for me, not one bit, but the incident amused rather than irritated him. I could never tell how he’d react to anything I said or did.
I became a consummate mimic of regional accents in the three languages I spoke, a habit I’ve had to retire in the current climate of microaggressions, implied biases, and oppressive White privilege. Now and then I do impersonations of people in my life for my therapist.
Mum’s first morning in India during the first years I lived there — most international flights arrived late at night — she said over breakfast, “Would you please stop swaying your head like that? You’re making me seasick.” I just wanted to be Indian; they were — still are — the coolest people on the planet, ask any swami’s Western disciples.
It got to the point when the only White man I saw for months on end was my reflection in the mirror. I remember distinctly waking up after an epic bender, staggering into the hotel bathroom and, still half asleep and halfway sober, being genuinely surprised and crushed that I didn’t have brown skin and those beautiful Brahman bull eyes.
I’m among many adult gays and lesbians who are perversely grateful that they aren’t kids today. “I would be in gender affirmation and put on puberty blockers,” is a common sentiment among the silent majority as we watch the communal narcissism of feral young gender-queer activists shred the goodwill we clawed our way to over the centuries.
I’m constantly reminded of a photograph of me at preschool, almost four years old, placing a tiara on my head that I’d fished out of the costume box. Great picture. Sadly, I tore up when I was a teenager — Dad put it in a frame and set it on a shelf outside my room to taunt me.
I doubt my parents would’ve given in to sending me for gender affirmation. That doesn’t mean they didn’t fret and badger me constantly about my complete disregard for gender when choosing my friends, as well as my fluid adoption, and subsequent discarding, of gender normativities. After that tiara picture was taken, I probably took it off and tried on a cowboy hat.
“He has friends who are girls because they’re more mature and intelligent at that age,” my mother reasoned with her friends. To a certain extent she was right: I’ve never cared about gender when choosing friends or people I work with.
I’ve queened it up for months on end trying on an admired new friend’s campy mannerisms and heavy New Yawk accent, then ditched them without thinking to have dinner with Dad.
In the mid-80s, my mind reached a certain maturity that is the beginning of real adulthood. I began a stretch as a metrosexual dandy somewhat patterned on the man who took the photo above, Philippe, Saskia’s husband. I was neither in the closet nor out; as long as the AIDS crisis raged, I was celibate. For many of us, sexuality became irrelevant; a number of my straight-acting gay male friends began romances with women. I went so far as to be briefly engaged to one.
By the end of the decade, I became more my authentic self: a mixture of Anglo-American swagger and bravado blended with cerebral European loucheness accelerating through a particle collider to fuse with India.
Most gay men who don’t become parents remain Peter Pans for longer than their straight counterparts. By my mid-30s, I began my final transition into the person I am now: an edgy, style-conscious, heavily tattooed muscle-wolf-daddy, to use a blend of the gay categories.
I have scrubbed my posh upbringing off to such an extent that I get, “You look like a character from Sons of Anarchy,” quite a bit. A few nights ago, at street artist Tristan Eaton’s studio party, a group of neck-tattooed Latino bros stopped me to say I reminded them of a good friend of theirs, Joe. They showed me a photo: Yup, total Sons of Anarchy, hermano.
Older gays and lesbians know these experiments with gender roles are nothing more important than trying on different outfit types in a department store. They shouldn’t be set in concrete before a young person’s neural pathways are formed by their mid-20s.
What gender-queer activists insist are real states of being are the only false constructs in the conversation. While they might deride “normativity” and “assimilation,” and drink the potions that their tenured guru-matas have concocted from de Beauvoir’s misinterpreted quote, they are the only true phonies in the room.
Gender-queer activists have trapped themselves in a circle jerk in an echo chamber that they’re mistaking for an orgy. It’s a social-media, fake-news phenomenon that is philosophically no different from MAGAs believing that Donald Trump won the election and is being framed by a “deep state.”
They’re nothing more than co-conspirators in a bogus, meth-induced QAnon-type fiction, except they really are keeping kids hostage in pizza-parlor basements and abusing them to the point of maiming them for life. In the most bitter irony in an era forged by ironies, it is they who have become the biggest threat to those “at-risk teens in the Midwest” they seek to protect with Drag Queen Story Hour and other preposterous initiatives backed by mental health professionals incentivized by unethical conflicts of interest.
When they’re called out, the need to make themselves right at all costs causes them to sink deeper into cognitive distortions, or the enormity of their crimes would cause them to splinter and crack completely. When Conservatives in the heartland push back with evermore-restrictive legislation — creating a narrative for the 2024 election that is even hard for me to resist — they point to it as evidence that what they are doing is righteous and warranted.
They beat the wolf until it bites just to say it’s bad.
Mankind has long acknowledged that there are two related-but-distinct kinds of spectrums: between two sexualities — homosexual and heterosexual — and two genders, male and female, with bisexuals and intersexed people in the middle, respectively.
Intersexed doesn’t imply a third sex. There’s a spectrum within that group, too: that German who was with me backstage at Dior was a strapping 6’6” mixed-race Berserker-looking dude, but he was also a “hermaphrodite,” as he called himself. I would never have known had he not told me. They are by no means all the same.
The same applies to sexuality: some human sexuality experts believe there are 13 different types of bisexuals. One is circumstantial/situational bisexuals — e.g., prisoners — who engage in homosexuality because they’re horny and once they overcome socially imposed mental blocks and get a taste for it, and everyone around them is doing it, they realize it’s not that bad. They tend to revert to their pre-incarceration heterosexual preferences after release, although quite a few don’t, in which case they become a different kind of bisexual, transitional. After which, it’s same-sex sex and romance for the rest of their lives.
A blend of two things makes a blend, not a distinct third or thirty-seventh thing in itself. It doesn’t need a new colored stripe on the Pride flag — it’s become a joke, as have all those letters. But that’s what happens when you let the mentally ill hold the talking stick for so long they think it belongs to them and they won’t give it back until they’ve bludgeoned everyone else with it senseless.
According to the dictionary — the only established social contract in the conversation, not the obfuscatory scribblings of an old lesbian known as Judith! — a spectrum is,
“…used to classify something, or suggest that it can be classified, in terms of its position on a scale between two extreme or opposite points.”
“Two points” means a binary system. Simone de Beauvoir would not disagree.
MOST TIMES A CHAMELEON IS JUST A CHAMELEON
I was the typical scapegoated child of a dysfunctional family. The problem is, people who endure my kind of experience really believe their own bad press. I’m fine now, better than fine, but I’m lucky — there are too many who’ve had my sort of experience who continue to suffer and might never find peace.
Sometime during the first year of psychotherapy, I asked Dr. Borkheim whether my mental state was nature or nurture. I’d been gaslighted by my family for over half a century into believing that I was generally a terrible person who deserved every exile and punishment they could stage. That self-image was soldered into my sense of Self, but it was coming loose. It’s was a disorienting time, like Neo unplugging from the Matrix and waking up in super-slow-motion.
Dr. Borkheim said, “Who you are is your nature’s reaction to your nurture. Someone else might be locked away in a mental institution, or out there as a Marine killing others like them on the opposite side.” That I hadn’t lost my mind, that I wasn’t a mercenary tapping into my inner Hulk on the frontlines in Ukraine, is a testament to my resilience and strength of character.
The lines between nature and nurture can be blurry. But when it comes to elemental things like masculinity and femininity, we can easily observe commonalities between human societies to determine what is human nature and “normal.”
Yes, there is such a thing as normal; the existence of aberrations and exceptions doesn’t make all normalities normativities, as gender theorists would have people believe in order to normalize performativities they themselves have created and adopted as a group that are by no means normal.
Because of America’s cultural dominance over the world, the nations shared World Series Syndrome makes it hard to see commonalities in human behavior across all societies, from uncontacted tribes in the Amazon to Highland clans to castes in India to the rigid behaviors of the Japanese.
However, ubiquitous traits and behaviors do exist, they’re merely hidden from the Western gaze by sociocultural customs; the more exotic those customs are, the more they obscure similarities. But they’re superficial. If a human being is a house that must have certain elements of furniture to be habitable and functional, there is no fundamental difference between a baroque and a Modernist dining table; they both serve as dining tables that all houses must have.
We focus too much on the styling of things, which are indeed added constructs and preferences, but they are not the things themselves, as gender-queer theorists and activists would have everyone not just accept, but bow down and “respect.”
Shared behaviors between all human groups are basic human nature, not nurture. Some of those behaviors are shared between the sexes — speech, parenting, marriage, fight-or-flight instincts — and some are particular to one of the two sexes. Many behaviors particular to either sex are powered by a completely different set of chemical reactions going off within us, that are so influential they can alter our perception of reality.
“Toxic masculinity” is fraught because we can observe it to one degree or another in every human social group, and many other animal species. A strutting peacock with his tail feathers fanned can be seen as displaying ostentatious masculinity; we don’t blame the peacock for being himself.
The butch lesbian peahen on a Harley heading up the parade who is unable to seduce the peahens she desires, when many peacocks have a harem’s worth, might be inclined to sit down and scribble theories about the peacock that portray him as an oppressive, nefarious, rape-culture fake who constructed those tail feathers in collusion with his buddies and stuck them on himself; after all, Simone de Beauvoir says so, in French, right there in the first sentence of feminism’s Book of Genesis: On the second day, Gertrude said, “Let there be the Second Sex…”
Except she doesn’t. She’s saying that women in the modern era have been buying their own bad press for too long and need to snap out of the Matrix.
Without aggressive behaviors that are common to all men, a tribe in the Amazon cannot defend itself, or act on instincts to warfare, to occupy and even enslave their enemies. This is basic survival of the fittest, to ensure the dominance of what Richard Dawkins calls “the selfish gene,” nothing more. Men behave the same way in every society, just in different languages, clothing and customs.
I know: I’ve lived in it, observed it, thought about it too much. The male and female of the human species, as with most other animals, have certain attributes and behave a certain way, predictably, every time. That’s science. Wearing a ballgown to the Met Gala when you’ve got an eight-inch dick dangling between your legs is truly sticking peacock’s feathers to your ass. It’s fun, it’s annoying, but real and worthy of the same respect as biology it isn’t.
Excessive machismo can be problematic; some of it is performativity created in a group of other men; again, it nonetheless serves the tribe when it comes to defending itself or risking life and limb on the hunt for food. Nobody knows how dangerous excessive machismo can be more than gay men throughout the world, especially ones who are by nature effete and have trouble hiding it.
The same applies to women, as well as the females of most animal and insect species. A male will not eat a female Black Widow spider, but if the male isn’t careful she will eat him — that’s in her nature, not evidence of her toxic femininity. It’s a behavior, which a bunch of butch lesbian peahens at elite universities have convinced too many well-meaning people is really a performativity that Black Widows of both sexes have learned in order to “become” women or men.
Perhaps the greatest realization that I had a few years after I stepped through the looking glass into India — I call it “the most different country in the world” — was that, because Hindus consider everything in existence as perfect and sacred, everything about human nature had a place and a function in society, including transsexual men, the sacred hijra “eunuchs,” whose purpose is to bless male newborns and weddings. From then on, anything that wasn’t institutionalized in Indian society to me seemed like a false construct.
One possible deviation to my rule about Indian society sticks like Krazy Glue: to the best of my knowledge as someone who has researched the hijras extensively, to the point of crossing the Rann of Kutch to visit their secret temple, up until now there have never been female-to-male transsexuals in India.
I try to justify it by adopting a Western feminist outlook about Indian restrictions on women’s behavior that don’t apply to men, but even that is so slippery it just won’t stick, not after seeing things like thousands of macho holy men with dreadlocks, covered in ash and wearing only loincloths, raising their tridents and chanting “Jai mata di!” over and over: “Glory be to the goddess!”
Taking fraught Marxist-feminist dialectic and applying it to something as complex, genuinely permissive and accepting as India is ridiculous. Far better to question a phenomenon that has arisen primarily in the Anglosphere only over the past twenty-odd years, which is the root cause of the terrors of trans activism that we’re experiencing right here, right now, and only here.
There are plenty of others out there doing that, mainly parents of female-to-male transsexuals. The numbers of detransitioning female-to-males are staggering, but being ignored by mainstream media — they are arguably the most responsible for propagating and authenticating gender-queer fictions.
To use a less-utilitarian metaphor than furniture, to me performativities are to human nature what camouflaging colors and patterns are to chameleons. Each change of pattern doesn’t constitute a new type of chameleon that needs separate classification, gender-neutral descriptors, civil rights and a new stripe on the flag; it’s a temporary adaptation along a spectrum of possible adaptations. The chameleon remains a chameleon, and it’s either male or female.
If we set aside the murky illusions that all of critical theory is imposing on us and look to those common denominators to determine whether a set of behaviors is human nature or performativity arising from nuture — be it parenting or social adaptation — we can see that just because it’s human nature doesn’t mean it’s permissible or inherently good for individuals or society. There are plenty of behaviors common to all humankind that need to be contained and regulated: murder, war, theft, pedophilia, lying, rape, slavery, religion, greed, injustice, jealousy, pride, honor, and so forth.
It’s actually very easy to separate what is human nature, or even inclinations — many social groups that have evolved separately from each other use tattooing, but that doesn’t make it human nature, just an inclination — from what are group constructs and performativities. Critical theorists want to educate/school everyone, but philosophical theories are the flimsiest constructs out there. If they want to change the world, first they need to go out and really explore it, live immersively in alternate cultural realities, not in inadequately translated books at Harvard and Princeton.
They need to learn other languages so fluently that they speak them automatically; that’s the only way to truly tap into the reality of another culture and find the common denominators that make us human. If they haven’t done that and they still try to impose theoretical dogma on millions of people who never asked for it, much less agreed to it, then they are the only true fascists in the conversation. But I leave the Twitterati to duke that one out.
This is the gospel I preach: Do what you want, believe what you want, on the condition that
if it cannot be backed by evidence, objective data and impartial observation, it is likely emotion and opinions, not real and doesn’t need to be treated and respected as such;
it doesn’t harm anyone, be it physically or emotionally.
The irony of ironies is that the entire Wokeism three-ring circus — modern antiracism, MeToo feminism, and gender-queer activism — truly is run by stereotypical middle-aged, man-hating, butch lesbian feminists with the same salt-and-pepper rockabilly haircuts if they’re White, and Badu braids when they’re Black.
It started with the invention of patriarchy; carried on with Black Lives Matter, when nobody said Blacks didn’t matter in the first place, certainly not Whites; then down, down, down the rabbit hole with the gender thing, erasing masculinity and sucking America and the Anglosphere into their bitter, obsessive peahen derangement.
Every time I see a straight male celeb on the red carpet in a frock I envision him being led by the nose by Judith!. And when the little girl pipes up, “But the empress makes no sense,” the crowd drags her off to be burned on a stack of Harry Potter books.
It’s well past time for the dykes on bikes to stop leading the parade and take up the rear. The reality is that even if people were aware of who is truly responsible for St. Simone’s Unholy Crusade and fully understood their motivations for starting it, it’s far too late to turn back.
Thanks for reading.
MORE ISABELLA BLOW & ALEXANDER McQUEEN
Shoulda been my shoot, dammit! But dudes in frocks ain’t nothin’ new or radical, kids. The only difference between now and back then is the joylessness, the mendacity, the false threat-elevations, the danger, and the baseless outrage.
Please consider upgrading for a chance to breaking your karmic cycle:
FURTHER READING:
Evolutionary biologist and caped crusader Colin Write and his contributors on Realities Last Stand break down the horrors of science-denying trans activism like nobody else.
Forget Drag Queen Story Hour. The title of this essay points to the deeper issues of female impersonation: Drag Is a Form of Blackface. So Now What?
How Judith! is the source of all our woes: The Three Heads of Woke Cerberus.