All the usual seductive shit
Shambolic Neutral on The Divine Trans/The Trans Divine:
“Transpeople are sacred. We are the divine”. If that’s not cult-speak then I do not know what is. Some of us have been saying gender ideology is the new religion for over a decade. Finally, it clearly feels secure enough to make it blatant.
Or at least the branch of it that hangs out at the Globe does.
In a way of course that makes sense – it’s what drama and acting are all about. You could get up on a stage and say “drama is the divine” and I would see it quite differently. It would be a metaphor as opposed to a lunatic boast. There is something magical (metaphorically of course) about theater, about plays and acting and movies and tv dramas. The best of it can change you.
But substitute “trans people” for “drama” and we’re in a different country altogether.
In the fervent, overexcited voice of a cult leader addressing a fresh intake of acolytes, actor Isobel Thom – also non-binary, also using a terrible haircut to indicate that she is super progressive and has liberated herself from the shackles of patriarchy and is no longer a woman yadda yadda yadda because of course nothing says escaping the shackles of patriarchy like thinking womanhood is something to escape to become a real person – talks about how being trans is sacred and divine, full of multiplicity and creativity and all the usual seductive shit designed to make young people desperate to feel special and different and cool feel special and different and cool.
It always makes me laugh to remember that for a time when I was a young people, 15 or 16, I spent a few weeks being special and cool by being as nerdy as possible to annoy my classmates. What did I do? I wore ankle socks. It worked, too; they remonstrated with me. It’s not Wordsworth and the French Revolution, but it amuses me.
A year or so later I wore bangs (a fringe in UK-speak) when the fashion was all for long straight hair parted in the middle, no bangs. Divine, yeah?
The Globe has now deleted their tweets, after getting ratio-ed so hard that it could practically send them back in time to get a bollocking off the very real Jeanne d’Arc. It also deleted this stupendous (and I don’t mean that in a good way) poem, which was written by an actual adult and not a moody 14-year-old who’s just been sent to their room without pudding for being rude to their mum at the dinner table.
Again, it’s more of the same. Trans is beauty, trans is special, trans is no-one understands me… and then finding someone who will understand you and encourage you to be as transgressive and broken and boundary-less as possible. All of it, all of this shit, is just the sly, seductive, come hither of groomers. That’s all it is.
And it’s so dangerous. Curry has a YouTube video entitled I Cut My Nipples Off Today. Jesus Christ. That’s not normal, sane or healthy. That’s not what someone who is revelling in their own power, truth and beauty does. That’s not someone who is making others jealous does. That’s not what anyone does! That’s the behaviour of a deeply troubled or deeply depraved or deeply both individual, and either way, they should not be being encouraged to influence young people and encouraged by establishments like The Globe.
What next, videos titled I Poked My Eyes Out Today? I Got My Feet Amputated Today? I Severed My Spinal Cord Today?
Thinking you are divine and sacred is not a good thing. And it is not true or possible. You are just a person, same as everyone else. You have a sex, which cannot change. You get one life. This is all there is. Instead of trying to hide from reality by teaching children magical thinking, we need to teach them how to cope.
So sorry, you are not divine or sacred. No-one is. You’re normal. There is nothing wrong with your body the way it is. Coping comes from accepting reality. Welcome to the adult world, kids.
Welcome to the adult world and keep your bits, you’re going to need them.
I saw To Kill a Mockingbird, at the age, I suppose, of about 17. The main thing I remember, because it horrified me so much at the time and it makes me cringe today when I think of it, was the case of the woman who cut off her nipples with garden shears; not normal, sane or healthy, as you say.
They normalize cutting body pieces off, and yet they can’t deal with someone talking about them with the wrong pronoun.
I saw an article about a college where a play, written by a Black playwright and talking about racism in the US South in the 1960s, was shut down because some of the racist white characters used derogatory terms (I suspect “the N word”, although it isn’t stated) for Black people. It occurred to me that it’s perfectly OK to show Black people spit on, beaten up, bombed, or killed, but using the very same historically accurate terminology that would have been used by their attackers in the 1960s is what gets the play shut down.
It’s all so bizarre and backwards.
Sacbut, same in 1960s Australia.
“Norm and Ahmed”, a play exploring casual racism in Australia caused a similar outrage. Norm is a white Australian WW2 Veteran, and Ahmed a Pakistani student, both waiting for a bus. Norm is aggressive, and Ahmed is calm. The play ends with Norm assaulting Ahmed and spitting out the words “Fucking Boong”* Twice actors playing Norm were arrested for indecent language while the underlying message escaped the Police and the right wing state governments of the time.
*Boong – a derogatory term for Aborigines, akin to Nigger in the USA.
I had a reading of one of my plays, designed to show the work in 21st century middle America. One of my characters, a boy with really bad habits, shooting things, swearing, wearing swastikas, and burning crosses on the lawn of the only black family in town – he said the N word. I was informed that it couldn’t be there, no one would ever do the play, and I might be permanently blackballed. For speaking the truth. For using the language I hear in the streets, in the hallways, from boys like him.
Someone might get offended. Also, someone else might not be able to show how virtuous they are, how not like the white people over there. Oh, yes, my skin is white, of course, but did you see how loud I screamed about that offensive word? So it was being spoken by an offensive character who did offensive things…how dare anyone allow him to say that word?
Well, Alex Curry, our pote (sic), or worseifier, looks as though he might be able to have a career at the Globe writing a slew of very bad Victorian operas. Curry & Mulligan, or perhaps Curry & Bully’em: Trans-women of the Guard, The Terfettes of Penzance, Yeet those Teets!, The Mikado & her Pinafore, Trial by Fury, Ruddy-gored Terfs, Dystopia Unlimited…
Hahahahahaha I can’t wait.
Unfortunately a lot of people are demanding simple rules for determining what is racist, and the use of slurs has become the litmus test in many people’s eyes. If you uttered or wrote a slur, regardless of the context — racist. If you said all sorts of hateful things about race but didn’t use any slurs — not racist!
Hence the obsession in 2016 with getting The Apprentice outtakes, in the hopes that the rumors were true that Trump had been recorded using the “n-word.”
I think some of the people promoting this view are just dumb people who can’t handle complexity and want a simple rule they can follow: just don’t say these words and you’ll be ok. Others are malevolent racists who want to carve out a safe harbor for themselves: I didn’t use the bad words, so it’s ok! (This latter group will never actually concede that they were racist even if caught using slurs, of course — they’ll fall back on the “I was being ironic” and “hey, black people use that word all the time, why can’t I?” defenses.)