Steyn on the Great Transition
June 24, 2024
We're well into "Pride Month" now - only another twelve or fifteen weeks to go - and, as you know, my advice to the LGBTQWERTY crowd is to enjoy it while you can. Because demography is destiny, and the successor populations imported into the west will not be hot for Pride parades. That process is already underway, and it will intensify. To reiterate:
In the end, it's all demography... You can change all the boys into girls and all the girls into boys but in the end there aren't enough of either to alter the outcome. You're merely arguing about who'll be using which bathroom on the Oblivion Express.
Or maybe who'll be waxing which genitals on the Oblivion Express. We used to do trans waxing stories on Rush and elsewhere every so often because, for a while, thanks to the psycho-tranny from hell in British Columbia, there were rather a lot of them. But, if you're the salon-owner getting scorched, it's not really funny:
Trans-identified male awarded $35,000 by Ontario court after women's salon refused to wax 'her' balls
By "awarded", the Court means that the proprietor of the ladies' salon Mad Wax in Windsor, Ontario will have to pay it to her. His name, delightfully, is Carruthers (not this Carruthers, presumably). The bepenised beauty called up to have her wedding tackle waxed on a day when the attendant in question was ...oh, I'm sure you can guess:
The salon employee working that day was a devout Muslim woman who refrained from physical contact with men, and the salon owner told the trans woman that they could not find a way to accommodate her request.
In other words, there is no correct answer to this dilemma. Mr Carruthers could have instructed the devout Muslima to wax the meat-and-two-veg in question and earned himself an entirely different "human rights" complaint or, alternatively, a visit to the bottom of the Detroit River courtesy of her husband and brothers. Like I said, no correct answer; an excess of diversity; what Marx would call the internal contradictions of multiculturalism.
The court in question was the Ontario "Human Rights" Tribunal, where I beat the rap over a decade-and-a-half ago. But time creeps on and the "human rights" judges have now discovered the universal human right to have your testicles depilated by an observant Muslim lady. Try it next time you're in Riyadh.
As I've said, it's merely an interim phase. As sometime Steyn Show guest Louise Perry writes:
If the last few decades of gender politics are remembered at all, it will be as a humorous blip. "Did you know that people in the early twenty-first century believed that women had penises?" some Stephen Fry-like figure will chuckle on a quiz show centuries from now, to the disbelief of his all-male panel.
That's not quite right - because the successor populations to what was once Christendom will be so revolted by this late-phase western decadence that they will erase all trace of it.
Which may be marginally preferable to our habit of keeping the past alive by torturing it into compliance with our peculiar obsessions. How much damage will have been inflicted on the western inheritance by its custodians before it's all tossed in the landfill? In last year's summer diversion Out of Time, there is an episode in which our Victorian adventurer arrives at the Palace of the Problematic, where the doughty heroes of nineteenth-century literature are being rewritten by sensitivitists into lesbians and intersexuals. Alas, satirical fancy is wasted in our time. Less than a year later, it's just happened to the Brontë sisters:
The Bronte sisters have been included in LGBT Pride events because they wrote under androgynous pen names.
Feminists have reacted angrily to Emily, Charlotte and Anne's inclusion in Pride Month material discussing "the Brontes and gender identity" because of their "androgynous" alter-egos.
Charlotte published her works under the name Currer, Emily under the moniker Ellis and Anne adopted "Acton". All three went by the same surname, Bell.
At the time, it was common for female writers to adopt male pseudonyms when writing and publishing their works in order to be taken seriously by the establishment...
That's great! If publishing a book under the name "Ellis Bell" is enough to get you marked down as gender-queer or non-binary, then "Lionel Shriver" and "J K Rowling" (who also writes as "Robert Galbraith", nudge-nudge) should be shoo-ins for the Non-Man Booker Prize. They should just cut to the chase and make the final a transgender waxing round.
This isn't some nutso academic who's decided to whip up a twitterstorm, but the Brontë Parsonage Museum - that's to say, those explicitly entrusted with maintaining the sisters' home and curating their legacy. It's not enough that ours is an age of utter creative exhaustion by corporate storytellers reduced to trannying up superheroes either sixty years old (Spider-Man, Avengers) or ninety years old (Batman, Superman). In addition to that, everything from the pre-crap stage of western culture has to be vandalised into line. So the authors of Jane Eyre, Agnes Grey and Wuthering Heights are now non-binary genderqueers. And it is not barbarians at the gate but the very custodians of the sisters' legacy who are most enthusiastically leading the charge to destroy it.
As longtime readers will know, my view is that the biggest issue of our time is not whatever trivia they're talking about at the next BBC leaders' debate or even the CNN-framed presidential "debate" this Thursday. The most pressing issue is that the entirety of western civilisation is sliding off the cliff, and very fast.
Whenever I say as much, many readers assume there are some Irish-monk types out there willing to round up the glories of our inheritance and keep an eye on them through the next Dark Age. But, if the glories have been hollowed out by woke bollocks, what's left for some attentive Ballycastle postulant to stow in the attic?
It may be that the Brontës' curators are merely moronic: as I used to say a lot, sometimes a society becomes too stupid to survive. I say it less often these days, because it seems to me that this is a conscious campaign, akin to that waged by the Taliban against the Bamiyah Buddhas or Isis against Palmyra, to destroy the past in order to ensure there is nothing to go back to.
So I'm not sure how much there'll be left for any putative Irish monks to hoard, or whether western civilisation is too far gone to "save". It is more likely that what emerges when the incoming Dark Age ends will have to be something entirely new.
Now back to our 24/7 election coverage...
~We thank you for all your kind comments these last grisly few months - and thank you especially to all those new members of The Mark Steyn Club, and those old members who've signed up a chum for a SteynOnline Gift Certificate or a Steyn Club Gift Membership. Steyn Clubbers span the globe, from London, Ontario to London, England to London, Kiribati. We hope to welcome many more new members in the years ahead.
We had a very lively weekend at SteynOnline, starting with Mark's thoughts on Ofcom and the Covid vaccines as delivered to camera outside the High Court in London. On Saturday, his latest edition of On the Town went kinda classical. For his weekend movie date, Rick McGinnis considered the birth of cinéma vérité, and Steyn's Song of the Week rounded up the Sixties Euro-zeitgeist. Our marquee presentation was Mark's farewell to his beloved and inspirational cat Marvin.
If you were too busy arguing that H G Wells is an obvious tranny, we hope you'll want to check out one or three of the foregoing as a new week begins.
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