There are some Rude Awokening moments – when the whole damn #BeKind shebang collapses in on itself – that are so perfect, so freakishly unlikely, that they might be mistaken for a fever-dream on the part of we free thinkers. Often, because of their inherent silliness, the ‘trans community’ are involved in some way.
I’m thinking, for example, of the holier-than-thou trans-ally and persecutor of gender-realist women Damien Barr who in 2020 led a campaign to have Emma Nicholson, then honorary vice-president of the Booker Prize, removed for ‘homophobic views’. He was then revealed to have tweeted, to quote the BBC, ‘derogatory terms to refer to transsexuals on social media. In one post, the author also appeared to mock a transsexual who had attempted to take their own life’. He also gave a shout-out to a ‘nice tranny charity’ and complained that there was a ‘mad tranny going through my recycling bin.’ Barr added, for good measure, a fervent plea for ‘Lady-man truckers of the world, unite!’
Then there was Munroe Bergdorf, who accused a Twitter foe of being a ‘hairy barren lesbian’ and boasted that they wanted to ‘gay bash’ a homosexual TV star. Bergdorf was dumped by L’Oréal in 2017 for writing: ‘Honestly I don’t have energy to talk about the racial violence of white people any more . . . Yes ALL white people.’ Bergdorf also labelled the suffragettes as ‘white supremacists’.
Schadenfreude is a popular pleasure – pretty much the Strawberry Creme in the chocolate box of life’s minor vices – but rarely is it as lingeringly relished as when the wokescreen falls down on the secular saints of our witch-hunting age.
Sometimes the biases of the professionally perfect are far, far uglier than our own; I’m thinking in particular of the allegations against ‘Male Feminist’ Neil Gaiman, who allegedly presumed that his shining cloak of ally-hood would prevent all those extremely young girls from noticing what big teeth Grandma had. (Gaiman has denied allegations of sexual misconduct, saying he has ‘never engaged in non-consensual sexual activity with anyone. Ever’.)
And now the first ‘trans’ Oscar-nominee Karla Sofía Gascón – who stars in Emilia Pérez, which has received 13 Academy Award nominations – stands revealed as being quite the social media scamp. Gascón has been an enthusiastic poster against Islam and violent criminals who are made into martyrs (we’ve all been there) and a fan of Hitler (or maybe not) in the past.
‘They have dedicated themselves to searching, to put together all the things that I had said at a time, that I had written – most of which are false,’ Gascón complained to the Hollywood Reporter through a translator. ‘And they put them all together, and so it seems that she is a very bad person, and we remove her just when we can do the most damage – right in the [Oscars] voting period.’ In this age of greedy pronouns, it’s crafty that Gascon gets to be both ‘I’ and ‘she’ in the space of a few sentences – like being both ventriloquist and dummy.
Nevertheless, the film’s distributor Netflix appears to have decided they don’t want anything more to do with either Keith Harris or Orville the Duck. It is reportedly removing Gascon from its Oscars promotional material, refusing to cover travel expenses to events (including the imminent Oscars) and giving more prominence to the film’s actual female lead Zoe Saldana. But Gascon is not giving up their moment on the red carpet gracefully; asked if they would renounce their Oscar nomination, them huffed: ‘I cannot renounce a nomination because what I have done is a job and what is being valued is my acting work… I cannot step down from an Oscar nomination because I have not committed any crime nor have I harmed anyone.’ They added with a quite staggering level of self-pity: ‘I believe I have been judged, I have been convicted and sacrificed and crucified and stoned without a trial and without the option to defend myself.’ Get you, Joan of Arc! Still, now you have an inkling of how numerous women feel after being driven from their livelihoods and careers because they refused to repeat the lie that men can be women.
I’d add that the creepiest thing about this whole brouhaha is that what Gascon said about Hitler (‘simply having opinions about Jews’) seems to have upset people the least. This may be because in recent years – due to resurgent Judophobia amped up since the 2023 Islamofascist pogroms in Israel – Hitler has become a bit of a ‘hall pass’ for a lot of people on the left. We saw this demonstrated way back in 2011 when the fashion crowd rallied around John Galliano like so many mother hens protecting an errant chick when he came out with a barrage of abuse aimed at a couple in a Parisian bar, including ‘your dirty Jewish face’ and ‘people like you would be dead today. Your mothers, your forefathers, would all be fucking gassed’ – with an ‘I love Hitler’ thrown in, just in case we hadn’t got the message. Vivienne Westwood’s comment at the time was typical, ‘He couldn’t be a sweeter person’ – let’s hope she sent him one of her famous swastika T-shirts to cheer him up. He has since made a triumphant return; the FT headline put it well – ‘The Uncancelling of John Galliano.’ I bet that wouldn’t have happened if he’d said those things about Muslims.
It’s a funny old business. You can now be ‘trans’ like Gascon and think Hitler was only having ‘an opinion’ by killing six million Jews or gay like Galliano and ‘love’ Hitler. You can be ‘left-wing’ and hate Jews, just like Hitler did, and demonstrate with placards equating the swastika with the Star of David. The hilarious parody anti-woke song ‘Everyone I Hate Is Literally Hitler’ appears now to be closer to ‘Everyone On My Side Appears To Like Hitler’.
Gareth Roberts, writing here about Keir Starmer, quoted a brilliant line by Alex Dale on X: ‘No he’s not lying, but only because he genuinely sees himself and his class as being beyond the old fashioned categories of truth and lies. He does what he wants first and then makes it true afterwards.’ This has become just as applicable to the wokers. There is no truth, just what their echo chamber mates think, which then becomes the received wisdom. When one of them goes rogue, the whole house of cards tumbles down, because there’s no actual facts at the base of the belief system. Man becomes woman, Hitler simply had opinions – they’re both equally true/untrue/your truth/my truth. So take your pick – and pay for it.
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