Transgender Activists Can’t Tolerate Their Own Ideology
In the recent debuted Netflix special “SuperNature,” Ricky Gervais leaves very few groups unscathed by his comedy. And it is joyous!
Most notable about this show are that the parts regarding transgender ideology which he dips in and out of throughout the show. That is after his flame-throwing introduction wherein he deconstructs this lobby hoisting them by their own petard: Gervais takes the very words of this lobby and throws it right back at them.
He opens his show with misogyny, a political swamp in which transgender ideology is firmly steeped. He notes that his show has no dancers and jugglers—only “a bloke talking…which is what comedy is: a bloke talking,” interrupting his own monologue, mocking a heckler—“Sexist!” “What about all the funny female comedians?” he asks, “Like, um…” struggling to find one example to answer his own question as the audience bursts into laughter. “That was irony. There’s going to be a bit of that throughout the show. See if you can spot it. Now that’s when I say something that I don’t really mean for comic effect and you, as an audience, you laugh at the wrong thing because you know what the right thing is. It’s a way of satirising attitudes.” Gervais’ paradoxical rift on comedy and irony is a point to which he returns throughout his show and it is pure genius.
Gervais refers to his opening sexist joke which plays on women not being funny, adding, “In real life, I know there are loads of funny women like, um…” He repeats the first joke commending the audience laughter: “Well spotted.”
Gervais then ploughs into it finally finding two examples: Dame Edna Everage (an alter ego of Aussie comedian Barry Humphries) and Eddie Izzard, adding, “She’s brilliant. She’s not only a great comedienne but she’s also a great actress. Isn’t she? She was brilliant in that thing as that man…”
He then switches over to discuss a Twitter troll who wrote Gervais after his last Netflix special, “Humanity,” to say that he was “as funny as a fart at a dead baby’s funeral…” I thought Gervais might have used some comic license in fabricating this insult for his show. And like much of his criticism of gender ideology, this too he took straight from Twitter to end it on a laugh returning to the original rift on misogyny describing that his audience members would laugh at a fart at a dead baby’s funeral, adding: “Even if it was your baby…It’s been dead a week. You’re probably up for a giggle…particularly if you are the father. If you’re the mother, you’d probably find it hard to see the “funny side of things’,” he says with air quotes. “Ah, women,” he says.
“Not all women. I mean the old fashioned ones, you know, the old-fashioned women—you know, the ones with wombs. Those fucking dinosaurs!” The audience roars with laughter. “I love the new women, the new ones we’ve been seeing lately. The ones with beards and cocks—they’re as good as gold.” He then lays into the gender-critical debate and has taken most every word of the transgender side from their social media posts:
“But they want to use our toilets!”
“Why shouldn’t they use your toilets?”
“For ladies!”
“They are ladies! Look at their pronouns! What about this person isn’t a lady?”
“His penis.”
“Her penis, you fucking bigot!”
“What if he rapes me?”
“What if she rapes you you fucking TERF whore!”
Where Gervais had previously suffered attacks from his detractors for his staunch criticisms of religion, this past week evidenced barely a peep from religious groups or the far-right. Indeed, the only detractors of Gervais came from the pseudo-left, neoliberal identitarians who fancy themselves “progressive” because pronouns trump the political reality of female prisoners being raped by men who identify as women. And Gervais cuts to the bone on this to the ironic laughter of his audience.
There is a well-funded lobby that has pushed gender identity into the public sector over the past two decades as many universities have instituted “designated pronoun” policies if not forthrightly encouraging “gender identity” throughout all aspects of higher education—from curricula to email signatures. And the reach of this lobby has no end as the US State Department celebrates “International Pronouns Day” while the British government obfuscates the distinction between sex-based and gender-based protections set out in the Equalities Act 2010. It is clear that the endgame is to destroy the notion of those boring, humourless vagina-havers.
If anyone was concerned about the rise of word-of-mouth influencers and influencer marketing platforms a decade ago that sent the media and advertising worlds into a tailspin, the more pernicious political marketing coup was that of identity politics, all happening backstage and in boardrooms.
Today the real concern for those of us worried about our ability to think and speak freely—and this especially includes the ground-scorching treatment that Gervais handed the humourless identity lobby—ought to be the way that politicians and media on the left have not only come out in support of a complete fiction, but they are willing to sack and censure anyone who contradicts the hokum with facts. This is our political climate over the past decade: anyone who proclaims humans are not sexually dimorphic or that men who win at women’s sporting events today is met with applause and extolments of bravery.
After all, what could be braver than using “correct pronouns” for the act of referring to “her penis” while folding to the insistence that men are whatever they say they are?