It wasn’t me who said this (though I kind of wish I had). It was the world’s most famous female impersonator Barry Humphries, better known as Dame Edna Everage, speaking his mind – as usual – in an interview with the Daily Telegraph.
The reason I wish I’d said it has nothing to do with any desire to offend transgender people. It does, however, have EVERYTHING to do with my desire to offend the vast and terrifying industry which has sprung up to take offence on transgendered people’s behalf.
Barry Humphries
I note by way of example that fully one quarter of the Telegraph’s news piece covering the story is devoted to quotes from various virtue-signalling parties – a brace of Conservative MPs; the gay campaign group Stonewall; something called Trans Media Watch; the BBC – distancing themselves from Humphries’ (pictured right) remarks.
What are we: children? Can we really no longer be trusted to make up our own minds on an issue without being nudged into correctness by the morality police?
This is what most of us find so irritating about the whole transgender phenomenon: the way an infinitesimally tiny minority issue has been hijacked by the forces of Social Justice and is used as a stick to bully us into pretending to give a shit about something we’d prefer not to think about.
Why should I ever have to spend even a millisecond of my life thinking about Bruce Jenner’s genitalia – or absence thereof? No more do I want to dwell on the fate of a 70s celebrity athlete’s sweaty testes than I do about the surgical procedure required to remove a candiru fish from your urethra or the precise make up of Kim Kardashian’s enormous butt cheeks or the mating habits of giant banana slugs or the digestive processes of a bird eating spider.
And I say this without prejudice to Bruce or indeed to transexuals generally. I’m sure they’re all lovely brave people with great stories to tell but I don’t want to hear them – ever – a) because I’m squeamish and b) because I’ve only got so much space in my head for thoughts and worries about the great problems facing the world and not one of these, unfortunately, includes whether or not transexuals feel sufficiently accepted by society or whether they deserve the title Woman of the Year or how amazingly courageous they are. In the unlikely event I ever meet one, I shall of course be courteous and kind: not because I’ve been ordered to be so by the Transgender Rights Stasi but because that’s how people generally do behave to one another in the civilised world.
Read the rest at Breitbart.
