September 04, 2012

Shulamith Firestone

Shulamith Firestone

Meet “€œJohn.”€ He now regrets his taxpayer-funded sex-change operation and the lengthy on-the-job “€œtransition”€ his public-service union strongly supported. Everyone involved (except those hapless taxpayers) took it for granted that “€œgenital difference between human beings”€ no longer mattered.

I”€™ve written here before about the Che Guevara-loving Toronto District School Board, whose teachers call themselves “€œco-parents“€ and conduct lessons in cross-dressing and gender stereotype awareness in primary school. Anyone who objects is the crazy one.

Progressives either don”€™t know or care that a key component of Firestone’s theories turned out to be junk science of the most tragic sort. The Dialectic of Sex holds up the aforementioned Dr. Money’s findings on gender “€œfluidity”€ based upon his work with a twin named Bruce Reimer, whose penis had been rendered “€œunrescuable”€ during circumcision.

Dr. Money spied a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to test his radical theories in the real world. He assured Reimer’s parents that babies are born genderless, counseling them to raise Bruce as “€œBrenda.”€ After a lifetime of anguish, including a sex change back to male again, Bruce committed suicide in 2004.

But while academics and “€œeducators”€ forcibly incarnate the discredited musings of a troubled young woman from the Nixon era, it is pop culture that seems, in spite of itself, to instinctively recoil at all this “€œliberation.”€

At the melancholy conclusion of 1975’s The Rocky Horror Picture Show, two underlings turn on their “sweet transvestite” leader and take him prisoner:

Frank-N-Furter, it’s all over
Your mission is a failure
Your lifestyle’s too extreme

Similarly, the “€œmale”€ and “€œfemale”€ leads in Hedwig and the Angry Inch (2001) revert to their original gender in a sequence that’s nakedly redemptive, if not downright celebratory.

Is any film or play about drag queens complete without the lonely hero(ine) staring sadly into a theatrical makeup mirror?

Firestone’s friends, family, and feminist admirers duly posted effusive memorials all over the Internet, but none of them was with her when she passed away. She”€™d been dead for a week when her landlord discovered her decaying corpse.

So much for that “€œcommunitarian”€ spirit.

 

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