Mr Tits
For me, the most disturbing thing about the Canadian teacher with the fake boobs is not the prosthetics themselves, ridiculous as they are. It isn’t the huge sexualised nipples, which all but confirm that the bloke is getting some kind of thrill from parading around in front of his teenage charges dolled up like a Halloween porn freak. It isn’t even the fact that there are men out there who are happy to behave in such a depraved way – we’ve known that for quite some time. No, it’s the fact that his school defended him, and what’s more that it defended him on the grounds of respecting ‘gender identity and gender expression’. There have always been weirdos in society – what’s new in the 21st century is the willingness of so many institutions to validate weirdos.
And now we know why these kids had to look, why they had to be in a classroom with a man who clearly has issues – it’s because their school thinks this is all fine and dandy. In response to ‘discussion on social media’, Oakville Trafalgar High issued a statement saying it is committed to ‘establishing and maintaining a safe, caring, inclusive, equitable and welcoming learning and working environment for all students and staff’. And this includes, it says, the right of staff to enjoy ‘equitable treatment’ for their ‘gender identity and gender expression’. In short, Lemieux’s grotesque parody of womanhood is his completely valid gender identity, and who are we to criticise him, far less tell him to get the hell away from those children?
The real problem here is the cult of validation. We are now expected to validate all sorts of wacky identities. That v-word is everywhere. It’s in the slogan of the trans lobby, as promoted by Stonewall: ‘Trans women are women. Trans men are men. Non-binary people are valid.’ It abounds on social-media hangouts like TikTok. In fact, on TikTok ‘valid’ doesn’t only mean acceptable or reasonable, but also cool and exciting. As Urban Dictionary explains, ‘valid’ is now used both to indicate that ‘someone’s personality, character or entire existence is 100 per cent normal’ and to describe things that are ‘enjoyable and fun’. So the switched-on young might say ‘my pronouns are valid’ or ‘that movie was well valid’. Validation is the holy grail of the identitarian-minded. As Francis Fukuyama says in Identity: The Demand for Dignity and The Politics of Resentment, modern identity politics ‘places a supreme value on authenticity, on the validation of [the] inner being…’. In earlier times people chased the favour of priests, the blessing of the church; now they’re desperate for ‘validation’ from a new, less godly elite.
And if they don’t get it, they will suffer. They will feel oppressed. They might even die. Failure to validate teenagers’ trans identities leads to a hike in suicide attempts, say cynical campaigners. Say a single contradictory word about someone’s gender identity and you’ll be accused of ‘erasing’ them. This is how sacred the act of validation has become in the 21st century – so much so that people will feel ‘destroyed, obliterated’, which is what ‘erased’ means, if they don’t receive it. Maybe this is why so many institutions are so quick and unquestioning in their validation of certain identities. From schools to universities, banks to the civil service, everyone is now pressured to speak and behave in a way that validates other people’s identity expression, especially their gender expression. You must use the right pronouns, welcome the man who thinks he’s a woman into your female changing room, use ‘they’ or ‘ze’ or ‘zir’ for those who fantasise that they are neither male nor female. Even the literal Royal Air Force now tells its pilots to use whatever pronoun a person demands they use – even ze, per and hir – because ‘total inclusivity is non-negotiable’ (my emphasis).
There it is. All of this is ‘non-negotiable’. We’re all slaves to validation now. It’s the new religious correctness – validate that person’s identity with your every utterance and mannerism or risk being branded one of the ‘erasers’ who is a threat to minority rights. This is how people like Kayla Lemieux come into existence. They clock that they live in societies that will validate almost any gender identity, and which will punish the bigoted erasers who dare to question these gender identities. And so they know they can pretty much do what they like.
https://www.spiked-online.com/2022/09/25/kayla-lem