I feel like Cynthia Erivo didn’t get the memo. She seems to think it’s still 2021 and the world gives a shit about rich-people problems. ‘It isn’t easy’, the Wicked star told a roomful of well-heeled LGBT activists in LA last week. She was wearing a sombre look and a Dior dress that cost more than all the clothes you’ve ever owned. I don’t need to tell you she wasn’t talking about soaring energy bills or war in Europe. No, what’s ‘not easy’ is that this obscenely rich star of stage and screen sometimes has to remind people to use they / them pronouns for ‘nonbinary’ people.
They’re still doing this? They’re still wanging on about their hurt feelings when some oik fails to address them with fitting deference? It was at the GLAAD Media Awards – where else? – that Ms Erivo bared her agony. To fawning looks from the assembled gender-bending millionaires, all rattling their jewellery in noisy empathy, she lamented: ‘It isn’t easy… waking up and choosing to be yourself.’ Waking up?! Will their ordeals never cease?
As if getting out of bed wasn’t taxing enough, Ms Erivo then finds herself having to educate the dim about pronouns. We the oppressed find ourselves ‘teaching people on a daily basis how to address [us]’, she opined. Every day she suffers the ‘frustration’ of ‘reteaching people a word that has been in the human vocabulary since the dawn of time: they / them’. Listen, Cyn: your ‘frustration’ at saying ‘It’s they / them!’ is nothing compared with ours at having woke slop thrown at us morning, noon and night. You’re sick of being ‘misgendered’ – we’re sick of having ridiculous neo-aristocrats like you look down your pierced nose at people whose only crime is correct grammar.
It was a hideous spectacle. It was like a scene out of The Hunger Games. The super-rich, their half-starved frames adorned with gaudy clobber and lavish jewels, lined up with zeal behind Erivo’s neo-religious crusade to ‘reteach’ the throng on how to ‘address [us]’. Briefly putting down her Dior Lady Art Bag, with its ‘dazzling embellishments’, she said ‘they / them’ are words that are used ‘pedantically’ to describe ‘two or more people’, but are used ‘poetically’ to describe ‘a person who is simply… more’. It was less ‘I Have a Dream’ than ‘I Have a Personality Disorder’. Get over yourself, Erivo: you’re a she, not a they.
To be fair, her patrician grumbling provided a brilliant insight into the vanity and tyranny of the trans ideology. She might fancy herself as the Rosa Parks of genderfluidity but she came off more like Marie Antoinette. Trans activists are positively obsessed with ‘reteaching’ the public how to address them. From that big American fella who barked ‘It’s ma’am!’ at a shop assistant who called him ‘sir’ to those Ivy League brats who insist everyone bow and scrape to their delusional gender identities, what these people want is not personal liberation but public compliance. Nothing less than our slavish submission to their post-truth bollocks will suffice.
Seeing a wealthy actress in head-to-toe Dior bemoan people’s failure to ‘address’ others correctly, I got a sense of how serfs must have felt when their powdered, bewigged lord would make a fleeting appearance and expect all the bells-and-whistles toadying. Today, we’re asked to ditch our understanding of science. Our recognition of sex. Correct grammar. Truth itself. All must be sacrificed. All must be set alight on the bonfire of Cynthia Erivo’s vanity. The price of her contentment is your rationalism.
It’s too high a price, isn’t it? That’s my take on the entire trans ideology: that it elevates the emotional fulfilment of a privileged new caste of eccentrics at the expense of scientific truth, linguistic precision and women’s rights. It poses as the heir to the great liberation movements of the 20th century but is more accurately the heir to the aristocratic hubris that preceded that era of progress. Ms Erivo, we neither need nor want you to ‘teach’ us transgenderism’s stiff Edwardian etiquette. We will speak freely, regardless of how many rich people we piss off.
It is not ‘pedantic’, as Erivo says, to use they / them as a plural, or to refer to women as ‘she’ and men as ‘he’. It’s truthful. In fact, it’s radical. In an era when we’re under huge pressure from eccentric elites to ditch what we know to be true, and to speak only in their strange tongues, it is a brilliant blow for liberty and sanity to be linguistically correct. That’s the real liberation movement right now: not the neo-aristocrats’ demand that we surrender our reason to their feelings, but our own defiant insistence on using the right words for the right things.
Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His new book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy
