No matter what movie reviewers say, actor Eddie Izzard is a man. The insistence otherwise shows the rot at the heart of the cultural Left’s war against Mother Nature.
Izzard dates women, is physiologically and hormonally a male, and plays a man in the recently released movie Six Minutes to Midnight. It defies faith, tradition, common sense, and science — all at once! — to call Izzard a woman. Yet that’s what film critics are doing, all because Izzard, a longtime transvestite, claims to be feeling “based in girl mode” for the time being.
Note the word “transvestite.” That’s how Izzard always referred to himself. He has taken no steps physically or medicinally to “transition” to being a transgender female and for years called himself “gender fluid” and a “lesbian trapped in a man’s body” while saying he didn’t care what pronouns were used for him. Read: He still likes women, but he likes undressing from women’s clothes in order to be with them. Or something.
To each his own. Izzard is a good actor who merits respect for his craft. But journalism is supposed to stick to facts, and the fact is that Izzard is a man. If he wanted to use a diminutive of his own name, Izzard could dress up as Mr. Ed in a new movie, but that wouldn’t make him a horse.
Truth be told, Izzard’s fetishes and current preferences wouldn’t be worth much cyber-ink in and of themselves. As an exemplar of the current cultural hysteria, though, the near-universal and unquestioning adoption of feminine pronouns and prefixes for Izzard is more important. When “feelings” and the leftist narrative-du-jour take precedence over simple facts and scientific reality, the culture has entered worrisome territory. Worse, when the assault on reality and nature itself becomes a governing ideology with which nobody dare disagree without risk of furious backlash, the territory is not just worrisome but dangerous.
The danger isn’t just about gender. It’s about a whole panoply of cultural flashpoints, but with sex and race chief among them, in which dissent is treated almost as if it’s assault. When even a Palestinian Muslim feminist leftist calls the latest woke mob action at Georgetown University Law Center a “Maoist take-over,” we can be sure that the cultural pathology is far advanced.
Against the Left’s Orwellianism, people of goodwill must begin with small things, such as insisting that words do have meaning. A human being with male body parts and male hormones who plays male movie roles and dates women is a man. Period. Someone who wants to provide equal opportunity for all, in colorblind fashion, and who lives according to those ideals in the private sphere as well, is not a “racist.”
Words affect policies, and policies affect people’s lives. That’s why it’s crucial to insist that, by dictionary definition, along with common sense, a law that expands the days and hours allowed for “early” voting does not “restrict” voting. A laptop that the Russians had nothing to do with is not Russian disinformation. And a difference of opinion is not an assault.
In a personal setting, in pursuit of politeness and tolerance, someone might reasonably refer to Izzard as “Ms. Izzard” if Izzard so requests. But to insist that everyone accepts that as reality in a public setting is to insist on a lie. Much of what the cultural Left pushes as part of its ideological mission is similarly, perniciously dishonest. It is right and good for thoughtful people to push back.
