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From gender-blind casting to recreational abortion
How far will the current Hollywood fad-concept of “blind” casting now go? Bear with me here, but in my opinion, it could well ultimately end in the future medical murder of infants in a process of what might best be termed “recreational abortion”.
What is “blind” casting? It is when people are (supposedly) chosen to fill a particular role irrespective of their innate physical characteristics, purely because they are deemed the best professional for the part – a black man being chosen to play Macbeth, for example, although never a white man playing Othello.
We are today very familiar with this concept when it comes to the idea of race, to the point of it now often seeming boring, not daring or innovative. Accordingly, Hollywood is ensuring people are now being cast “blind” in a much more radical way than simply asking Hulk Hogan to pretend to be Nelson Mandela.
Consider Disney’s pathetic recent announcement that six of the seven dwarfs in their upcoming live-action version of Snow White will in fact be played by persons of wholly average height. Allegedly, this much-ridiculed move was done to avoid giving offence to any actual dwarfs who might be watching. Yet some small actors who rely upon getting cast as dwarfs rather than, say, as NBA basketball players, such as tiny WWE star Dylan Postl, have criticised this as simply “sacrificing the careers of short people to achieve diversity.”
No man’s land
There have been several confected “scandals” about “cis actors and actresses” (i.e., genitally normal ones) taking up trans roles on screen, with Scarlett Johansson famously dropping out from such a part in the film Rub & Tug in 2018 after receiving “friendly suggestions” from the usual mob-like activists that she do so, and Eddie Redmayne ritually apologising for his “mistake” in playing a transwoman in 2015’s The Danish Girl after coming under similar fire.
Bears Fonte (a “violently queer filmmaker”) is the transgender writer/director of the wholly benign-sounding 2019 “ultra-violent” short indie film Conversion Therapist, which he describes as a “revenge-motivated script” in which “a pansexual, polyamorous trio kidnap a bigoted conversion therapist and torture him until he sees the light” – which sounds like a much more barbaric version of conversion therapy in and of itself, although Bears does not appear to recognise this irony. “Many writers put themselves in their scripts,” explained Bears, and so did he, with the torturer character Justine “taking on all my vengeance.”
Naturally, such a figure had to be played by a real-life trans: Scarlett Johanssen would no doubt not only have been too busy, but also too inauthentic, chromosome-wise. Thus, Bears rejected all female applicants for the role and handed it instead to Evalyn Jake, a transgender model with no prior acting experience, as “There is no substitute for having someone in a role that truly understands the life circumstances of that character”, which is rather disturbing, given Justine appears to be a psychopathic torturer of normies.
According to Bears: “The misguided belief that transgender roles are acting challenges [for non-trans actors/actresses] reinforces the notions that trans women are really just ‘men who want to play dress up’, or that trans men are women just masquerading in pursuit of fame and fortune. It is damaging to the identity of the community because it undercuts its very truth.”
In other words, this whole trend is not just about “giving opportunities to marginalised communities” at all, as some useful idiots like to claim, it carries a ideological agenda. “If we can work toward colour-blind casting, we can also work toward gender-blind casting,” Bears has said, whilst also simultaneously and contradictorily arguing that “I can’t imagine why anyone would try to cast a cisgender actor in a film like this.”
Alarmingly, this fringe agenda has now spread out from obscure indie shorts to more mainstream Hollywood blockbusters. The current mega-pink Barbie film has been banned in certain Muslim lands like Algeria, for instance, on the grounds of it being alleged gay propaganda. How so?
Well, there is actually a trans “actress” (re: a man dressed as a cartoon female) in the film named Hari Nef, who plays the role of Doctor Barbie. Once, the plastic doll-figure of Doctor Barbie was seen as a shining symbol that girls could be whatever they wanted to be in terms of their future career-paths; now it seems she’s a shining symbol that men can be whatever they want to be in terms of their future gender-reassignment paths.
I gain the impression Doctor Barbie plays only a minor role in the plot (I must confess I haven’t actually seen the film myself), but Nef’s presence in the movie has been relentlessly exploited by the gay press nonetheless.
The New York Dolls
According to an interview in Pink News, Nef and his transsexual NY-based friends have formed a gang called “The Dolls”, and when they are out on the town, “We yell the word [doll] because the word matters. And no doll matters more than Barbie.” Why? Because “the name BARBIE looms large over every American woman. Barbie’s the standard; she’s The Girl; she’s certainly THE doll.” Commendably, Nef is not disturbed enough to think he is an actual woman, just a man pretending to be one – a dress-up doll, in fact: “not quite a woman – recognisable as such, but still a fake.”
Supposedly, says Nef, “David Heyman, the executive producer, told me that when he saw my [audition] tape he didn’t know I was trans. He just knew that I got the tone of what they were going for,” that tone being one of high camp. The implicit message? That the difference between “male” and “female” is now so non-existent persons of either sex can play one another without anyone non-transphobic in the audience so much as batting an eyelid: I can’t wait to see Robert De Niro playing Shirley Temple.
This novel development facilitated by the Barbie blockbuster, says Nef, now opens the door to him and his fellow trans actors being able to fill a much wider variety of roles on-screen, roles “that aren’t merely redemptive … I’m excited for trans anti-heroes on-screen … I’m excited for trans sex on-screen. I’m excited for trans nudity on-screen.” And, in particular, “I’m excited for trans assholes on-screen.” Mission already accomplished, I think.
A feast for the eyes
Oddly enough, there is an obscure historical parallel for all this. In 1934, the Spanish Surrealist painter Salvador Dalí published a wilfully weird essay in the leading French Surrealist journal Minotaure, “The New Colors of Spectral Sex Appeal”. Here, the eccentric artist humorously suggested that, one day, womankind would be transformed into a new species of deconstructable and rearrangeable doll like those sculpted and photographed by his fellow 1930s Surrealist Hans Bellmer, via “the disarticulation and distortion of her anatomy”.
This would lead to the creation of the post-human “body that can be dismantled”, the crowning culmination of what Dalí saw as the ever-increasing growth of “female exhibitionism” in an age of high fashions, new sexual freedoms for both genders, and novel visual mass-market medias like photography and film.
The rearrangeable doll-woman of tomorrow would be able to detach and “isolate” these elements of her figure entirely, and thus “show each part separately” to the world at large – a well-endowed woman could quite literally remove her chest and place it on a pedestal for admirers.
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Womb raiders
But where does abortion come into all this? With this August’s news that the UK’s first successful womb transplant has just taken place in Oxford.
The transplant was female-to-female, occurring between two sisters, but that has not stopped various transgender ideologues fantasising (not necessarily entirely impossibly, given enough time and Frankenstein-type will and effort on the part of activist doctors) about trans women gaining successful access to transplanted wombs too. Then, these men in dresses will also possess items of previously indisputably female biology – so that will finally mean that, at last, they too are indisputably female themselves, right?
Wrong. Trans “women” can already have breast implants and various other similar procedures, but it still does not make them into actual women. Instead, it makes them more like contemporary versions of Mae West in Salvador Dalí’s 1930s comic fantasy: the rearrangeable woman of Surrealism is now so ultra-rearrangeable that you can cut bits off from her and glue them onto waiting men too, so they can adopt her shapely cartoon silhouette for themselves instead.
The conservative-minded English “reactionary feminist” thinker Mary Harrington has recently spoken of this kind of potential procedure representing a form of “meat Lego Gnosticism”, transforming the human frame itself into an inherently fungible concept.
The Surrealists got there first, I think, and the idea of a pregnant male is indeed in itself a characteristically Surrealist concept; indeed, the inherent comic value of it was once recognised by Hollywood casting directors so clearly that they deliberately cast the most hyper-masculine star of the day, Arnold Schwarzenegger, as just such a ludicrously pregnant male in the dire 1994 comedy film Junior (“Nothing is Inconceivable” goes the tagline).
Abortive logic
But, now, gender-blind casting is here, and suddenly we are told by Hollywood that there is nothing comic whatsoever about women playing at being men and men playing at being women anymore: instead, as Hari Nef allegedly so capably shows, there is no meaningful difference between the two sexes at all, so why shouldn’t a man have a womb transplant to better method-act at being a woman?
But why would a man even want to gain a womb in the first place? The obvious answer is “To get pregnant”, thereby to look much more like a real woman in fetching cinematic silhouette-form than they ever could simply by shoving a mere cushion up their top. And yet, an even darker answer suggests itself as the next stage to this potential future procedure: “To get pregnant and then to get an abortion.” Abortions, it seems, are now aspirational, at least to some of the very worst solipsists in the trans-crowd.
Around the time of the Oxford womb-transplant, transgender activist Rhiannon Rose went viral on Twitter/X, following his posting of a video clip in which he shamelessly announced, in a manner widely interpreted as being apparently in all seriousness, that “I want to be the first transwoman to have an abortion.”
As shown by English pro-abortion campaigner Ann Furedi in a condemnatory article on Spiked, Rose is not the first to express similar sentiments. US academic and self-styled “unreformed omnisexual chaos Muppet” and “synthetic female hormone monster” Grace Lavery, author of the abysmal-sounding biography Please Miss: A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Penis, has in the past observed (in Furedi’s view “wistfully”) that “Someone alive today will become the first transwoman to have an abortion”, an ambition followed by an emetic love-heart emoji.
Although staunchly pro-abortion herself, Furedi suggests that for most real women who actually seek one, “abortion is not a political statement” and “has nothing to do with their identity”, but is generally a regretted surgery they feel, rightly or wrongly, they must go through “to solve major problems in their lives.” You may approve or disapprove of such procedures, but to anyone but a narcissistic psychopath, “abortion is never a goal in itself.” But then, many of the more extreme trans activists these days are nothing but narcissistic psychopaths, aren’t they?
Let’s get this straight: if their words are indeed to be taken at face value, the likes of Rose and Lavery are so in love with themselves and their acts of Hollywood gender-blender make-believe they actually express a desire to either get pregnant themselves, or see someone else like them do so, purely in order to then murder the foetus, as an apparently worthless, throwaway accessory to their own public method-acting session. An unborn life becomes a mere prop to their fake but sacred sense of pseudo-womanhood: like a living wig or a fake yet animate pair of strap-on breasts.
Not even the determinedly Surrealist mind of Salvador Dalí could have come up with something as warped as the notion of “recreational abortion”. Woke Hollywood producers may think it is oh-so “kind” and “progressive” to cast men as women thereby to groom audiences into subliminally accepting all this stuff, but it isn’t really terribly “kind” to the made-to-be-slaughtered babies themselves, is it?
Whilst I doubt they realise just what they are helping potentially bring about, such foolish casting-agents are more literally “blind” than they may currently anticipate. In truth, the makers of films like Barbie are helping facilitate not future womb-transplants, but future tomb-transplants.
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Steven Tucker is a UK-based writer with over ten books to his name. His next, Hitler’s & Stalin’s Misuse of Science, comparing the woke pseudoscience of today to the totalitarian pseudoscience of the past, will be published in summer 2023.
Image credit: Eddie Redmayne in 'The Danish Girl'
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