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Now for something completely different: the queer theorists who celebrate cancer
October marks annual Breast Cancer Awareness Month, with its characteristic fluttering pink ribbons and charity runs springing up right across the Western world.
Yet there are certain other, rather more obscure, cancers out there of whose existence the general public is still lamentably unaware by comparison: sexually transmitted dog cancer, for instance.
Despite its comically absurd name, this is a genuine disease, albeit its official medical label is the slightly less sensational “Canine Transmissible Venereal Tumour”, or CTVT. The cancer in question is unique in the sense it can actually be passed on from animal patient to animal patient; nobody with lung cancer or breast cancer can transmit their ailment on to those around them through coughs and sneezes like a bad dose of the flu, thank goodness. CTVT is different, though. Dogs who mate with sufferers are liable to end up infected with a tumour themselves.
Fortunately, such carbuncles are abnormally receptive to drug-based treatment, making the disease often highly curable. Some commentators have reacted to the prospect of eradicating it entirely with alarm, however. As one hand-wringing science writer put it in a 2019 piece about CTVT in The Atlantic, “I wonder, when we talk about cure, do we really mean extinction?” Apparently, “There’s a growing movement to protect unglamorous parasites alongside more charismatic fauna” like pandas and polar bears – even up to and including cancer cells. That’s right, even tumours have rights now. “If it was kept [alive] in a museum [i.e., a zoo?] that would be ideal,” The Atlantic quoted one Cambridge biologist as saying of such precious beings – presumably at taxpayer expense.
Sick in the head
You may think the idea of tumours enjoying rights to be a thoroughly mad one, but introducing mad ideas into the general hive-mind of society and thereby helping poison the shared bloodstream of wider humanity is actually the characteristic modus operandi of that contemporary civilisational cancer we now call “Queer Theory”.
By labelling Queer Theory a “cancer”, I am not merely attempting provocatively to insult it: there is a genuine similarity between the way the two malignant obscenities operate. Consider the incredibly strange image of a tumour being giving quasi-human rights and existing comfortably subsidised upon taxpayer support with which I opened. That is a demented notion you will almost certainly never have thought of before – but you have now, and you may well never forget it.
In a very real sense, your pre-existing normative idea of what a cancer tumour actually is will therefore have been irredeemably “queered” by me – that is to say, changed and mutated in an intentionally bizarre fashion, just like happens when normal, healthy cells in the human body begin to metastasise and mutate into unhealthy cancerous ones. The word “queer”, when used in a political or pseudo-academic context, actually functions as a verb, not a noun. Ordinary people are more familiar with the word “queer” as a noun, used to denote homosexuals, lesbians or transgenderists. Within actual Queer Theory itself, however, this is not necessarily so.
To “queer something” (the word here now being used as a verb, not a noun), means simply to distort, complicate or alter it in a deliberately weird or subversive nature. Drawing a moustache on the Mona Lisa would be to queer it; literally cutting your own nose off to spite your face would be to queer it; buttering your bread with battery acid would be to queer it; or inserting cancerous cells into a previously healthy organ would be to queer it, too. Queering is perhaps best seen as a deliberate process of giving the normative cancer – but cancer suddenly redefined as being a positive form of disease, not a negative one.
Bent but still straight
Homosexuals as such are only considered “queer” by analogy by true activists in the field of Queerness. Heterosexuality has generally been considered by most societies throughout history to be normative: therefore, homosexuality is comparatively non-normative by contrast, and thus analogically “queer”. This makes it potentially politically useful to those on the Far Left who wish to deconstruct, tear down and rearrange society wholesale – most actual gay people are really just tools and dupes in these actually rather uncaring ideologues’ manipulative and malicious hands.
After all, many homosexuals are, their actual homosexuality apart, otherwise perfectly socially normal: respectable men like Professor David Starkey, Douglas Murray and their ilk spend their days walking around wearing suits and ties and acting in a wholly normal fashion outside the bedroom, not mincing ostentatiously through the streets in leather fetish-gear waving rainbow flags during Gay Parades. Indeed, Starkey and Murray are generally considered to be leading conservatives, their homosexuality notwithstanding. Thus, a genuine Queer Theorist would not consider them to be truly “queer” at all; instead, they would have to be queered by, for example, getting them to dye their hair purple and green, don nipple-tassels and begin dressing like the biker from the Village People. Starkey and Murray would have to be mutated into genuine queerness, in other words, via something often known as the “politics of parody”.
The clearest example of the politics of parody in action today is that of the Drag Queen. By getting obvious men to dress up as absurd cartoonish parodies of actual women, combining stereotypical features of both males and females – pink dress and black bowler hat, large artificial breasts and long hairy beard – such individuals act to subvert and undermine gender binaries, binaries in general, and the very notion of normality itself. Their appearance is a walking parody of the human body as we traditionally know it. Yet cancer, too, can be seen as a parody of the usual, healthy, normative human body: by analogy, sickness stands to health much as homosexuality stands to heterosexuality, or abnormality to normality.
Once these plainly cancerous ideas have been injected into certain previously healthy organs of the wider Western body-politic – our universities, for instance – their operational model is to begin to metastasise and spread out to infect other previously healthy organs, too, like the media, schools, sport or political parties. Unlike the average cancer, Queer Theory really is transmissible from person to person, or social body to social body, as shown by the current epidemic spread of transgenderism across the Western world: the direct intellectual equivalent of sexually transmitted dog cancer.
What Queer Theorists want to do is quite literally transform their own civilisation into a thoroughly sick society – under the delusional assumption that, once the allegedly unjust traditional, normative, capitalist culture we once unquestioningly enjoyed has been torn down wholesale, what will emerge will somehow be a post-Marxist utopia. This is every bit as wrongheaded as saying that giving a healthy person cancer will likewise allow them to emerge with a brand new carcinogenically mutated body which will somehow be much better than their old one ever was, like real-life X-Men.
Giving cancer cancer
Consider Kimiko Tobimatsu, a Toronto-based lesbian lawyer and author of the 2020 graphic novel Kimiko Does Cancer. As “a young queer with breast-cancer”, and a mixed-race one at that, Kimiko was left alienated by her treatment regime, as the “corporate sponsorships of the mainstream breast-cancer community don’t exactly scream “we’re gay!”, or at least not my brand of masculine-presenting, left-leaning gay.” But why the hell should they? Because, it would appear, breast cancer is actually an excellent means of dismantling normative society in a much wider sense.
“Losing my breasts wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world. I wonder if I’d like the look, I could play with gender a bit more …” Kimiko thinks in one frame of her comic, an idea she brands “topless [as in breastless] activism”. Yet topless activism also has an inherently anti-capitalist agenda, as “Queer writers have also brought an important analysis to the ways the cancer industry has intertwined with capitalism.” As such, the idea of “depoliticizing cancer” and treating it as just a disease rather than yet another cog within the evil right-wing system which enslaves us, is misguided. Charitable pink-ribbon campaigns simply encourage the public to donate cash towards supporting patients, rather than “forc[ing] engagement with more difficult issues like poverty or racial justice” instead.
As an illustration, Kimiko provides another comic-panel, in which breast cancer charities march in solidarity with utterly unrelated causes, illustrated by banners like “JUSTICE FOR MIGRANT WORKERS” and “STOP DEPORTATIONS NOW”. By this twisted logic, a donation to a cancer-charity may “legitimately” end up being used to campaign for a borderless world, not a cancerless one.
In a piece on the website rethinkbreastcancer.com, entitled “Gender Expression and the Appeal of a Mastectomy”, Kimiko further explained how:
“for me, as a gender-nonconforming, queer woman, the idea of a [medically enforced] mastectomy actually had a certain appeal … [Although not technically fully trans] I do gravitate to collared men’s tops and hide my breasts more than I accentuate them … So, when the topic of mastectomy came up, I found myself wondering if I’d like my new look.”
Yes, cancer-mutilated breasts can now be a fashion accessory, it would appear: as with the idea of a taxpayer-funded tumour being given human rights, your previous, normative, common-sense idea of what cancer itself is has now once again been successfully queered. Kimiko even goes on to explicitly admit this is one of her main ideological aims:
“There was one more reason that I sort of liked the idea of a mastectomy – I could mess with people’s assumptions. I could turn the typical pity associated with a mastectomy on its head. Or push back on the other likely assumption – that I must be trans [rather than just a very mannish lesbian]. A reminder that gender expression can look all sorts of ways, even within the context of a cis gender identity.”
Another of Kimiko’s essays is entitled “Straight Cancer in a Queer Body”. How can cancer possibly be “straight”? In the same way a socially normal homosexual like David Starkey or Douglas Murray is; normal cancer is just too boringly normative. Instead, it too must be queered into a state of even greater pathological abnormality – cancer itself must now be given cancer.
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Untickled pink
Another individual with a thoroughly diseased brain was Philippa Hetherington, a London-based lecturer who died of secondary breast cancer in 2022. Her equally queer essay “How Breast Cancer Rips Up Conventional Markers of Gender” decries contemporary pink ribbon fundraising campaigns as merely a sinister cisheteronormative corporate crusade to reinforce standard binary gender norms upon the helpless sick.
Undergoing breast cancer treatment, she approvingly argues, “opens up an array of potential genderqueer identities” for sufferers. For example, having chemotherapy can make a woman’s hair fall out. She cites one female chemotherapy patient as saying “Being bald, I felt like an ‘It’ [with] no gender.” Instead of viewing this as a saddened complaint, Hetherington prefers to see it as a potential avenue for queering the normative female body.
She approvingly cites Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s description of her own cancer as an exciting “adventure in applied deconstruction” as it literally made her own body fall apart into incoherent mush around her, much as the leftist philosophy of Michel Foucault-style Far Left pseudo-academic deconstructionism, which Queer Theory itself originally grew (or metastasised) out from, seeks to make Western civilisation decay into mere atoms around us all too. Sedgwick, it seems, had “never felt less stability in my gender, age and racial identities” as she did when she had breast cancer, which opened this lucky patient up to “a dizzying array of gender challenges and experiments.”
But, of course, continues Hetherington, queerphobic doctors and charities seek to “close off the genderqueer possibilities [cancer] otherwise raises” by pressurising patients with “the demand to perform upbeat, cheerful and attractive femininity even when shorn of one’s breasts” by having them surgically reconstructed following recovery, wearing a wig and pinning girly pink ribbons to their dress. It seems that “breast cancer is a direct strike against stereotypic[al] womanhood” [yes, what a “stereotype” it is that women have breasts]. Therefore, “In this context, the frantic performance of pink femininity takes on a specific hue; it has to be so visible precisely because it is so unstable and weak.” Instead of Barbie-style pink ribbons and glossy blonde long-haired wigs, what is needed are “the seeds of hope for a genuinely queerer breast cancer culture.” Enter an entire new breed of ideologically corrupted medics and researchers who are only too happy to oblige.
Physician, queer thyself!
A sudden rush of medical papers devoted to helping queer cancer are now appearing in research journals worldwide. One particularly disturbing example appeared in the Archives of Sexual Behaviour in January 2023, entitled “Reinforcing or Disrupting Gender Affirmation: The Impact of Cancer on Transgender Embodiment and Identity”.
Led by a team of Australia and New Zealand-based medics, psychologists, paediatricians, gynaecologists, trans activists and sociologists, the study interviewed various trans cancer patients, some of whom viewed their illness as a “godsend” as it necessitated the free, taxpayer-funded surgical removal of unwanted “gendered” organs like diseased breasts, ovaries or testicles: “I feel like I now have a body that fits me” gushed one grateful patient. “Cancer allowed me to achieve the flat chest and breastless body I wanted,” said another, as if advertising some quack new diet-plan. Another called cancer “a gift” which facilitated the “relief” of feeling true bodily “wholeness” at last. “Hormone blockers mean that my testicles, well, they’re very small now … [meaning] I can wear tighter panties and hide everything” cooed one happy man pretending to be a woman.
Other patients, however, complained that surgeons had unthinkingly warned them sympathetically of various unpleasant possible side-effects, such as going chemically bald, which they themselves actually found to be positives that induced “gender euphoria” within them. Thus, the surgeons’ warnings were deemed “confusing” by interviewees, the seeming implication being that doctors should instead begin presenting cancer to their patients as a wonderful new opportunity to dismantle and deconstruct previously unexamined gender binaries rather than, for example, a highly unpleasant deadly disease which could well soon kill them.
There was a further apparent narrative within the paper implying cancer may actually help turn a patient trans. “I feel more non-binary” than ever before after getting cancer, enthused one 58-year-old. “My witnessing all the intervention possibilities [e.g., mastectomies, hysterectomies, skin-grafts] has given me courage to embrace gender-affirming surgery and hormones” testified another.
Even more curious, evidence was presented that simply being in close proximity to cancer patients having their breasts and ovaries removed might be enough to turn their carers or lovers trans too! One man interviewed only realised he was trans after looking after his dying female partner, experiencing strange thoughts about surgical bodily alteration, and then “confessing to her that I’d rather spend the last day of my life [with her] authentically” – that is, with authentic fake breasts glued onto him, presumably. This is a genuine sentence from the paper: “A non-binary carer told us that they [first] realised the “disconnect” with their body and their “suppressed” feelings about gender affirmation when they witnessed their partner’s distress at the loss of her breasts.” How sick and self-obsessed would you have to be, precisely, to look at someone with cancer and think “lucky you, wish I had that too!”?
There is no way, up until about five or so years ago, that people outside of actual lunatic asylums would have begun experiencing such blatantly morally perverted thought-patterns as this. The only reason they have begin doing so now is because of the lamentable success Queer Theory has recently experienced at spreading relentlessly through the social organs of its host societies, their immune systems already fatally weakened by the more fundamental underlying disease of excessive liberalism.
It turns out sexually transmitted dog cancer is not quite so unique as it once seemed – people really can give one another cancer after all. It is called Queer Theory, and it is little more than a malign lump which should be surgically removed from the West with blades of cold, hard steel before it is too late for everyone.
Steven Tucker is a UK-based writer with over ten books to his name. His latest, Hitler’s & Stalin’s Misuse of Science, comparing the woke pseudoscience of today to the totalitarian pseudoscience of the past, has been published in summer 2023.
Image: Bigstock
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Mary Bennett commented 2023-10-14 08:35:28 +1100For those who still ask: “How could so many Germans— in the most ‘advanced’ nation of the world — have been deceived so horribly, and go along with such evil?” Now we see.
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