I start to worry when I agree with both Bari Weiss and Andrew Sullivan, both in the same week! Heck, I’ve even been listening to Glenn Greenwald.

Dave Chappelle Is Right, Isn’t He?

The comedian defends reality. Which is currently under siege.

by Andrew Sullivan | 2:21 PM EDT

There’s an understandable tendency to view the debate about transgender ideology today as a marginal issue, affecting a minuscule number of people, and at most, a trivial matter in the larger culture wars. And I can see why. It does seem on the surface to be about maybe 0.2 percent of humanity. And if you venture an opinion on it, the consequences are intense — so why bother?

And, overwhelmingly, the elite media in the United States prevents readers from knowing that a debate is even happening, let alone what it is really about. If the argument about gender theory is mentioned at all, it is dismissed as a bunch of “anti-trans” bigots — aka “TERFs” — hurting a beleaguered and tiny minority, for some inconceivable, but surely awful, reason.

And so when the greatest living comedian, Dave Chappelle, bases almost an entire Netflix special on the subject — alternately hilarious and humane, brutal and true — and wades into the debate with wellies on, the exact same piece about the special will be written in much of elite media.

You could write it yourself, couldn’t you? 1. He’s a bigot. “The phobic jokes keep coming — and Chappelle’s efforts to ironise them, to dance around rather than wallow in the boorishness, are derisory,” says the Guardian review. 2. He’s out of date: “All that’s left is the same tired observations delivered behind a bizarre form of commiseration, this time with an added dash of JK Rowling solidarity and using someone else’s death to validate his half-decade of public stubbornness,” according to IndieWire. NPR adds a “multi-racial whiteness” edge: “Too often in The Closer, it just sounds like Chappelle is using white privilege to excuse his own homophobia and transphobia.”

Both the “stubbornness” and the “bigot” theme are reiterated in Vulture: Chappelle is full of “outdated excuses masking a refusal to update a worldview … his head is up his ass. He needs new ideas.” And, with respect to the marginalized: “He’s just asking for you to take up less space, to usher in progress by giving other people time to come around to you.”

There’s much more at the original, but it has to be asked: why would a conservative Catholic like me be agreeing with three famously liberal homosexuals?^[1]Miss Weiss is actually bisexual, though she eschews that label. Shockingly enough, all three of these famous commentators believe in some very, very radical things like freedom of speech and individual liberty.

In his recent column on substack, Mr Sullivan notes the rather objective truth: despite what today’s left and the ‘transgender’ activists want you to believe, only females can carry a child through gestation and give birth. We noted, last Monday, The Washington Post’s stylebook change to reference “pregnant individuals” rather than “pregnant women”, due to the left’s cockamamie notion that men can be pregnant.

A transwoman cannot give birth as a woman gives birth. She does not ovulate. Her vagina, if it exists, is a simulacrum of one, created by a multiple array of surgeries. Sex in humans is binary, with those few exceptions at the margins — mixtures of the two — proving rather than disproving the rule. Until five minutes ago, this was too obvious to be stated. Now, this objective fact is actually deemed a form of “hate.” Hate.

This means that the debate is no longer about 0.2 percent of humanity. It’s about imposing an anti-scientific falsehood on 99.8 percent of humanity. It means that we have to strip all women of their unique biological experience, to deny any physical differences between men and women in sports, to tell all boys and girls that they can choose their sex, to erase any places reserved exclusively for biological women, like shelters for those who have been abused by men, and to come up with terms like “pregnant people” to describe mothers. Yes — mothers. The misogyny buried in this is gob-smacking. Is Mothers’ Day next for the trans chopping block?

The struggle is one of language, because language is the formative basis for thought. If the term “woman” can encompass both females and biological males who claim to be female, it has become meaningless. That the terms “cisgender” and “sex assigned at birth“^[2]Wikipedia defines “sex assigned at birth” as: Sex assignment (sometimes known as gender assignment) is the discernment of an infant’s sex at birth. Assignment may be done prior to … Continue reading ever came into existence demonstrates the idiocy of modern life.

Mr Sullivan has no problems with homosexual or transgendered persons, but he is mocking the idea that current political correctness requires not only acceptance of transgenderism as something real and normal, rather than a mental illness, but that everyone must publicly conform to the demands of the transgendered for recognition of their claims.

Chappelle’s final Netflix special, “The Closer,” is a classic. Far from being outdated, it’s slightly ahead of its time, as the pushback against wokeness gains traction. It is extremely funny, a bit meta, monumentally mischievous, and I sat with another homo through the whole thing, stoned, laughing our asses off — especially when he made fun of us. The way the elite media portrays us, you’d think every member of the BLT community is so fragile we cannot laugh at ourselves. It doesn’t occur to them that, for many of us, Chappelle is a breath of honest air, doing what every comic should do: take aim at every suffocating piety of the powers that be — including the increasingly weird 2SLGBTQQIA+ mafia — and detonating them all.

I will admit it: I had to follow the link in the New York Post’s mocking article about Justin Trudeau to find out that 2SLGBTQQIA+ stands for “Two Spirit, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, questioning, intersex and asexual”. As people keep adding letters to “LGBT” it kept getting sillier and sillier, to the point at which mockery is the natural response.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is being mocked on social media after he published two posts that mention the latest woke iteration of an acronym for people with different sexual identities — 2SLGBTQQIA+ — which some likened to an encrypted password or “headbutting the keyboard.”

“People across the country are lighting candles to honour Indigenous women, girls, and 2SLGBTQQIA+ people who are missing or have been murdered. We must continue to work together, raise awareness, and advocate to end this ongoing national tragedy. #SistersinSpirit,” the prime minister posted to Facebook and Twitter on Monday, referencing the Sisters in Spirit vigil, which honors women of specific racial or sexual identities who are missing or have been murdered.

The number and letter ‘2S’ in 2SLGBTQQIA+ includes people who identify as “Two-spirit,” ​referring to someone who identifies as having both a masculine and a feminine spirit. It is used by some Indigenous North Americans to describe their sexual identity.

The acronym, which used to be most commonly known as “LGBTQ,” sparked confusion among social media users.

I guess that some people just aren’t #woke^[3]From Wikipedia: Woke (/ˈwoʊk/) as a political term of African-American origin refers to a perceived awareness of issues concerning social justice and racial justice. It is derived from … Continue reading enough to keep up with the silly acronyms.

I suspect that Messrs Greenwald and Sullivan, and Miss Weiss, despite the fact that they would not approve of my stance on transgenderism and homosexuality, would very strongly support my right to say and publish my beliefs. Fortunately, I’m retired, so I can’t be ‘cancelled’ from my job, but it’s pretty sad that I have to depend upon that protection.

Mr Sullivan’s subtitle claims that reality “is currently under siege,” which is certainly true, because reality and transgenderism are diametrically opposed. No one really thinks that Bruce Jenner^[4]Mr Jenner has legally changed his name to “Caitlyn”, and I suppose that is what has to be used on legal documents now, but my website is not a legal document, and it is The First Street … Continue reading is actually a woman, but political correctness and the #woke left and the credentialed media all pretend that he is, because it’s practically required now.

At some point, the left, who were the champions of unrestricted freedom of speech not all that long ago, will have to recognize people’s freedom of speech. Miss Weiss and Messrs Sullivan and Greenwald have done so, but they are too far and in between these days.