My mother died in 2016, and she is dearly and deeply missed by her family. She preceded my dad by 13 months. It took quite some time for my sister and I to get around to looking though all the boxes of stuff that was at my parent’s house, and I’ve been dutifully going through much of it recently, and in one box, I unearthed the program for a show my mother was in called ‘The Cotton Minstrel.’
My mother was born on the last day of 1937 and graduated from high school in 1955. At that time in Escambia County, the schools were still segregated, and in her high school, the seniors would put on a minstrel show. My mother, being the popular head cheerleader, was cast in this show as ‘Petunia.’
For those unfamiliar, a minstrel show was an event where white people would use charcoal or shoe polish or something dark to blacken their skin, and then they would parody black people, black accents, and perceived black habits and attitudes. It was generally meant to be comic, but it was deeply disrespectful. Minstrel shows are where we get the term ‘blackface.’ My mother appeared in blackface for The Cotton Minstrel in high school.
I’m not sure how long minstrel shows carried on in public schools in Escambia County, but I went to the same high school she did, and by 1977, when I started, those days were long over. The schools were integrated, and as far as I could tell, the students, black and white, were mostly respectful towards each other and had friendships that crossed the race barrier. I know I did.
And my mother, much to her credit, updated her attitudes. She became a teacher in the same school district and was instrumental, in the 1970s, in addressing the lingering antagonisms that existed between black and white students. She was a part of the larger institutional effort to create better relationships between the students, and she disallowed my sister and I from using any racial slurs, as did my dad. We grew up free from the sort of racial antagonism that marked her time in school, and things were better. In the final presidential election of her life, in 2012, she pulled the level enthusiastically for Obama.
My mother was a champion for women’s rights as well, and in 1978, she traveled to Washington DC to march in support of the ERA, which stands for the Equal Rights Amendment. Had it passed, it would have been a constitutional amendment meant to secure equal rights for women in all areas of the law.
In short, my mother was a good woman, well educated, active in her community and a strong supporter if equal rights for all. She was a wonderful woman in full. She gave birth to me and her daughter, my sister Nancy. Nancy gave birth to my niece Lauren, who has now given birth to two daughters.
Giving birth is what women do. In fact, only women do this. Who does not give birth are men, including those that now mock women with their grotesque parody of women and put on what I will call ‘pinkface.’
This kind of behavior should be as embarrassing and unacceptable as ‘blackface,’ and minstrel shows, and perhaps one day, it will be. As of now, men who dress up as women and demand to be treated as actual females, including access to women’s private spaces, are not shamed; they are celebrated. They are hired to represent some of the leading brands in the world. They are getting rich, they are winning sports championships, and they are bullying everyone else to silence. If my mother was alive and spoke up for real woman and girls, they’d label her a ‘bigoted bitch’ and attack her physically. This is where we are now.
Many of the trans-women post themselves doing the most stereotypical things that perpetuate an image of women as frivolous and foolish. The prancing, the posing, the general silliness of the most popular trans-women would be merely childish if it was on MTV and those were real 16-year-old girls. One might assume they would grow up to be adult women in time and do womanly things. But many of the trans are not kids; they are fully grown men who are putting on a female minstrel show. They act in the most extreme forms of youthful adolescent girls, and yet they demand to be taken seriously as women.
Dylan Mulvaney is the trans who says he is transitioning from a man to a girl and who was hired to promote Bud Light, a beer brand that its own marketing director says is ‘in decline.’ She hired Mulvaney to promote Bud Light, and here it is. For this, he was paid a substantial amount of money.
It seems like a SNL skit about a 13-year-old girl, except he is serious. I know a lot of very feminine women, and they don’t act like Dylan Mulvaney. Some of them know a lot about sports and enjoy them. They are beautiful and playful, and funny, and smart, but they aren’t this. This man is putting on a femme show in his ‘pinkface,’ and there are no other words for it. It’s a show, and it’s mocking real women, and he is serious, and Bud Light hired him.
Being silly little girls, however, is not where it stops. There is no way for a man to have menstrual cramps, since men don’t menstruate. And yet, there are hours video of men clutching their abdomen and moaning about mentrual cramps. They can use this as an excuse to miss school and work. Observe:
Some trans women even claim to be superior to the actual lowly natural born women, mocking actual female body parts.
The minstrel shows of old would mock black features as well. The women would stuff their clothing to show an exaggerated buttocks. Not so be outdone, a trans teacher in Canada, Kayla Lemieux, has taken to teaching shop class wearing a pair of huge prosthetic breasts.
What purpose does any of this serve? Well, there are great benefits to the trans-women, as Mulvaney demonstrates. For the men who are clearing the floor in the women’s sports category, there are benefits as well. Lia Thomas was a middling swimmer at best as a man, but the NCAA champion as a woman. There are men competing against women in boxing, running, and weightlifting. These men competed as men, did not win, and switched to the female category and rose to the top. Is this not cheating? The losers are the girls, like Riley Gaines, who would have won, but had to accept second place to make way for a man.
This will go on until the courts stop it, or as was the case with black faced minstrel shows, it becomes culturally unacceptable. That day can’t come soon enough. All women, especially the ones like my mother who grew as a person over the course of her life and stood up for women’s rights, deserve better. Ladies, you all deserve better. Stand together against this abomination or your rights will slide backwards and a man will be the top women in every endeavor of life.
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ADDENDUM: Is Dylan Mulvaney even trans? He appears to have been putting on the same show even before he was declaring himself to be a girl. Take a look here: Pre-Trans Video of Dylan Mulvaney
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