{"id":34117,"date":"2016-01-16T02:00:08","date_gmt":"2016-01-16T07:00:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=34117"},"modified":"2016-01-15T15:59:46","modified_gmt":"2016-01-15T20:59:46","slug":"david-bowie-was-not-the-trans-messiah","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2016\/01\/16\/david-bowie-was-not-the-trans-messiah\/","title":{"rendered":"David  Bowie was not the &#8220;trans messiah&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.nationalreview.com\/article\/429710\/david-bowie-transgenderism-mistaken-link-blot-his-good-name\" target=\"_blank\">Brendan O&#8217;Neill<\/a> on the attempt to portray David Bowie&#8217;s career as something other than music, showbiz, and a set of unevenly brilliant self-marketing abilities:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Poor David Bowie. Barely 72 hours dead and he\u2019s already being misremembered. Turn on the TV and you\u2019ll see cultural talking heads telling the world he was the granddaddy of transgenderism. Open a newspaper and you\u2019ll come across 800-word PhD theses masquerading as op-eds, informing us Bowie paved the way for the \u201cgender fluidity\u201d of the 21st century, the fashion for declaring oneself neither male nor female, but rather non-binary, or genderqueer, and whatever the other post-gender labels are. (It\u2019s easy to lose track. Last year Facebook increased its gender options from 50 to 71, overnight. Presumably some professor suddenly discovered 21 hitherto unknown genders.)<\/p>\n<p>It is a blot on Bowie\u2019s good name to link him with the politics of transgenderism. Just because in the early Seventies he rocked the cultural world by coating himself in makeup and donning dayglo jumpsuits with vertigo-inducing platform shoes, that doesn\u2019t mean he was transgender, far less that he facilitated modern transgenderism. On the contrary, there\u2019s a stark difference between Bowie\u2019s cross-dressing antics and today\u2019s seemingly catching gender dysphoria: Where Bowie and other queens and freaks in the Sixties and Seventies were flipping a beautifully manicured finger at authority, modern transgenderism seeks to become its own form of authority, chastising and censoring those who dare dissent from its theology. The glam crowd broke boundaries; the trans elite enforces new ones.<\/p>\n<p>Bowie\u2019s death had barely been tweeted before people were hailing him the trans messiah. A British newspaper said that 40 years ago Bowie had flown \u201cthe flag for the non-binary movement.\u201d Which is patent nonsense, since nobody \u2014 certainly not this contrarian lad from Brixton in South London \u2014 was using the turgid phrase \u201cnon-binary\u201d in the early 1970s.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Brendan O&#8217;Neill on the attempt to portray David Bowie&#8217;s career as something other than music, showbiz, and a set of unevenly brilliant self-marketing abilities: Poor David Bowie. Barely 72 hours dead and he\u2019s already being misremembered. Turn on the TV and you\u2019ll see cultural talking heads telling the world he was the granddaddy of transgenderism. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,28],"tags":[263,254,196,200],"class_list":["post-34117","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-britain","category-media","tag-1970s","tag-gender","tag-lgbt","tag-music"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-8Sh","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34117","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34117"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34117\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":34118,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34117\/revisions\/34118"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34117"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34117"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34117"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}