Gender Appropriation ‘Good’; Cultural Appropriation ‘Bad’

by Roger L. Simon

Many of us remember “Four Legs ‘Good’; Two Legs ’Bad’” from George Orwell’s “Animal Farm.”

In its proclaimed superiority of animals over humans, it was perhaps the most memorable expression from that brilliant and often hilarious satire of communism and fascism.

I bet many of our “progressive” friends loved it, too, in their youths, oblivious to how, in present times, it just might in some way be referring to them.

I can remember decades back sitting in a crowd of hipsters in an outdoor theater in Los Angeles’ Topanga Canyon as they, the coolest of the then-cool, chortled away at a decent adaptation of Orwell’s work.

So it was of “Animal Farm” that I immediately thought when my wife Sheryl Longin came up, as she often does, with the right phrase to characterize a particularly malign aspect of our contemporary life.

She called the trans mania that has overtaken our society “gender appropriation,” in response to the left’s endless carping about “cultural appropriation.”

Many men are appropriating women, actually becoming them, in a new form of left-wing misogyny you would think would alarm “feminists.” Somehow, it doesn’t.

Hence, my Orwellian title:  Gender Appropriation “Good”; Cultural Appropriation “Bad.”

The cultural appropriation meme—fraternity boys attacked for celebrating Cinco de Mayo, only Italians can make pizza, and more—so beloved of “progressives” has always seemed to me particularly brain dead.

Virtually everything in culture has been appropriated from something or someone else, starting with the first words uttered by humans.

On a higher level:

Shakespeare, in his history plays, appropriated Holinshed.

Thomas Mann appropriated Goethe in “Dr. Faustus.”

Picasso appropriated Velázquez.

Miles Davis appropriated Dizzy Gillespie.

DJs appropriate other people’s music every time they do a mix. It’s their job.

I could go on and on and bore you to death. Make up your own. I’m sure you can.

The whole cultural appropriation song and dance is, on one level, just dumb. However, in reality, it’s a strategy for one group to bully another to get what it wants, sometimes with violent overtones.

In other words, like most progressivism, “cultural appropriation” is an absurd fake that Orwell would ridicule, and deservedly so until the four-legged cows come home.

“Gender Appropriation” is based on a similar strategy—something we are told by “elites” to accept as good—but is a great deal more dangerous in its implications.

I think we can agree that it—the trans movement—is now everywhere, and not just in the heavily criticized, yet still pervasive, acceptance of transgendered men in women’s sports that Donald Trump has promised to do away with if he is reelected president.

Yet, more importantly, it’s in culture from early childhood. We see this in the fad for drag queen story hours with the most flagrant transvestites reading fairy tales to young children and the sexually explicit material available in school libraries.

The left accuses the right of censoring these explicit books, but as everybody knows—even the lefties themselves, if they were honest—the right just seeks to preserve the innocence, at least for a while anyway, of pre-pubescent 6-year-olds.

What’s behind all this?

Whether conscious or not, the goal of “gender appropriation” is the breakup of the nuclear family. When everything and everyone are confused about gender—a deliberately misused word in itself—what happens to the family unit?

Ultimately, it dissolves.

Many of their rank and file may not believe this or deny it, but that’s been a principal aim of the left since the French Revolution.

Read Rousseau.

Karl Marx, the Frankfurt School later enhanced it, and now there’s the woke obsession that seeks to throw family values and life into the air like so much worn-out confetti to be stomped on and forgotten.

The irony in this is they mean your family and mine, but not theirs.

I hope my wife’s term “gender appropriation” takes off. It could help prevent this cultural Armageddon from destroying the most important part of our lives and the actual lynchpin of Western civilization.

First published in the Epoch Times.