Grab the popcorn and let me tell you a tale of identity politics.
Once upon a time, a man walked into a spa for a ‘Brazilian wax’. The only fly in the ointment here is that the man identifies as a transgender woman and the woman who carries out the waxing (a waxologist) is a practising Muslim who refrains from physical contact with males outside her family. Mind you, one does not have to be a practising Muslim to refrain from intimate physical contact with males other than one’s husband. But I digress.
The waxologist refrained from carrying out the Brazilian wax on the man, and as the only staff member who did male waxing was on sick leave there was no one else to carry out this task.
As such the transgender woman understood the difficulty of the situation and sought the Brazilian wax at another establishment that could carry out waxing on male genitalia.
No, that’s not what happened, of course. This is Canada 2018 so that means only one thing – litigation!
The undepilated person went straight to a lawyer to complain that the Mad Wax salon in Windsor, Ontario, had breached his human rights by denying services based on gender identity and gender expression and caused ‘immense harm to my dignity’. This, the person claimed, could be assuaged with damages of $50,000.
What all of this means, of course, what this competition between the identity groups (we used to call this tribalism) means is that the State must grow ever larger to mediate between each disputing party. Nothing can be resolved amicably. True to form, we are told that ‘the next step is for the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario to arrange a meeting between both parties with a mediator. If the issue can’t be resolved it would move on to an official tribunal hearing’.
By astonishing coincidence a similar story has surfaced in Australia (or maybe such events are now commonplace around the globe). You can read an account of the incident on BuzzFeed News where they put the phrase male genitalia in ‘scare quotes’. That won’t make them magically disappear, by the way.
A transgender woman was left ‘humiliated’ after a Melbourne salon refused to give her a Brazilian wax, saying they were not qualified to do ‘male genitalia’.
Karen Parker, a researcher at La Trobe University, said that when the waxer saw he had not had sex reassignment surgery, she immediately said it wasn’t possible.
‘She said “Let’s get started,” I took the towel off, she looked at me in horror,’ Parker told BuzzFeed News. ‘I felt really humiliated. I like to think I’m an attractive person, but when I was in that room, I felt so ugly.’
Parker is now seeking damages claiming discrimination on the basis of gender identity. Of course he is. We’ve talked about compelled speech before
– now we have compelled male Brazilian waxing. Wax my male genitals or I’ll sue you. 2018 rocks!
And on and on it goes. On the one hand, all of this is quite entertaining – the Leftist hierarchy of victims cannot all be winners – but on the other hand we are seeing the death of civility and decency itself. Goodness knows what the next few years will bring.
