There is a scene in Monty Python’s iconic film The Life of Brian in which Stan, a member of the People’s Front of Judea, expresses to his comrades his desire to become a woman and have babies. John Cleese’s character hilariously points to the lunacy of indulging Stan in the delusion that he will ever be able to give birth to a child.
Now, while many of us still find humour in the notion that a man can give birth, if Stan were alive today he would more than likely be a senior policy adviser to a western governments on transgender issues. He, or she, or whatever invented pronoun of the week by which Stan would demand we refer to him for fear of losing our livelihoods, would be at the forefront of defending the NHS’s provision of puberty-blocking medication to children as young as ten, many of whom, as research has shown, would have desisted from having gender dysphoria before they were adults and without being pumped full of unnecessary chemicals.
Above all else, though, Stan would be delighted to have lived to see the day that not only could men with gender dysphoria have their todgers chopped off by the state, but that in the near future transgender women will be provided with womb transplants, thus answering the Cleese character’s query on where Stan’s foetus would gestate.
We live in the most bizarre of times when large swathes of society see it as progressive and enlightened to allow transgender women to be given womb transplants, but cruel and intolerant to defend the right not to be killed of humans in the wombs of real women.
We also live in an age where the censorious Left dominate the comedy circuit and much of the mainstream media are highly critical of any comedians who don’t fully subscribe to progressive shibboleths. Comedians such as Ricky Gervais and Dave Chappelle have been widely denounced for ‘transphobia’ in their routines. Progressives are not just content with dictating how everyone should think, they now want to control what other people may find funny. They are delighted with comics mocking Christians and straight white males but often call for censorship when it comes to their own cherished beliefs being ridiculed. In a free society no ideas should be beyond critique or satire. Progressives can’t have it both ways.
Anyway, putting aside the ‘transphobia’ in The Life of Brian, the BBC has made it clear that a show like Monty Python’s Flying Circus would never be commissioned today because there are just too many white people in it. Why is it acceptable to complain about too many white people in a country that is predominantly white? We would rightly criticise someone who complained that there were too many black people on a TV show. The BBC’s dismissal of Monty Python based on the skin colour of its cast led former Python Terry Gilliam to mockingly say he now identifies as a black lesbian.
We have already entered the brave new world of trans men giving birth (these are women who have had hormone treatment to give them male characteristics but who have retained their wombs), even though it seems strange, shall we say, to want to live as a man and yet have the uniquely female experience of pregnancy and childbirth.
And in the near future Stan’s dream of gestating a foetus having been born a man may become reality. On that day we will have woken to find ourselves in a real-life Monty Python sketch. Only by then it might will be a hate crime to laugh out loud about it.
