I’m sorry, but a woman cannot just click her fingers and become a ‘he’.

 FROM SPIKED:

We need to talk about Ellen Page

So that’s it, is it? Ellen Page is no more? She’s been disappeared? She’s been shoved down the memory hole, left to stalk that netherworld of people whose names must never be uttered out loud, like Bruce Jenner, Frank Maloney, Voldemort? Ellen Page, the actress most famous for starring in irritant quirkhouse movie Juno, has now declared that she is Elliot Page and that she’s a he. And, boom, just like that, Ellen’s gone. She’s being erased from film history. People are getting into trouble even for saying the word ‘Ellen’. ‘Who?’, woke identitarians ask, as if they’ve all gone mad.

We need to talk about this. Specifically we need to talk about Ellen Page. We need to talk about the fact that this woman – yes, woman – existed in public life and in the celluloid imagination for many years, and that can’t just be scrubbed from the record, Soviet-style. Yesterday, Ellen issued a statement saying she is now Elliot and her pronouns are he and they. That’s just bad grammar. Swiftly, slavishly even, the establishment media and the film world rushed to erase Ellen, the movie star of a decade’s standing. It’s like she never existed. From IMDb to Wikipedia, it’s all Elliot. ‘Elliot Page is a Canadian actor’, Wikipedia tells us. Where’s Ellen gone?

I’m sorry, but a woman cannot just click her fingers and become a ‘he’...

With eye-swivelling speed, Ellen was erased. IMDb now tells us that the lead star of Juno (2007) was Elliot Page (though in parenthesis it says, rather riskily, ‘as Ellen Page’). Juno was ‘their breakout role’, it says. But it wasn’t ‘their’ breakout role. It was Ellen Page’s. We all saw the movie. It was about a teenage girl who got pregnant. Elliot Page didn’t play that teenage girl any more than Caitlyn Jenner won gold in the decathlon at the 1976 Olympics. It was Ellen, and the gold-medal winner was Bruce. Although if you ask Google ‘Who won gold in the decathlon at Montreal in 1976?’, it says: ‘Caitlyn Jenner.’ Which is a lie. They’re lying about the past now.

The strength of the trans ideology was confirmed by the swiftness with which media institutions turned Ellen into Elliot and started calling her ‘he’. They had to, I guess, given the fury that will be visited upon anyone who says ‘Ellen’ or ‘she’. How dare you mention that mere woman who we have all agreed to erase from the historical record? Trans campaign groups have instructed the media to stop ‘deadnaming’ Page. ‘Deadnaming’ is a neo-Orwellian word used to publicly shame anyone who utters names, or facts, that the woke elites have agreed to put in the memory hole. ‘Ellen Page’, ‘Bruce Jenner won gold’, ‘born a male’, ‘born a female’ – these are all now deadnaming thoughtcrimes.

First, is it really the case that Page is male? A he? How can someone who doesn’t have male biology and who has had no male experiences – boyhood, male puberty, masculine impulses, being a brother, an uncle, a father – be a ‘he’? How does that work? Is it magic? Or have words like male, he, brother and father been so denuded of meaning thanks to the cult of genderfluidity that anyone can adopt them as their preferred identity? It is not prejudiced to ask these questions; it is reasonable, and important.

Secondly, there’s the question of what is happening to lesbians in the era of transgenderism. ..

And thirdly, there’s the issue of democratic discussion, of democratic public life, of what the rest of us think and believe. The transgender fad captures just how atomising, anti-democratic and elitist identity politics has become. The idea is that an individual can be whatever he or she wants to be, and everyone else must – absolutely must – bow down to their view of themselves. So a female journalist who gave birth to a child insists that we all agree she is the child’s father. Sam Smith insists we call him ‘they’, even though that makes no sense – he is one person, not many people. ...

Surely it’s time more of us stood up and said that, in their private lives, people can refer to themselves however they please, but in our public world, in the space we all share as citizens guided by knowledge, beliefs and traditions, truth matters; we matter. The cult of transgenderism isn’t liberation. All it does is allow individuals to ‘liberate’ themselves from reality while heaping pressure on the rest of us to deny the truth, to silence our own knowledge, to lie to ourselves and to others. That is the opposite of freedom. Sorry, Ellen.