A few years ago, I wrote a blog entry about my experience at the fair and how much I loved the animals, especially the elephants (except for the chains securing them to the floor). But another area of the fairgrounds, a place delighting so many teenagers because it seemed almost forbidden, was the "freak show." I don't remember how the display was actually billed now, but within the confines of various tents, depending upon the year, members of a curious public could find a cornucopia of, well, freaks. Human beings, yes, but who would come and pay money to see curiosities named in normal terms? Far more exciting it was to pay a few coins, progress slowly in semi-darkness with a racing heart in anticipation of something incredible, and then -- there it was! A man who looked (sort of) like a snake. . .a woman with two heads (or one extra of any body part). . .little people who could probably sue you for calling them dwarfs today. . .the almost obligatory fat lady. . .and all nature of people with physical abnormalities by virtue of birth or other unfortunate circumstances that made them ideal for view by paying customers.
The slow but certain disappearance of REAL freak shows at circuses, carnivals and state fairs proved all but guaranteed as members of state or local governments and various activist groups joined together to ban what they believed was pure cruelty exerted upon a special class of people. Thing is, in a preponderance of cases back in the day, human "freaks" who couldn't get jobs due to their appearance actually discovered secure employment and camaraderie in the traveling shows -- even though the money wasn't always good and their treatment sometimes quite brutal.
Tod Browning's 1932 movie, Freaks took full advantage of unusual members of this community as he portrayed the inner circle of a traveling sideshow (strangely, an epilogue circulating with the original film was extracted from reissues years later).
However, for better or worse, sadly or victoriously, the sideshow freak class is all but history, at least in the USA, right?
Well, not exactly.
THE NEW FREAKS
Maybe we'd all be better off if we suffered from gender euphoria, rather than some who experience gender dysphoria. In any case, just as California governor Gavin Newsom -- arguably the person who single-handedly destroyed a beautiful state -- wants to add an Amendment to the U.S. Constitution further restricting the 2nd Amendment's "shall not be infringed" promise, I demand my own new Amendment: That every person born in the United States shall have a zipper installed from head to toe capable of expanding with age, so that we can instantly determine whether a person was born male or female. The convenience of a zipper settles all arguments about both anatomy and physiology, accomplished simply by looking inside a body, where unchanging birth structures denoting one of two original genders will be evident.
As I've noted before, when thousands of patients of all ages came my way while I served in Air Force hospitals, only two genders showed up. Anybody who counts more than two is deceived, lying or attempting to build unsustainable sand castles in the sky. Utopia, maybe.
"Trans" people are not new. If living as an alternate gender makes one happy, or at least content, so be it.
But you don't go on a campaign to recruit peple's children into changing their gender. People undertaking this effort, often vigorously, are the new freaks. You don't strive to make kids cut off body parts or make other irretrievable changes, and no matter how "trans" you are, kids should do children's things until age -- probably -- 18, when immature brain thoughts aren't overwhelmingly scattered to the winds.
Kids must beware nouveau freaks-de-trans. They'll poison them with lies emotionally, and then physically, and the day may come when ill-advised decisions result in depression or suicide.
Tragically, gender freaks have spent years taking up residence in high schools, colleges and universities, and their incursion into nursing and medical schools to a degree where even faculty are now forced into "affirming" there are more than two genders is a disgrace and a crime against logical, scientific practice.
Some members of the gender-flipping freak community appear not only to crave public attention, but to gain immense satisfaction by successfully drawing parents and their kids into their lunatic circle, insisting upon hormone-altering drugs and eventual surgery -- long before young people have the ability to make firm decisions about their bodies. To convince families to go trans via one's sales abilities probably creates positive emotions for the perpetrator, who believes a great thing and a good deed have been accomplished. This is madness, nothing less.
While school shootings are bad enough, there's another tragedy occurring in the sacred halls of education everywhere: The misuse of pronouns. The new freaks, be they of gender or of the bastardized political left, must change the words to change the language, and once the language becomes secondary to ideas there are no workable ideas to put into words, no logic, no science, no math. Thus, a man can be a woman and a woman a man. I can go out in the streets and proclaim my new identity as a jar of salad dressing as I snatch your dog from its leash, take it to a justice of the peace and marry it.
Or do I mean marry they or them? See? Not even dogs are immune from the absurdity of trans freakishness.
