No illness, not even Covid, spreads quite as far and wide as a social contagion, and no amount of masking, cleaning, and social distancing, can save you. Allow me to present the cover story of this month's India Today's digital magazine.

In conversation with Brides Today, gender nonconforming and transfeminine author...

I had to look up "transfeminine."

Transfeminine is a term for any person, binary or non-binary, who was assigned male at birth...

...and has a predominantly feminine gender identity or presentation.

Feminine presentation?

The rest of the intro:

...performance artist, poet, and comedian Alok Vaid-Menon — who performs under the moniker ALOK — makes a compelling case for 'love is love'.

Comedian, I get. In fact, this cover, this entire piece, is a classic "should be satire but is real," story, pretty much the raison d'être of Not The Bee.

This is how the interview starts.

Brides Today: You look absolutely fabulous in these photographs.

No. You don't. Sorry, but you don't, and the person telling you that, she doesn't believe that either.

I say that as a life-long believer in the sentiment that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. In fact, I feel exceedingly fortunate that I found a woman who found my appearance inoffensive enough to marry me, but lines have to be drawn at times, and I am supremely comfortable in drawing that line right here.

Actually, a couple miles prior to right here given all the real estate you have to cover to get to "hairy guy in an Indian bridal outfit."

Asked how to define his personal style, Alok replies:

A: "Style is mobile poetry...there are no guidelines, just a sincere and engaged commitment to beauty. My style is a form of storytelling — a way of communicating who I am, what I feel, where I've been, and where I'm going.

I'll cut this guy some slack in that he clearly considers himself a performance artist. He has a shtick, and it appears to be working for him. He saw an opening and he took it.

And remember, he's a comedian, so I'm not sure how seriously to take any of this. I'm not sure he knows.

Take this, for instance.

Brides Today: What does love mean to you?

A: "Love is about expansion, not constriction. Permission, not prohibition. Becoming ourselves, not betraying ourselves. Writing love poetry isn't simply about composing a stanza, it's about composing a day... It's about how we live, and I want to be a living love poem. Every day I ask myself, 'How can I love harder?' Love is my grounding force, it's what gives my life shape and meaning; it anchors me to who I am and what I do. The more compassion I discover for myself, the more I unlock for the world around me. Love breaks through binaries — man and woman, us and them, you and me. I believe that everyone is worthy of love for being, not just for doing. Love means we believe in one another's infinite capacity for transformation. It means we affirm one another's complexity. And love also means we need each other...fundamentally and irrevocably."

This is a complete word salad that says absolutely nothing. It is meaningless gobbledygook. I can picture the interviewer nodding sagely, brow furrowed in deep thought...

There is a lot of that in this piece.

A: "Relationships involve multiple universes coming together, and of course, there are going to be complications. We are people shaped by histories of neglect, trauma, and misrecognition. We are also people shaped by histories of care, jubilation, tenderness. To make a future together, we must hold that the present is where our histories convene.

He's playing a role, I know that, but this is how dumb people talk, and the dumb people listening to them aren't smart enough to know that.

The piece finishes with this:

Brides Today: Lastly, what are your hopes for the queer community?

A: "I hope that we dream beyond tolerance towards meaningful acceptance. I hope that we are able to find beauty and pride in our differences. I hope that we are not just safe, but well, and not just seen, but witnessed. Most of all: I hope that we can be free."

My instincts are libertarian. You do you, and let me do me. That's what tolerance is. I actually don't like the word as it has a pejorative tone, but it's good enough. For example, I'll tolerate you making your dog wear a sweater as long as you don't force me to like it, or worse, force me to make my dog wear a sweater.

Not on my watch, buddy.

Not. On. My. Watch.

But it doesn't stop there. He wants "acceptance."

And what follows acceptance? "Celebration."

That's the sequence. Every time. They aren't coy about it, either.

There were only a few comments, two in English.

Please Don't Bring This US Propaganda to India.

A similar sentiment was found on Twitter.

Alok Vaid is an [sic] US citizen...

Of course he is.

The other comment in English made some serious allegations against him:

Hes [sic] a published pedophile under his Pen name Dark Matter describing little girls as kinky. And you want this psychopath respresnting indians [sic] and brides? Ill send this to every partner you have so may they stop advertising with you.

Oh?

I dug a bit deeper.

This is not the first time that Alok Vaid-Menon has courted controversy. He was accused of sexualising underage girls in a Facebook post published in 2016. "These days the narrative is that transgender people will come into bathrooms and abuse little girls," he wrote.

"I believe in the radical notion that little girls are complicated people. There are no fairy tales and no princesses here. Little girls are trans, queer, kinky, devious, kind, mean, beautiful, ugly, tremendous and peculiar," the trans activist further claimed.

"Your kids aren't as straight and narrow as you think they are. Like everybody else, I've been a cute little girl," he wrote, suggesting that he had sexual relationship with adults when he was a minor.

This caused a furor of sorts on Twitter at the time.

This was pre-Elon, so, yeah.

Alok's statement is terrifyingly similar to comments often made by pedophiles who excuse their crimes by projecting their own perversions on the minors they are abusing. A lot of people see the red flags in this comment and have lashed out on Twitter. Sadly, Twitter are supporting Alok's comments.

A conservative woman and republican politician, Lauren Witzke, of Delaware USAQ simply retweeted the Alok Vaid-Menon's quote with the caption "demonic" and she was immediately and permanently suspended from Twitter for hate speech.

Tolerance. Acceptance...

A memo reportedly circulating Twitter states that the term "pedophile(s)" is considered hate speech and saying that "Minor-Attracted Person (MAP)" is a gender and a protected class.

...Celebration.

It turns out, perhaps unsurprisingly, that this is a targeted campaign.

Of course it is.

Which I think proves that it's just an urban elitist concept. Masses don't connect with this and that's why they havnt [sic] released it on paper till now

"Till now."

Bud Light's mistake was that they moved too fast. They put an urban elitist in charge of a blue-collar beer. They needed to soften the ground more first.

Tolerance. Acceptance. Celebration.

Prepare to be softened some more.

And perhaps more importantly, be really careful which wedding invitations you accept...