The first time I heard Macy Gray singing her hit song "I Try" on the radio years ago, I remember marveling how awful it was. Luckily for her, she certainly didn't need to win my approval in order to have a lucrative singing career. But just because Gray has never been my cup of tea vocally doesn't mean that I have enjoyed watching her endure what has happened to her over the course of the last week.
Truthfully, she should have seen it coming when just days prior, the privileged white liberal icon Bette Midler ran into a buzz saw of cultural condemnation after doing what she normally does to the sound of thunderous applause – shout hyperbolically about some evil conservative male plot to strip women of their uteruses:
I don't know if Bette had been drinking, if she just suffered a temporary lapse in judgment, or if she inadvertently grabbed a non-updated version of her approved-messaging handbook for online progressives, but I'm floored that she didn't realize you can't say things like that these days.
After all, Bette, it's not conservatives calling anyone "birthing people" or "menstruators." In fact, we're the ones who are pushing back hard against such nonsense. No, that's the left's transgender movement doing that, and you better not think all your street cred, all your liberal bona fides, all your years of service to the cause of progressivism, will spare you the fate of J.K. Rowling when you are perceived to have strayed from the thought plantation as she did.
If Midler was under such an impression, she quickly learned otherwise, being forced into a near-immediate apology and clarification.
Poor, sweet Bette. Unity isn't the objective of the movement she's signed onto. Conformity is. Remember, that's what J.K. Rowling is refusing to do – conform. And that's why she's a pariah to the very people who now run Bette's movement and will decide her fate. Best of luck, ma'am.
So, with all that as a backdrop, you would have thought that Macy Gray would have been wiser than to go on television and say 100% true things like this:
Of course she knows that for a fact. Because it is a fact. It's always been a fact. Being a woman is something far more than playing dress-up. It's something far more emotional, psychological, and spiritual than having a few cosmetic surgeries that alter an outward appearance. Womanhood is nothing that a man can understand no matter how many operations, how many drugs, how many makeovers he has.
In fact, in a sane world, suggesting that superficial changes coupled with a verbal claim to be female could somehow bestow womanhood upon a person would have sparked equal parts laughter and intellectual contempt. But the West chased sanity out the door shortly after escorting the knowledge of God out the same exit.
And ironically to those who assumed ridding society of "Bible banging" would engender greater tolerance and freedom, the new religion that futilely attempts to fill the void is far more rigid and far less forgiving.
Much like Midler, Gray was torched for her "transphobia," and after a few days of courageously trying to stand her ground, eventually caved in and conformed to the spirit of the age:
No Macy, being a woman is not a vibe. It's something far more than that, and like you told Piers Morgan just days ago, you know it.
It's important to note what happened to Midler and Gray these last few days. They aren't closet haters or mean-spirited people who just recently got exposed, nor were they lying about what they said. Even though we're supposedly a more sophisticated and evolved society that's left primitive religion in the dust, what happened to them is exactly what happened to countless young women who ran afoul of the prevailing superstitions of Salem around 1690.
Gray and Midler were caught blaspheming against the religion of the moment. It doesn't matter if their words were consistent with reality, they were inconsistent with the accepted religious dogma of the age and therefore were branded with the scarlet T for transphobia, paraded in front of the social media townspeople, and threatened to either recant or be torched.
And though many want to call them cowards, no one can blame Gray and Midler for choosing as they did. Their whole lives are wrapped up in their elitist privilege, and the thought of losing it frightened them. It scared them so badly that they decided it was preferable to slip on the ideological straight-jacket that has been fitted for them by the new priests and pastors of the alphabet faith.
They rightly reasoned that given their own worldview there's no escaping it. If it didn't happen today, it would happen tomorrow. Even benign phrases like "biological women" are now considered heretical.
So Gray, like Midler before her, has chosen to bow her knee, accept her humiliation, receive her lashes, and attempt to move forward living as a chastened, faithful slave to this ever-evolving religion of sex and gender whose doctrine changes as quickly as the tides.
I don't have it in me to mock those who choose that path, because I can't escape feeling so sorry for anyone who even attempts such a hopeless, impossible life. Christ offers such a better way.
