When I read Hans Christian Andersen’s story “The Emperor’s New Clothes” many years ago, I was at first not impressed. How could anyone not see that a naked man had no clothes on?
But the story was often then interpreted as being about appearance and reality, and nobody needed to look beyond appearances to see that the Emperor was naked.
What Andersen’s story is really about is something quite different. Long before the term was invented, he understood the cancel culture. The crux of the story is that two scoundrels manage to make everyone believe that if they can’t see the Emperor’s clothes, they must be either unfit for their job or unusually stupid. The point is that if you can make people sufficiently panicked about losing their reputations and livelihoods, you can make them say and believe anything, no matter how idiotic.
They’ll say what they are told to say, for fear of being canceled. Sound familiar?
The best example of how Emperor’s New Clothes (ENC) tactics now work is transgenderism.
If you’ve learned Andersen’s lesson, you know that you must stick to what you see and not let anyone frighten you into saying that you see something that you don’t.
Suppose, then, that we see someone who appears in every respect a man. He has a distinctively male skeleton: The male pelvis is clearly distinguishable from that of a female, the angle of the legs to the perpendicular is male and not female, the upper body is broader and stronger, the shape of the head is different. The voice, the musculature, the reproductive organs, body, and facial hair are all different. And below the surface are even more profound differences in body chemistry, brain, and so on, and, in fact, every single cell in the body is marked as male. We’re seeing a male.
But the bullies tell us that we must say we’re seeing a female, or we’ll be labeled a bigot, transphobic, and guilty of hate speech, we’ll be social outcasts, and our jobs may be threatened—all classic ENC scoundrel tactics.
Resisting ENC-style bullying means refusing to lie about what we see. What we certainly do see is a man so unhappy about being a man that he wishes he were a woman. We see someone who feels that he’s in spirit a woman. We see a man who asks that we treat him as if he were a woman. But we don’t see a woman. Well now, say the scoundrels, we’ll tell you what you really see. How dare you refuse to say what we tell you to say? Their bizarre view is the only one they will allow. We must see things their way, or else!
