No longer may gay white men in England’s schools try to pass themselves off as sassy black women

Flip WilsonThis story is not from The Onion. Repeat: It’s not from The Onion. Instead, it is a bona fide news story from the United Kingdom’s National Union of Students.

It all started with the “jazz hands” (which are, unbeknownst to this new generation of cultural sensitivity warriors, profoundly racist remnants from the old minstrel show days, but whatever). It turns out that the insensitive among us didn’t realize that clapping needs a trigger warning, since some women apparently get anxious when they hear it.  (I welcome your theories explaining why applause makes women anxious.  I’m sure we can get very Freudian about this one.)

Of course, when you’re at a big conference, with lots of enthusiastic delegates, it becomes difficult constantly to give trigger warnings very time applause is about to break out. How much better to ban clapping altogether — which resulted in one what, up until a couple of days ago, was the ultimate distillation of the looniness that drives academic culture at home and abroad:

Jazz hands tweet

Never let it be said that the hyper-politicized LGBTQRSTUVWXYZ crowd can’t keep up with the hyper-sensitive feminists. Inspired by the ease with which clapping was banished to history’s rubbish heap, the agitators found a new target — gay men who act like black women:

Put forward by the NUS LGBT Committee, they believe the appropriation of black women by white gay men is prevalent within the LGBTI scene and community.

‘This may be manifested in the emulation of the mannerisms, language (particularly AAVE- African American Vernacular English) and phrases that can be attributed to black women. White gay men may often assert that they are “strong black women” or have an “inner black woman”,’ they said.

‘White gay men are the dominant demographic within the LGBT community, and they benefit from both white privilege and male privilege.’

They claimed the appropriation is ‘unacceptable and must be addressed’. Passing the motion, they agreed to eradicate the appropriation of black women by white gay men and to raise awareness of the issue.

This was not the NUS’s only crude discrimination against drag queens. You see, it turns out that (as many people have realized) it’s not always easy to distinguish between a drag queen, who revels in her camp performance, and an actual transexual or transgender person. Well!  We can’t have that kind of inter-LGBTQRSTUVWXYZ community discrimination. I’m sure that all of you can see the next motion coming already:

A second motion passed was the banning of cross-dressing or drag as it could be offensive to trans women.

‘To issue a statement condemning the use of crossdressing as a mode of fancy dress,’ they pledged.

‘To encourage unions to ban clubs and societies from holding events which permit or encourage (cisgender) members to use cross-dressing as a mode of fancy dress’.

But what about men who like to dress as women, but aren’t transexuals, transgenders, or drag queens, I hear you ask? These poor souls were not forgotten. They got a special exemption. Really.

This ruling was given an exclusion to queer students who want to use cross-dressing in their everyday lives as a mode of expression and to those who want to cross-play by flipping the gender of a fictional character in fancy dress.

To those of you mumbling words like “fascist” and “tyranny,” and “authoritarian nut cases,” you can just stop that right now.  The NUS delegates are not a collection of little Hitlers , trying to micromanage everyone and squeeze them into the narrow, dead-end tube of gender non-conformity. This is a democratic movement. They’ll tell you so themselves:

A NUS spokeswoman told Gay Star News: ‘We’re a democratic society, and if members voted for it, these are our policies’.

Long ago, when I looked at England’s bowing down before the demands of increasingly radical Muslims, I started saying, and kept repeating, “There won’t always be an England.” Having witnessed the delusional, tyrannical, anti-liberal shenanigans at the UK’s National Union of Students, I can only add one thing to my original statement: “Thank God for that!”

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Just as a little coda to this post, here are a few examples of those jazz hands in old racist Hollywood.

You’ll see modified jazz hands sprinkled throughout the scene in the finale from Babes on Broadway:

From 1936’s Show Boat, look for the shufflin’ jazz hands at 4:48:

Even the great Fred Astaire, in Swingtime, not only donned black face for his Bojangles homage, but did the jazz hands too:

And a Geraldine video seemed appropriate here too: