Meet Max Hightower:
If I would have gone to school with Max in the early to mid seventies, I would have probably said about him:
"Between a boy and a girl, Max is somewhere in the middle." and that would have been that. Whether in a school play he would have played a boy or a girl, I wouldn't have cared either way, not that I was great fan of school plays. There have always been people like Max.
My school days are long past, yet I have to read something like this and my mind just boggles:
https://www.dallasnews.com/news/education/2023/11/08/why-was-a-transgender-texas-teen-removed-from-his-lead-role-in-a-school-musical/?outputType=amphttps://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/nov/10/trans-teen-oklahoma-role-max-hightowerMind you, I'm not above making ribald jokes --->
doughnut bumper about the LGBTQ movement and sometimes it gets - like any activist movement can - plain on my nerves. But this type of a desperate rollback denying what has always existed (and especially in theater and entertainment arts which have always attracted people who weren't all that obsessed with choosing a side) leaves me gaping. It's theater culture-historically inane too: Hell, in Shakespearean times, women were largely not even allowed to act and most women roles in his plays were initially played by men/boys. (That this turned a majority of British men into gays and had the population of the British Isles die out subsequently has not found its way into anthropological records so far.)
Max of course wasn't cast to play a woman, he was to play a male role in the school's performance of the musical 'Oklahoma!' Why that needs to be taken away from him because he is apparently "not male enough" to some people, is beyond me. How bigoted - and scared shitless about your own positioning on the gender scale - can you be?
