South Park versus Drag Race
In 2005 South Park dissected the absurdities of the 'born in the wrong body' narrative. Unfortunately, later that year the makers of Ru Paul's Drag Race started doing the opposite.
It’s worth paying £1.89 to buy Episode 1, Season 9, of South Park on Amazon Prime.
There’s a clue why in the title, ‘Mr. Garrison’s Fancy New Vagina’. The episode brilliantly lampoons the central claims of trans ideology that someone can be born in the wrong body and that someone can …really be …deep down…the opposite sex.
It’s hard to watch it now and not wonder at how prophetic it was; more perhaps than the creators of the series, Trey Parker and Matt Stone, could have imagined.
The show tells the story of how teacher Mr Garrison’s sex change surgery sets off a cascade of events. When little Kyle Broflovski’s mum insists on explaining Garrison’s sex change as an attempt to surgically bring his body into alignment with his inner reality as a woman, this sets Kyle a-thinking.
Kyle’s always wanted to play basketball but gets rejected for being too short. And for being Jewish not black. Ho ho. Garrison’s surgeon, Mr Biber, says he can make Kyle into a tall, black kid. He can perform a negro-plasty. Ho ho ho. I didn’t say everything was funny.
One of the reasons the show’s trenchant criticism of trans notions wasn’t taken seriously was …South Park was, and is, gloriously funny in an absurdist way. Not for nothing were Parker and Stone inspired by Monty Python. The humour in this episode was so jaw dropping for audiences of the time that few people thought it was more than a surreal fantasy. In fact, as we’ll soon discover South Park wasn’t surreal enough. Even stranger things would happen.
After little Kyle returns home ….taller and black, his dad is infuriated and makes his way to the sex change clinic to confront Biber. There, Biber spots he’s wearing a T shirt with a dolphin logo. He’s always wanted to be a dolphin it turns out.
The scene where Kyle’s dad returns home as a dolphin is a masterpiece. And very funny too. The real Mr Biber didn’t think so.
Yes there was one. Stanley Biber had learned his surgical skills in the Korean War. After returning to Colorado in the 1950s he became a GP. It was only in 1969, when a mutual friend of his asked if he would consider doing a sex change operation for a ‘transwoman’ she knew that Biber was drawn into the world of ‘sex change’.
Biber had conducted hundreds of complex operations, including urological ones, on soldiers with terrible injuries incurred on the battlefield. He also corresponded at some length with the country’s leading, and for a time only, centre of ‘sex change’ surgery at John Hopkins University in Baltimore, who sent detailed instructions. Rather you than me.
Biber’s tiny clinic was based in Trinidad, Colorado…just 3 hours drive from Boulder, where twenty five years later South Park’s Parker and Stone would meet and start developing TV ideas together.
Biber’s reputation was by then long established. His real breakthrough came in 1979 when John’s Hopkins closed its ‘sex change’ clinic. Trinidad promptly became the busiest centre for ‘sex change’ surgery in the United States. Biber claimed eventually to have performed ‘sex changes’ on 5,000 men and 800 women over three decades. At one point, he could boast of doing 60% of the world’s sex-change operations. Indeed for over a decade his clinic was known as ‘The Sex Change Capital of the World’.
Maybe it wasn’t a surprise that South Park’s portrayal offended Biber. In the opening scene he tells Garrison that if only the public could see more of the reality of what the operation entails there would be less prejudice against it. The animation is intercut with graphic footage of real operations to ghastly stomach-churning effect. Avert your eyes if you’re squeamish.
The irony was that South Park missed a bizarre and equally prophetic story-line at the Trinidad clinic. Biber was 81 when the show went out in 2005. He’d die the following year. He’d already handed over the clinic management to a young transgender surgeon he’d trained who would take Biber’s advice in the show to heart. Marci Bowers would showcase ‘sex change’ operations as never before. And to spectacular effect.