Empathy begins with sincerity, not groveling.
Empathy begins with sincerity, not groveling.
F lattery is defined as “excessive and insincere praise, given especially to further one’s own interests.” Traditionally, flattery meant bearing false witness against one’s neighbor, which is forbidden by the Ninth Commandment. Today, many think of it as a virtue.
Drew Barrymore is a keen practitioner. Last week, the actress and host of the Drew Barrymore Show interviewed a trans-identifying TikTok star, Dylan Mulvaney. Mulvaney is famous for his series, called “Days of Girlhood,” in which he claims a female gender identity.
During the interview, the two traded in saccharine flattery. First, Mulvaney: “I look at someone like you and can’t imagine anybody disliking you.” Barrymore, beaming, then gets on her knees before Mulvaney. “Oh please,” she says. “Do you want to know, ironically, who dislikes me the most sometimes? Myself.” “Oh, me too,” Mulvaney replies, joining Barrymore on the floor.
Myself. Me. That’s what the façade of our “affirming” culture is really about. Not compassion or human rights, but naked self-interest. Take Joe Biden, for instance, who last year also met with Mulvaney, boosting his woke credentials among the Democratic Party’s youth. During the NowThis Presidential Forum, Mulvaney asked the president what’s needed to advance the cause of transgender rights. Biden replied: “I’m not being facetious when I say this: being seen with people like you.”
How, exactly, does Mulvaney inspire people to take transgenderism more seriously? Mulvaney’s singular achievement has been making a mockery of the female sex, insulting millions of women in the process. His vision of femininity is not only caricatural but creepy. Watching his videos is like walking into a chauvinistic sexual fantasy from the 1950s. It’s all pink dresses, bows, and Barbie dolls; he even calls himself a “bimbo.”
When she hosted National Review on her show, Megyn Kelly said to Charlie Cooke and me that what she saw in Barrymore’s kneeling “encapsulates a lot of what is driving actual biological women nuts” about the transgender movement. Not only are males “coming into our locker rooms, in our sports, in our bathrooms, in our colleges, and so on, and taking over,” but we “as women are expected to take the knee and just be thankful and say, ‘We appreciate what you’re doing to us,’ and anything else means you’re a bigot.”
As a culture, we’ve come to consider flattery as, at worst, a white lie and, at best, a kindness. This overlooks not only the deceit involved but also the harm done to the person being flattered. Normally people who flatter want something. Salesmen flatter to make a sale. Professional contacts flatter those in their network to win influence and opportunity. Men flatter women to get them into bed. And celebrities flatter those with fashionable identities to boost their own popularity.
Mulvaney, a man in a girl’s costume, is making a complete fool of himself. Indeed, this is what the Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh communicated in his controversial monologue, “A heartfelt message to Dylan Mulvaney.” Walsh called Mulvaney “manufactured and lifeless . . . unearthly and eerie.” He said that Mulvaney will “never be accepted as a woman by anyone,” and that those who claim to accept him as such are only pretending to do so because they are either “afraid of being lectured” or are using him “as a platform to virtue-signal.” Walsh continued: “Everyone who looks at you will see something pitiable and bizarre, something utterly unfeminine in every way.” Mulvaney is still a man. Just not “one any of us can respect or take seriously.”
What Walsh said was unkind, but it is also true. Of course, it’s possible to be tactful as well as truthful. But given the choice between an unpleasant truth and flattery — give me the former any day.
There are consequences for flattery; it renders one person deceitful and another delusional. Affirming the fantasy that it’s not only possible but praiseworthy to attempt to escape life’s disappointments by impersonating a member of the opposite sex is to encourage people down a path that leads to mutilation and despair. Many clinicians who practice “gender affirmation” are ready to show “empathy” when handing out cross-sex hormones or agreeing to remove healthy body parts. But when it comes to follow-up, or to counseling patients who experience regret — they’re nowhere to be seen.
Empathy begins with sincerity. As Mother Angelica once said, “Those who tell you the truth love you. Those who tell you what you want to hear love themselves.”