October marks annual Breast Cancer Awareness Month, with its characteristic fluttering pink ribbons and charity runs springing up right across the Western world.

Yet there are certain other, rather more obscure, cancers out there of whose existence the general public is still lamentably unaware by comparison: sexually transmitted dog cancer, for instance.

Despite its comically absurd name, this is a genuine disease, albeit its official medical label is the slightly less sensational “Canine Transmissible Venereal Tumour”, or CTVT. The cancer in question is unique in the sense it can actually be passed on from animal patient to animal patient; nobody with lung cancer or breast cancer can transmit their ailment on to those around them through coughs and sneezes like a bad dose of the flu, thank goodness. CTVT is different, though. Dogs who mate with sufferers are liable to end up infected with a tumour themselves.

Fortunately, such carbuncles are abnormally receptive to drug-based treatment, making the disease often highly curable. Some commentators have reacted to the prospect of eradicating it entirely with alarm, however. As one hand-wringing science writer put it in a 2019 piece about CTVT in The Atlantic, “I wonder, when we talk about cure, do we really mean extinction?” Apparently, “There’s a growing movement to protect unglamorous parasites alongside more charismatic fauna” like pandas and polar bears – even up to and including cancer cells. That’s right, even tumours have rights now. “If it was kept [alive] in a museum [i.e., a zoo?] that would be ideal,” The Atlantic quoted one Cambridge biologist as saying of such precious beings – presumably at taxpayer expense.

Sick in the head

You may think the idea of tumours enjoying rights to be a thoroughly mad one, but introducing mad ideas into the general hive-mind of society and thereby helping poison the shared bloodstream of wider humanity is actually the characteristic modus operandi of that contemporary civilisational cancer we now call “Queer Theory”.

By labelling Queer Theory a “cancer”, I am not merely attempting provocatively to insult it: there is a genuine similarity between the way the two malignant obscenities operate. Consider the incredibly strange image of a tumour being giving quasi-human rights and existing comfortably subsidised upon taxpayer support with which I opened. That is a demented notion you will almost certainly never have thought of before – but you have now, and you may well never forget it.

In a very real sense, your pre-existing normative idea of what a cancer tumour actually is will therefore have been irredeemably “queered” by me – that is to say, changed and mutated in an intentionally bizarre fashion, just like happens when normal, healthy cells in the human body begin to metastasise and mutate into unhealthy cancerous ones. The word “queer”, when used in a political or pseudo-academic context, actually functions as a verb, not a noun. Ordinary people are more familiar with the word “queer” as a noun, used to denote homosexuals, lesbians or transgenderists. Within actual Queer Theory itself, however, this is not necessarily so.

To “queer something” (the word here now being used as a verb, not a noun), means simply to distort, complicate or alter it in a deliberately weird or subversive nature. Drawing a moustache on the Mona Lisa would be to queer it; literally cutting your own nose off to spite your face would be to queer it; buttering your bread with battery acid would be to queer it; or inserting cancerous cells into a previously healthy organ would be to queer it, too. Queering is perhaps best seen as a deliberate process of giving the normative cancer – but cancer suddenly redefined as being a positive form of disease, not a negative one.

Bent but still straight

Homosexuals as such are only considered “queer” by analogy by true activists in the field of Queerness. Heterosexuality has generally been considered by most societies throughout history to be normative: therefore, homosexuality is comparatively non-normative by contrast, and thus analogically “queer”. This makes it potentially politically useful to those on the Far Left who wish to deconstruct, tear down and rearrange society wholesale – most actual gay people are really just tools and dupes in these actually rather uncaring ideologues’ manipulative and malicious hands.

After all, many homosexuals are, their actual homosexuality apart, otherwise perfectly socially normal: respectable men like Professor David Starkey, Douglas Murray and their ilk spend their days walking around wearing suits and ties and acting in a wholly normal fashion outside the bedroom, not mincing ostentatiously through the streets in leather fetish-gear waving rainbow flags during Gay Parades. Indeed, Starkey and Murray are generally considered to be leading conservatives, their homosexuality notwithstanding. Thus, a genuine Queer Theorist would not consider them to be truly “queer” at all; instead, they would have to be queered by, for example, getting them to dye their hair purple and green, don nipple-tassels and begin dressing like the biker from the Village People. Starkey and Murray would have to be mutated into genuine queerness, in other words, via something often known as the “politics of parody”.   

The clearest example of the politics of parody in action today is that of the Drag Queen. By getting obvious men to dress up as absurd cartoonish parodies of actual women, combining stereotypical features of both males and females – pink dress and black bowler hat, large artificial breasts and long hairy beard – such individuals act to subvert and undermine gender binaries, binaries in general, and the very notion of normality itself. Their appearance is a walking parody of the human body as we traditionally know it. Yet cancer, too, can be seen as a parody of the usual, healthy, normative human body: by analogy, sickness stands to health much as homosexuality stands to heterosexuality, or abnormality to normality.

Once these plainly cancerous ideas have been injected into certain previously healthy organs of the wider Western body-politic – our universities, for instance – their operational model is to begin to metastasise and spread out to infect other previously healthy organs, too, like the media, schools, sport or political parties. Unlike the average cancer, Queer Theory really is transmissible from person to person, or social body to social body, as shown by the current epidemic spread of transgenderism across the Western world: the direct intellectual equivalent of sexually transmitted dog cancer.

What Queer Theorists want to do is quite literally transform their own civilisation into a thoroughly sick society – under the delusional assumption that, once the allegedly unjust traditional, normative, capitalist culture we once unquestioningly enjoyed has been torn down wholesale, what will emerge will somehow be a post-Marxist utopia. This is every bit as wrongheaded as saying that giving a healthy person cancer will likewise allow them to emerge with a brand new carcinogenically mutated body which will somehow be much better than their old one ever was, like real-life X-Men.

Giving cancer cancer

Consider Kimiko Tobimatsu, a Toronto-based lesbian lawyer and author of the 2020 graphic novel Kimiko Does Cancer. As “a young queer with breast-cancer”, and a mixed-race one at that, Kimiko was left alienated by her treatment regime, as the “corporate sponsorships of the mainstream breast-cancer community don’t exactly scream “we’re gay!”, or at least not my brand of masculine-presenting, left-leaning gay.” But why the hell should they? Because, it would appear, breast cancer is actually an excellent means of dismantling normative society in a much wider sense.

“Losing my breasts wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world. I wonder if I’d like the look, I could play with gender a bit more …” Kimiko thinks in one frame of her comic, an idea she brands “topless [as in breastless] activism”. Yet topless activism also has an inherently anti-capitalist agenda, as “Queer writers have also brought an important analysis to the ways the cancer industry has intertwined with capitalism.” As such, the idea of “depoliticizing cancer” and treating it as just a disease rather than yet another cog within the evil right-wing system which enslaves us, is misguided. Charitable pink-ribbon campaigns simply encourage the public to donate cash towards supporting patients, rather than “forc[ing] engagement with more difficult issues like poverty or racial justice” instead.

As an illustration, Kimiko provides another comic-panel, in which breast cancer charities march in solidarity with utterly unrelated causes, illustrated by banners like “JUSTICE FOR MIGRANT WORKERS” and “STOP DEPORTATIONS NOW”. By this twisted logic, a donation to a cancer-charity may “legitimately” end up being used to campaign for a borderless world, not a cancerless one.

In a piece on the website rethinkbreastcancer.com, entitled “Gender Expression and the Appeal of a Mastectomy”, Kimiko further explained how:

“for me, as a gender-nonconforming, queer woman, the idea of a [medically enforced] mastectomy actually had a certain appeal … [Although not technically fully trans] I do gravitate to collared men’s tops and hide my breasts more than I accentuate them … So, when the topic of mastectomy came up, I found myself wondering if I’d like my new look.”

Yes, cancer-mutilated breasts can now be a fashion accessory, it would appear: as with the idea of a taxpayer-funded tumour being given human rights, your previous, normative, common-sense idea of what cancer itself is has now once again been successfully queered. Kimiko even goes on to explicitly admit this is one of her main ideological aims:

“There was one more reason that I sort of liked the idea of a mastectomy – I could mess with people’s assumptions. I could turn the typical pity associated with a mastectomy on its head. Or push back on the other likely assumption – that I must be trans [rather than just a very mannish lesbian]. A reminder that gender expression can look all sorts of ways, even within the context of a cis gender identity.”

Another of Kimiko’s essays is entitled “Straight Cancer in a Queer Body”. How can cancer possibly be “straight”? In the same way a socially normal homosexual like David Starkey or Douglas Murray is; normal cancer is just too boringly normative. Instead, it too must be queered into a state of even greater pathological abnormality – cancer itself must now be given cancer.