Or, Not Neurotic Enough.

From Vancouver, via Alex Zoltan, an attempt to attend a “2SLGBTIAQ+-friendly” outdoor theatre is derailed by some cultural-sensitivity complications:

A woman in Vancouver was denied access to a “2SLGBTIAQ+-friendly” outdoor theatre because her hair violated the venue’s “Code of Conduct Cultural Appropriation policy.” pic.twitter.com/reB5DbDtL1

— Alex Zoltan (@AmazingZoltan) August 15, 2025

You see, madam’s hair – or rather, her woollen hair extension – violates the venue’s “Code of Conduct Cultural Appropriation Policy.”

Which is a thing, apparently.

Readers may not be entirely surprised to learn that the list of terms and conditions is somewhat extensive and includes both pre-emptive scolding that is nebulous and therefore open to interpretation by those so inclined:

And pre-emptive scolding that is more particular:

Because pronoun policing is the basis of every good night out. And with regard to madam’s supposedly scandalous hair:

That’s the non-consensual wearing of your own clothes and hair.

You see,

We’re talking, you’ll recall, about a trip to a “2SLGBTIAQ+-friendly” outdoor theatre. In the hope of a jolly time.

We’re also informed, sternly, that people of pallor do not experience,

And that,

Again, at a venue where luridly cross-dressing men can pretend to be women and must always be addressed with their fabulist pronouns.

In short, attendees must, 

Those forever downtrodden magic brown people.

And transvestites. 

I feel I should point out that the interaction filmed above goes on for nine minutes. You may wish to have a fortifying beverage to hand.

Or something to bite down on.

The complications of progressive fun times – specifically, what can only be referred to as ideological dancing – have been mentioned here before.

Update, via the comments:

Liz adds,

There is that. But if we start listing the things our Enforcers Of Purity don’t know, and the things they choose not to know, and the things they think they know but which are wildly incorrect, I suspect we’ll be here all day. And any interest in history, or in reality in general, seems likely to be subordinate to the neurotic, wearying drama that they wish to inflict on others.

Not unreasonably, Chow Bag asks,

Well, indeed. And likewise, if you’re obliged to continually “uplift, celebrate and hold sacred those most marginalised among us,” while fretting about pronouns and privilege and “how you take up space,” and while fretting about police brutality and “intergenerational trauma” and the sacredness of other people’s hairstyles… well, that may leave little time for watching the actual show. Which, I seem to recall, was the purpose of the visit.

But poking at the implications of their rules of admission almost certainly makes you a white supremacist and so you’re not allowed in.

Lest you contaminate The Purity.

In the pages of British Vogue, Ms Hanna Flint is dismayed that new adaptations of works by Emily Brontë and Jane Austen have,

How very dare they.

Says Ms Flint,

Richness and relevance, and imagination, being determined by race, of course.

I’m not at all sure what historical inclusivity might mean, given the racial demographics of rural England at the time of Brontë and Austen, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Indeed, what Ms Flint seems to want sounds more like ahistorical inclusivity. And whether incongruous, politically corrected racial casting choices constitute “imagination,” rather than a following of Very Modern Fashion, is a question I leave to the reader.

“Why Is The Next Wave Of Period Dramas So White?” asks the headline of the article, with the obligatory note of disapproval. An understood tutting, one presumed of its readers. Yet I’m struggling to picture Ms Flint making demands that period dramas produced in China and set in the Han Dynasty be adjusted so as to accommodate “excluded or marginalised” actors who resemble Jack Hawkins or Charles Gray.

Ms Flint, “a mixed-race woman, of British and Tunisian heritage,” informs us that, despite her enthusiasm for the genre, “I was left somewhat cold by the news that all these remakes had cast the protagonists as white once again.” Yet this train of thought terminates before reaching the possibility that others, perhaps some larger number, might be left somewhat cold by modish anachronism and jarring contrivance.

It seems to have escaped Ms Flint that, for many, the appeal of period dramas is, as it were, a holiday in time – a brief respite from modernity, its politics and paraphernalia, and perhaps even from those “diverse, multicultural surroundings” that Ms Flint feels should be the foundation of all drama and period-specific programming.

Whatever its merits in terms of modern “workforce inclusivity,” ahistorical, racially ostentatious casting does, for many viewers, risk breaking the spell, making any suspension of disbelief more difficult, while shifting the focus away from then and back to now.

Previously and related, on sex-swapping Bond.