Editor’s Note: The following article was originally published by the Observatory of University Ethics on April 16, 2025. The Observatory translated it into English from French. I have edited it, to the best of my ability, to align with Minding the Campus’s style guidelines. It is crossposted here with permission.
Hollywood was in a frenzy. The Césars were already quivering. It was happening—a transgender actress was about to sweep every award for female performance. There was talk, half in jest, of casting a hermaphroditic statuette for the Oscars. The right-thinking set of American insiders had found its revenge after the electoral slap in the face. Ah, those rednecks—that uncultured rabble that just doesn’t get the all-inclusive gospel! Intersectionality has a problem with the people? Then dissolve the people.
She had already taken home the Palme d’Or at Cannes, but now this was the crowning glory. This boy—or rather, pardon, this Gascón—had stuck both feet into the reheated dish. And then—patatras!—a few old tweets dug up from the past were enough to shatter the icon and lay bare the contradictions of wokism. What dreadful gasconades had our Karla Sofía dared? Nothing less than remarks deemed racist and, worse still, Islamophobic—a neat confusion of race and religion. She had declared that “the Black martyr” George Floyd was “a drug addict and a crook,” and had mocked a photo of a fully veiled woman, quipping that “Islam is wonderful, free from any machismo.” Finally, she concluded that Islam was “becoming a breeding ground of infection for humanity that urgently needs treatment.” Touché.
Immediately, the musical Emilia Pérez gave way to a masquerade of hypocrisy. The infamous Karla Sofía had reverted to Carlos—not Carlos the terrorist subsidized by Islamists and worshipped by the ultimate idiots of Islamo-leftism, but a Carlos now despised. Netflix rushed to cancel the fleeting star. Director Jacques Audiard—certainly not in the name of his late father, but perhaps in the name of the holy (or was it the hallowed) spirit of César—courageously disavowed his leading actress. The film, once boasting 13 Oscar nominations, had lost every chance. Thirteen at table—look no further for the Judas. In a final twist, it was her 100 percent female co-star, Zoë Saldaña, who walked away with the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress. And at the Césars, everything went to Audiard; Gascón was shoved in the closet.
The farce stands as a perfect emblem of the internal incoherence of intersectional theory. Judith Butler, high priestess of gender theory, had already provided a glaring example by pairing ostentatious anti-racism with open racialism and patent anti-Semitism—a nauseating intellectual shipwreck. Trans-affirming activists, imposing “re-education” sessions and excluding homosexuals from their own LGBTQIA+++ associations (the absurdity of that catch-all acronym can never be overstated), when not attacking them outright as “TERFs,” had already given us a taste of wokism’s wanderings and contradictions. And what can one say of the stupidity of these same activists marching for Hamas, when their life expectancy would be vanishingly short were they ever to set foot in the Gaza Strip?
What can be learned from this Gascón(e) tragicomedy? This is wokism—born, ascendant, then vaulted over into ridicule. Let us hope it now recedes, shrinks to a minuscule turd, and is at last wiped from the pages of history.
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