A clip featuring South Park’s chief troublemaker Eric Cartman using transgender identity politics for his own ends has gone viral 8 years after it originally aired on Comedy Central.
Dark comedy “South Park” has mocked political figures and ideologies on both sides of politics for decades. Recently, an old clip gained tens of thousands of views for poking fun at how some people use identity politics, such as changing their gender identity, to cynically game the systems of modern society.
In the scene from the episode “The Cissy,” shared by numerous Twitter accounts, Cartman grows so outraged with the lack of available toilets in the boys’ restroom at school that he puts on a bow and identifies as transgender, or as he mispronounces it, “transginger,” to use the girls’ room.
Cartman proceeds to the girls’ restroom and is confronted by female characters, to the point he defends his claim to be there.
1998 “Kenny”, “Cartman”, “Kyle”, and “Stan” are the characters in the hit series “South Park.” (Getty Images)
“Did you notice the bow? I’m not comfortable with the sex I was assigned at birth, so I’m exercising my right to identify with the gender of my choice, now get out of my way I have to take a sh**,” he says.
When the school principal confronts him later in her office suggesting he does not know what “transgender” means Cartman responds, “It means I live a life of torture and confusion because society sees me as a boy, but I’m really a girl,” later proclaiming the principal cannot force him to use the same restroom as the “cisgingers.”
School staff are shown in a later conversation as Mr. Garrison, who had spent years identifying as a female, explains cisgender is the “politically-correct name for people who aren’t transgender,” because “saying normal is extremely offensive to people who aren’t in that group.”
He follows by warning his coworkers not to start a scandal by going against transgender ideology, “Trust me, you don’t want this hot potato, just let him use the girls’ room.”
Santee High School Dean Jose Lara talks to reporters about transgender issues outside the school’s gender neutral restroom in Los Angeles, CA on May 4, 2016. (MARK RALSTON/AFP via Getty Images)
The principal observes that Cartman has a nefarious reputation, to which Mr. Garrison replies, “Nobody else is going to know that, you better just give him what he wants.”
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“So Eric Cartman has us in some kind of bathroom checkmate?” the principal asks.
Mr. Garrison, making a bathroom pun in a somber tone, “Actually, it’s more like a royal flush.”
A previous, even older South Park clip from 2005 went viral last week for similarly lampooning transgender ideology.
IMDB summarized that episode: “Mr. Garrison gets an operation and becomes a woman; Kyle gets surgery to become tall and black so he can play basketball; Gerald decides he wants to be a dolphin.”
University of Pennsylvania swimmer Lia Thomas accepts the winning trophy for the 500 Freestyle finals as second place finisher Emma Weyant and third place finisher Erica Sullivan watch during the NCAA Swimming and Diving Championships. (Photo by Rich von Biberstein/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)
The topic of men identifying as women has become a controversial sticking point in female sports, where men with more upper body strength can overwhelm their female competition with ease. Lawyer and former Olympian Nancy Hogshead-Makar warned on an episode of Dr Phil, “There’s no training, no coach, that’s going to outrun biology.”
