By Andrea Widburg
Britain’s Royal Academy of Dance (“RAD”), founded in 1920, is one of the most prestigious classical ballet academies in the world. It’s an examination board that helped standardize and now helps maintain classical techniques at the highest level of dance, and that has a worldwide standard of influence. That’s why it matters so much that, in 2017, it gave a passing grade to a man who calls himself Sophie Rebecca, who leveraged that grade into being a professional ballerina in America, a story that suddenly hit the airwaves now.
Back in the days before women were allowed to perform in public, only men appeared on stage, whether as dancers or actors. When it came to “ballet,” this was not the en pointe dancing that is the hallmark of today’s classical ballet. Instead, it was elaborately costumed, very ritualistic dancing. Louis XIV, for example, liked to get up there and shake a leg:
Classical ballet, as we recognize it, began in the 19th century and has continued in its current form ever since. The public expectation is that ballerinas are shapely (nipped waists, long legs) and graceful. Grace is the fundamental prerequisite for a ballerina, although Balanchine added to that the current requirement of unhealthy skinniness, and extreme athleticism.
Sophie Rebecca, who somehow managed to pass the RAD “intermediate foundation” ballet exams with “merit,” is none of those things. The 6’3” man is a lumbering, graceless elephant, who is seemingly incapable of dance’s most basic requirement, which is sticking to the music:
It’s the insult to women that makes this so bad. If Sophie Rebecca were, in fact, one of those rare, sylph-like men who is a genuine female impersonator, it might make sense that he passed the tests and, within the ballet world, is allowed to perform in the female role. But that’s not the case. He’s really bad:
And yet, the media are celebrating him, as was the case with this BBC spotlight:
The video, though, highlights what transgenderism really is: Men who wish they could do traditional or stereotypical female activities. They all want to be Marilyn Monroe (or, in the case of that attention-seeking model for pedophiles, Dylan Mulvaney, a 6-year-old Eloise). They are emotionally stunted people who never outgrew their childhood fantasies.
As it is, in 2023, we have a society that allows men to embrace their inner woman. If you want to wear pink, go for it. But we’ve gone so much further than that. Instead of tolerating their eccentricities, we demand that the world acknowledge their fantasies as truth.
That journey into societal mental illness must inevitably degrade cultural institutions, including those, such as the RAD, that once set the standards. And tragically, for women, this means insulting, degrading, and erasing them to ensure that a mentally ill, dysphoric man’s juvenile dreams override a biological woman’s reality.