Ten Years Later, Some ‘South Park’ Fans Still Don’t Understand the Trans Bathroom Episode
Since it apparently bears repeating for the 1,000th time, the general rule for watching South Park is that, if you find yourself identifying with Eric Cartman, then you are exactly what we’re all laughing at, not trans people.
In 2014, Trey Parker wrote a South Park episode satirizing the then-new political debate over transgender people using the bathrooms that match their identity. In “The Cissy,” Cartman exploits the newfound sensitivity over toilet usage by identifying as “transginger” and causing a scene in the girl’s bathroom when the boys' stalls were all occupied before convincing the school to assign him a private lavatory where he can perform BDSM on a toilet bowl. Critically, that’s barely the first five minutes of the episode and hardly a complete picture of the points Parker made about the issue. But a decade later, so many South Park fans still haven’t watched “The Cissy” in its entirety before shaping their policy opinions around it.
Earlier this week, the right-wing Twitter slop poster Community Notes & Violations went viral for tweeting neither a note nor a violation, but a cherry-picked clip from the first two minutes of “The Cissy” with the title, “South Park Was Way Ahead of Its Time.”
Don't Miss
And Republican shitposters are way behind South Park — they can't even get to the first commercial break.
As so many South Park fans with attention spans lasting longer than the length of the Twitter clip pointed out, “The Cissy” wasn’t actually a condemnation of transgender people who quietly use the bathroom that matches their identity. In fact, it was one big satire of the obsessive, bigoted types like Community Notes & Violations who think that taking a dump in a toilet can, itself, be a human rights violation.
After Cartman spends the entire runtime of “The Cissy” abusing the inclusive language used by the trans-tolerant, the entire student body of South Park Elementary votes in favor of a bathroom policy wherein every student can piss and shit in whichever restroom they are most comfortable, and “anyone who has a problem sharing a bathroom with people who might be transgender will have to use the special designated bathroom designed to keep them away from normal people who don’t care.”
Somehow, this is far from the first time that “The Cissy” has been cited by the exact people South Park was satirizing on a huge platform. Last year, Fox News Digital associate editor Alexander Hall wrote an article titled, “Classic South Park Clip Mocking Transgender Bathroom Policies in Schools Goes Viral” about a different instance of the same scene amassing millions of views from people who didn’t actually watch the episode. Hall, apparently, has not finished “The Cissy” or simply lied about the in-show context as he recounted the first few minutes of the episode as if it was condemning the “transgender ideology” and not, you know, Hall himself.
The sad part about the continued popularity of “The Cissy” is that the episode is actually a great satire of the entire debate over gender identity policies, both of the left-leaning obsession with replacing all gender-related terminology with approved trans-inclusive language and of the objective weirdos who spend all their time worrying about where trans people take their shits. Sadly, as is the case any time South Park addresses social issues, the conservative side only understood half of the parody, and they’ve astoundingly decided that Cartman is their moral compass when it comes to the trans community.
It’s only a matter of time before conservative Twitter and Fox News take their hatred of San Francisco to the next step and go full pro-Cthulhu.
