Alice Cooper’s rock’n’roll revolt against trans ideology

Is the tide finally turning on trans? It can often feel as if every public figure is toeing the woke line, with any dissenting view crushed by cancel culture. Even those rock stars who think of themselves as rebellious, from Billy Bragg to Neil Young, have become boringly conformist. Thank God, then, for Alice Cooper.

In an interview with online music magazine Stereogum this week, the American rock legend gave some refreshingly commonsense takes on gender-identity ideology.

Cooper was especially sceptical about the growing number of kids who identify as trans. ‘I’m understanding that there are cases of transgender [children], but I’m afraid that it’s also a fad’, he said. ‘I find it wrong when you’ve got a six-year-old kid who has no idea. He just wants to play and you’re confusing him [by] telling him, “Yeah, you’re a boy, but you could be a girl if you want to be”.’

Cooper went on to talk about how bewildering it must be for children and young people to grow up under the shadow of trans ideology, while still struggling to work out their own identities. ‘Let somebody at least become sexually aware of who they are, before they start thinking about if they’re a boy or a girl’, Cooper said. In other words, as fellow rockers Pink Floyd once said: ‘Leave those kids alone.’

Cooper also touched on the threats trans ideology poses to women’s rights and single-sex spaces: ‘A guy can walk into a woman’s bathroom at any time and just say, “I just feel like I’m a woman today”, and have the time of his life in there.’ Unfortunately, this is now a very real concern for many women. Predatory men have been given a green light to enter women’s private spaces, and women who push back will be branded as bigots. ‘Where do you draw this line?’, Cooper rightly asked.

Saying what we’ve all been thinking, Cooper also summed up ‘the whole woke thing’. ‘It’s getting to the point now where it’s laughable’, he said. ‘Everybody I talk to says, “Isn’t it stupid?”.’

Predictably, Cooper’s commonsense takes have since sparked outrage in the media and online. Rolling Stone has accused him of ‘spewing debunked bathroom-predator myths’ and using ‘right-wing, anti-trans scare tactics’. Woke hacks are especially aggrieved as Cooper was once famous for wearing make-up and confounding expectations of gender. Cooper was ‘pretty progressive’ on sexuality in the 1970s, says Rolling Stone, but he has apparently taken a ‘decisively more conservative’ stance on the trans question today.

Alice Cooper, who built a career partly out of defying and toying with gender expectations, said he’s afraid that being transgender “is a fad.” And he also leaned on right-wing, anti-trans scare tactics about “woke” culture and bathrooms. https://t.co/N7vlBddIuM

— Rolling Stone (@RollingStone) August 23, 2023

Of course, there is nothing progressive about insisting that boys who play with dolls must really be girls. The gender-bending of past rock stars was about liberating people from those gendered expectations and stereotypes. The trans ideology, on the other hand, repackages them in a woke guise.

Alice Cooper’s comments on trans are a breath of fresh air. While most of our ageing rock’n’roll heroes have accepted all the elite orthodoxies, at least there are still some rock stars left who are kicking against the pricks.

Lauren Smith is an editorial assistant at spiked.