Logic: Is Beyoncé a Boy, Rude, or Just Ugly?

A reflection on beauty, online obsessions, and our collective descent into nonsense

Someone posted a video of Beyoncé allegedly being rude to another woman. Utterly uninteresting. But what did catch my attention was the comment section.

Down the rabbit hole I went

Hundreds of people calling her ugly. Untalented. The implication being: only the “approved” beauties are permitted to be rude.

Some declared they had never liked her and were not surprised. Others gleefully celebrated the idea that she had finally been “exposed.”

And then came the pièce de résistance. Someone proclaimed Beyoncé was a man. Their evidence? Her name: Bey (Boy) + once (she was a boy once).

I could not help but think they had missed an opportunity to reference her song ”If I Were a Boy”. A terrible argument, of course, but at least a touch more creative.

Trans? Rude? I could not care less. But arguments? God, I care about those.

So, she is rude because she is a boy. She is rude, and she should not be, because she is not pretty enough.

As the discourse deepens it deteriorates, spiralling into something akin to a masturbatory recursive AI algorithm. I suddenly realise we collectively deserve the world we have got.

We are in hell because we all create it.

It made me reflect on my own pet peeves, the things I complain about, the things I just do not like. How irrational am I, really? Could I also be guilty of my own mental gymnastics, bending logic to fit my narratives? Even though I am not the sort to leave unhinged comments on the internet, I cannot help but feel I should be more diligent in catching my own internal inconsistencies.

This is what makes us ugly, truly ugly. Not our appearance, but our projections, our fears, our hatred, our jealousy, laid bare for the world to see, and yet we remain blind to them.

Someone does not want Beyoncé to be considered beautiful, so they seize every opportunity to undermine her. Someone else is obsessed with “uncovering” trans people, so they project their theories wherever they can.

But perhaps we owe it to ourselves to examine these obsessions. To understand why we latch onto them and why we let them consume us.

Regardless, education has failed us all to some degree, and it is highly convenient for the world to keep getting more miserable.

And I cannot shake the feeling that none of this would happen if philosophy were compulsory in schools from the age of six. Maybe we would actually know better than to confuse rudeness with gender or beauty with worth.