From the article:
The essence of the joke in the ad (for joke it was) lay in its "anything you can do I can do better" contest between the "real" woman and the "imposter". If she applied mascara, he applied more mascara. If she applied lip-gloss he applied more lip-gloss. There was a sneering, condescending quality to the ->-bleeped-<-'s behaviour right up until the moment the woman whipped out her Libra and forced him to beat a huffy retreat.
Were stereotypes in play? Of course they were! All humour relies, in one way or another, on stereotypes. Was the ad capable of being read as "transphobic"? Only if the viewer was already caught up in that curiously Anglo-Saxon web of mandatory moral concessions and puritanical prohibitions we call "political correctness". Only if he or she had already become acclimatised to the culturally claustrophobic world of identity politics, in which every word is checked against the official dictionary of diversity, and every gesture undertaken with the exaggerated circumspection of a tightrope walker.
