Welcome to his nightmare. Vampyre Cosmetics dropped legendary shock rocker Alice Cooper from a partnership deal signed two weeks ago. The goth-themed cosmetics company canceled the collaboration with Cooper due to some remarks he made in an interview with Stereogum, an indie music website.

Vampyre Cosmetics describes the company as “proudly women-owned, disabled owned and LGBT+ owned. Our products are vegan, cruelty-free and talc-free. They are also super long-lasting as they were specifically formulated for stage and screen.” Also on the website, the company declares, “We believe gender is a construct and has no place in our business. We refuse to gender our products because they are for everyone.” The company was going to collaborate with Cooper on a makeup collection named after him.

It would seem like a perfect match. Alice Cooper is known for goth-style makeup onstage. He’s been around for 50 years in the entertainment business. No one would be surprised about the collaboration. It would be a natural.

What many people don’t seem to know is that Alice Cooper and his wife are born-again Christians. He’s a pretty normal kind of guy in his offstage life. He’s an avid golfer. He was a track and field star in school, and he credits his faith with saving him from drug and alcohol addiction.

“My wife and I are both Christian,” Cooper said in 2018. “My father was a pastor, my grandfather was an evangelist. I grew up in the church, went as far away as I could from it — almost died — and then came back to the church.”

Cooper is 75 years old now and is still rolling along. He travels with the Hollywood Vampires, a supergroup also comprising Joe Perry and Johnny Depp. He will soon release his 22nd solo album. Then he sat for an interview with Stereogum. He was in Budapest with the Hollywood Vampires. The interview was a career-spanning one.

Ahead of Road‘s August 25 release, Cooper sat down for a career-spanning chat with Stereogum. We talked about his latest output, palling around with Groucho Marx and Salvador Dalí, babysitting a young Keanu “Ke” Reeves while recording Welcome To My Nightmare, and what he, as one of the best-known gender-benders in rock, thinks of the ongoing gender-affirming care “debate.”

Uh-oh. The “gender-affirming care debate.” There’s a red flag. The question that caused the kerfuffle referenced back to 1974 when the interviewer acknowledged Cooper’s prediction about sexuality in the future.

“In the future, everyone will be bisexual,” and you accurately defined pansexuality, among other things. You also said, “Lots of men who perform wear make-up – that’s a theatrical tradition, it has nothing to do with sexuality.”

Then he was asked about recent remarks from other performers like Paul Stanley and Dee Snider that call gender-affirming care for kids as a “sad and dangerous fad.” What does Alice Cooper think? Well, he’s also of the opinion that transgenderism may be a fad for a lot of young people.

Yeah. I’m understanding that there are cases of transgender, but I’m afraid that it’s also a fad, and I’m afraid there’s a lot of people claiming to be this just because they want to be that. 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 telling him, “Yeah, you’re a boy, but you could be a girl if you want to be.”

I think that’s so confusing to a kid. It’s even confusing to a teenager. You’re still trying to find your identity, and yet here’s this thing going on, saying, “Yeah, but you can be anything you want. You can be a cat if you want to be.” I mean, if you identify as a tree… And I’m going, “Come on! What are we in, a Kurt Vonnegut novel?” It’s so absurd, that it’s gone now to the point of absurdity.

The whole woke thing… Nobody can answer this question. Maybe you can. Who’s making the rules? Is there a building somewhere in New York where people sit down every day and say, “Okay, we can’t say ‘mother’ now. We have to say ‘birthing person.’ Get that out on the wire right now”? Who is this person that’s making these rules? I don’t get it. I’m not being old school about it. I’m being logical about it.

It’s getting to the point now where it’s laughable. If anybody was trying to make a point on this thing, they turned it into a huge comedy. I don’t know one person that agrees with the woke thing. I don’t know one person. Everybody I talk to says, “Isn’t it stupid?” And I’m going, “Well, I respect people. I respect people and who they are, but I’m not going to tell a seven-year-old boy, ‘Go put a dress on because maybe you’re a girl,’ and he’s going, ‘No, I’m not. I’m a boy.’”

So I say let somebody at least become sexually aware of who they are before they start thinking about if they’re a boy or a girl. A lot of times, I look at it this way, the logical way: If you have these genitals, you’re a boy. If you have those genitals, you’re a girl. There’s a difference between “I am a male who is a female, or I’m a female that’s a male” and wanting to be a female. You were born a male. Okay, so that’s a fact. You have these things here.

Now, the difference is you want to be a female. Okay, that’s something you can do later on if you want to. But you’re not a male born a female.

That’s a long quote but I wanted to post the answer accurately, as it ran in the piece. The interviewer went on to say that parents aren’t really encouraging kids to call themselves transgender. We know that isn’t true in many cases. Cooper spoke about men going into women’s restrooms, sometimes under false pretenses. We also know that there have been reports of women being sexually assaulted in restrooms by men claiming to be trans. Cooper is right in his statements and he is being logical.

Transgender activists don’t accept logic or any other opinion that strays from their dogma. The cosmetic company kicked Alice to the curb on Instagram.

“In light of recent statements by Alice Cooper we will no longer be doing a makeup collaboration. We stand with all members of the LGBTQIA+ community and believe everyone should have access to healthcare. All pre-order sales will be refunded,” Vampyre Cosmetics posted on its official Instagram page.

The radical activists are not interested in a robust conversation about these hot-button issues. There are no allowances made for anyone who doesn’t march in lockstep. This is where we are now. Surely Cooper had to have known that his comments would be controversial, given his common sense approach to reasoning.

I’ve checked around on social media and I don’t find a response from Cooper on the deal cancellation.