Transgender Rights

Men Rush to Chappelle’s Defense

It is simply astounding to hear cis straight men defend the most vile transphobic tripe under the guise of "jokes."

Shortly after defending homophobes and openly bragging about punching a woman for being a butch lesbian, Chappelle spent 34-minute on an anti-trans monologue which included exactly ONE joke — a joke Chappelle lifted from a dead trans woman. He told no jokes himself. Instead, he defended J.K. Rowling’s anti-trans stance, conflated sex & gender, worried aloud about a 'woman with a dick' next to him at a urinal, made a vulgar pantomime of a trans woman with a deep voice and a masculine stance, announced he’s "team TERF" (see theTERFs.com), mocked trans women’s genitals as inferior ("not the real thing") and twisted the story of the suicide of a trans woman (who struggled with PTSD from childhood abuse, and had recently lost custody of her child) to center himself, his version turning her death into martyrdom in his defense — he the misunderstood hero, trans people a hateful mob.

He bizarrely implied that trans people are all privileged white men who switch genders just to escape accountability for racism (???). He compared the trans experience to blackface.

Here are some of the leading voices in the U.S. trans community:

Janet Mock, Laverne Cox, Angelica Ross, Dominique Jackson, Ashlee Marie Preston (all Black women); Bamby Salcedo, MJ Rodriquez (Afrolatina women).

When "humor" is so obviously leveraged to rob a people of their humanity, to paint a target on their backs, that's not comedy. That's political rhetoric. That's reactionary propaganda, no funnier than Tucker Carlson's or Rush Limbaugh's. No funnier than Trump mocking a handicapped reporter at a rally.

When “humor” is so obviously leveraged to rob a people of their humanity, to paint a target on their backs, that’s not comedy. That’s political rhetoric. That’s reactionary propaganda, no funnier than Tucker Carlson’s…