Ricky Gervais’ new transphobic Netflix special has social media outraged
Ricky Gervais is on the defensive after mocking trans women in his edge-lord stand-up special SuperNature, referring to them as “the new women” and “the ones with beards and c*cks.” He went on to joke about a hypothetical trans woman raping cis women.Last year was the most lethal year on record for trans people, with the HRC reporting some 57 violent killings of trans and gender non-conforming people.
Rhetoric like Gervais’ that reduces trans women to sexually violent caricatures based solely around their genitals contributes to the culture that leads to these violent killings, but on a recent interview on The One Show with Alex Jones, Gervais asserted that his dangerous rhetoric was all just comedy.“That’s when I say something I don’t really mean, for comic effect.
And you as an audience laugh at the wrong thing, because you know what the wrong thing is. It’s a way of satirizing attitudes.”A quick scroll through Twitter shows you that, in fact, his audience does not know what the wrong thing is.Meanwhile, people with a real handle on trans issues and the violence they face had plenty to say:Ricky Gervais just called trans women rapists & told us to cut off our genitals for his personal comfort on yet another hate-filled Netflix “comedy” specialFuck you @netflix, SO glad I cancelled my subscription to your hate service months agoYou’re gonna get more of us killed— Strewth.
