“Does the word ‘tranny’ bother me? No. I love the word ‘tranny,’” RuPaul said in a recent interview on the WTF With Marc Maron Podcast.
Logo TV has distanced itself from RuPaul after a recent interview in which he defended the use of the word ‘tranny.’
In the interview, RuPaul directly responded to the criticism he has received over the past few months for his use of the word ‘she-male’ in a mini-challenge on RuPaul’s Drag Race Season 6.
“Don’t you dare tell me what I can do or what I can say” RuPaul said. “It’s just words. Yeah, words do hurt. ‘Words hurt me.’ You know what? Bitch, you need to get stronger. You really do. Because you know what? If you think, if you’re upset by something I said, you have bigger problems than you think. I’m telling you this.”
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Logo TV doesn’t stand with RuPaul and these remarks. A spokesperson for the network told Buzzfeed, “These comments did not come from Logo. We are committed to supporting the entire LGBT community and will not feature any anti-trans rhetoric on our shows.”
According to RuPaul, “fringe people” are responsible for the backlash, not the transgender community:
[quote]That is what we’re dealing with. It’s not the trans community, because most people who are trans have been through hell and high water and they know — they’ve looked behind the curtain at Oz and went, ‘Oh, this is all a fucking joke.’ But some people haven’t, and they’ve used their victimhood to create a situation: ‘No, you look at me. I want you to see me the way you’re supposed to see me.’ You know, if your idea of happiness has to do with someone else changing what they say, what they do, you are in for a fucking hard-ass road.”[/quote]
Parker Marie Molloy, a writer at Advocate.com, has been credited with bringing the controversy into mainstream media. The queens from RuPaul’s Drag Race have been walking on thin ice since then, and Alaska Thunderfuck recently issued an apology after one of her YouTube videos received backlash for “hurting people’s feeling.”
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matthew
Well RuPaul’s fans stand with him on this. Logo needs to be aware of that.
Meggie81
Bull. I’m Ru’s fan and I love the show, so so much. But I am fine with not using the ‘she-mail’ segment and I think the show could be better with respect to trans issues. You don’t have to resist change. The trans and drag communities are overlapping, historically, and have a lot of the same history and people among them. It’s a hard process to figure out what you should claim and what you should let go, but it only begins when they’re ready to say maybe they could be better people to each other. I’m a fan but I won’t be if they all keep this defensiveness up. It doesn’t threaten drag to maybe acknowledge it’s time to move forward.
matthew
I agree with you. It is about dialogue. But dialogue involves not attacking the people who are your historical allies and friends. On other threads I have seen activists compare drag to “black face” and one activist compared drag queens to house negroes versus the transgendered community who are field negroes–borrowing Malcolm X’s analogy. If you really believe that drag is black face, then all the language adjustments in the world are not going to be enough. There can’t be true dialogue until this is worked out–seeing drag as a poor copy of the T community is part of the problem– it has nothing to do with transgendered people, drag has been around forever, it’s a form of community and identity, and it has as much right to exist as the transgendered community does. Where there is overlap that’s where there has to be dialogue. I have seen RuPaul remove words from his show, I have seen him remove segments that offended, I have seen him have transgendered contestants and judges on his program, all of which has offered a public platform for the transgendered community to show who they are and all of which shows a willingness to dialogue. One doesn’t turn around after all of that and continually attack the man. I will believe this group is serious once they lay down their weapons and venom.
ngblog
Logo wants to tap into that goldmine that is the homophobic tranny movement.