what a joke

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:

Members of the queer community had hoped following the debacle with Dave Chappelle’s transphobic special The Closer and the subsequent employee walkout at Netflix that the streaming giant would stop platforming violent rhetoric, but that hope seems to be wearing thin.

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