Blake Lively: I Want My Future Children To Be ‘Trannies’

“Gossip Girl” star Blake Lively made some incredibly offensive remarks recently when she told ELLE magazine about her hopes for her future brood.

"I hope to have a few girls one day,” she told the fashion magazine. “If not girls, they better be trannies, because I have some amazing shoes and bags and stories that need to be appreciated."

From a less critical perspective, it’s easy to chalk Lively’s comments up to her attempt at making a joke, or even an open-handed gesture of tolerance to the transgender community. But in reality, it’s exactly this sort of “joking” that perpetuates stereotyping of young transgender girls, and their cisgender counterparts.

Pop culture’s use of the word “tranny” has undergone more scrutiny in recent months.

Last month, ABC’s offensive show “Work It” premiered in the midst of intense protest and criticism, and as a result was cancelled after only two episodes. As the Huffington Post reports, several other celebrities like Lance Bass, Neil Patrick Harris, Kelly Osbourne, have also used the word “tranny” in somewhat negative contexts only to incur backlash from the LGBT community. They all apologized.

Ironically, the Huffington Post was also called out recently for using a transgender slur in a poll to decide which celebrity wore the most outrageous outfits and donned the most dramatic makeup. (They later took down the poll and apologized.) The two celebs chosen for the poll were Sofia Vergara, from Modern Family, and Blake Lively.

Prior to this recent ELLE slip up, Lively made a reference to “feel[ing] like a tranny most of the time,” in Allure back in 2009. 

Naima Ramos-Chapman is an associate editor at Campus Progress.

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