Guess who’s not bothered by that so-called “transphobic” Caitlyn Jenner costume? Caitlyn Jenner.
“I’m in on the joke. Yeah, no, I don’t think it’s offensive at all,” Jenner told Matt Lauer in an interview.
“I know the community does, and they’ve gotten a lot of criticism for doing it. I think it’s great,” she said, laughing. “To be honest with you, I think it’s great.”
Got that? “Great” — which is a pretty far cry from the way that a lot of the activists on Social Justice Internet described it.
Vincent Villano, spokesman for the National Center for Transgender Equality, said the very existence of the costume is the same thing as calling transgender people scary monsters:
“There’s no tasteful way to ‘celebrate’ Caitlyn Jenner or respect transgender people this way on the one night of the year when people use their most twisted imaginations to pretend to be villains and monsters,” he said in a statement to the Huffington Post.
By this logic, dressing up as anyone for Halloween is always offensive — because apparently what you’re doing there is saying that that person or character is an evil, nasty villain.
#share#This is obviously a ridiculous line of reasoning, but plenty of people agreed with it. Cavan Sieczkowski, the author of that Huffington Post article (which, by the way, was titled “This Caitlyn Jenner Halloween Costume Is the Worst Idea We’ve Heard All Year”) called the costume “horribly offensive” and said that HuffPo “couldn’t agree more” with Villano’s statement.
And people on Twitter were pretty outraged, too:
There is actually such thing as a Caitlyn Jenner Halloween costume? Literally the most offensive thing ever…
— abigail (she/her) (@nothingbutabz) August 24, 2015
and
What kind of society are we to allow ppl to mock @Caitlyn_Jenner on Halloween with a costume! We got some work to do on inclusion.
— Michelle Vidrine (@Shell_belle2) August 25, 2015
and
https://twitter.com/STUDlOGHOUL/status/636177096113541120
and
To the people who are considering a Caitlyn Jenner costumer for Halloween:
You need a high five.
With a chair.
In your face.
Repeatedly. ಠ_ಠ— Dee (@headphones_D) September 1, 2015
Whoa.
That’s not to say that Jenner loved everything about the costume.
“We could have done my own costume,” she joked. “I mean that was a serious bustier on the cover of Vanity Fair, you know?”
#related#“You’ve got to enjoy life,” she said. “Life’s too short. I can’t get too upset about that type of stuff.”
Earlier in the interview, Jenner had told Lauer that she is much more easygoing than the LGBT community about political correctness.
“To be honest with you, I’m the easiest on people,” she said. “Now, the community, you know, GLAAD, all the people in the community, are like ‘Oh my God, you have to get the pronouns right, you have to do this, you have to do that. I’m much more tolerant than that.”
— Katherine Timpf is a reporter for National Review.