Bethenny Frankel Makes A Bunch Of Gross, Transphobic Comments About Transgender Kids
Bethenny Frankel defends her comments about trans people and gender identities, says she’s not afraid of being canceled
Bethenny Frankel came under fire last week for uttering some pretty ignorant comments about pronouns and gender identities on an episode of her podcast and instead of hearing the criticism and, oh I dunno, educating herself about the trans experience, Frankel defended her words and begged the internet to “cancel” her.
But first, a little back-story on Frankel and her comments about the trans community.
During Frankel’s September 23rd, 2021 episode of her Just B podcast, she opens with a monologue about how she and her daughter “have to” announce their pronouns at her 13-year-old’s school now. “We have to go into the fact that I did a Zoom for my daughter’s school and [had] the pronouns conversation with each teacher, each parent, each child,” Frankel says on the podcast. “And my daughter says in school, too, that everybody has to say their pronouns. And my daughter didn’t even know what hers were.” As she tells the story, Frankel sounds very put out by the exhaustive task of simply saying, “She/her.”
So that happened, and then Frankel went into a story about “the craziest year in [summer] camp history” because she heard that a young trans girl had attended a summer camp in her community.
Mind you, Bethenny’s daughter was not at this camp, it was just that Frankel knew that there was, her words, “a person with a penis, who identifies as being a girl,” attending an all-girls summer camp and Frankel decided that she absolutely had to weigh in with her opinion on the subject, and cue the largest eye roll in history. Frankel tells the story, focusing exclusively on the anatomy of this literal child, which I’m sorry, is fucking weird, and said, “So the other girls saw a penis. They’re 9, 10 years old, so the parents obviously weren’t that happy…A penis often goes into a vagina often so they might not want that visual so soon.”
Frankel then goes on to riff some more ignorant stuff about inclusive bathrooms in schools and camps, muttering some nonsense about how some trans kids may not actually be trans because, as she puts it, “a lot of girls in college have a lesbian phase and then they realize that they’re not?”
Some people slammed her online, others simply asked her to educate herself and be mindful of the language she uses.
“No one’s trying to cancel you, just educate you that your discussion was offensive to a lot of people. Maybe this wasn’t the reaction you were expecting, but we need to be more graceful when talking about this stuff on a huge platform,” one Twitter user wrote.
For her part, Frankel went on the defensive, sending tweet after tweet defending her right to talk about the young trans individuals the way she did.
Frankel told her followers that she’s “not afraid of cancelation,” and that said, “I don’t have a transphobic bone on my body,” though she seemed incapable of engaging or listening to anyone who urged her to actually educate herself on the words she uses when she talks about trans people.
Frankel will probably continue her defense in another episode of her podcast and honestly, it’s a shame that Frankel’s organization does significant humanitarian work around the country, but on the topic of trans identities, she seems so unwilling to learn.
