How ‘Tranny’ Became a Slur

“I hope to have a few girls one day,” said the actress. “If not girls, they’d better be trannies. Because I have some amazing shoes and bags and stories that need to be appreciated.”

The year was 2012. Blake Lively, the Gossip Girl star who uttered these words in an interview with Elle magazine, was in her mid-twenties. Now, she’s a mother of four with a new film—and she’s being dragged online after a random guy shared the twelve-year-old comment, which promptly went viral.

People quickly tracked down other instances of Lively using the word tranny. In 2009, she told Allure magazine that she “felt like a tranny a lot of the time,” because of her height (five feet, ten inches) and propensity to wear heavy makeup. And in 2008, she said in an interview with Nylon: “You read the gossip magazines and everybody is dating everyone, everybody hates everyone, everybody’s had tons of plastic surgery and we’re actually men and trannies. You don’t listen to the rumors.”

As the evidence mounted, the LGBT lobby pounced. According to Pink News, “The Blake Lively controversy is a reminder that the t-slur is offensive and shouldn’t be used.” The article quoted GLAAD’s glossary, which says the word “dehumanizes transgender people.”

But it wasn’t just the LGBT press. Even the New York Post reported that Blake Lively had used a “transgender slur in past interviews.” 

“The term ‘tranny’ has been deemed defamatory by some members of the transgender community,” reads the report, “as pointed out on GLAAD’s website.”

People seem to have forgotten that, until the mid-2010s, tranny was not widely considered pejorative. A lot of people used it, from Kim Kardashian to Miley Cyrus. Its newfound status as an unsayable slur is a fairly recent and controversial development. Here’s how it happened.