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The Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Trans Defamation (GLAAD) has condemned Ricky Gervais’ new Netlfix special SuperNature, writing in a Twitter thread that his set is “full of graphic, dangerous, anti-trans rants masquerading as jokes.” The organization also noted that the comedian and star of the original, British version of The Office “spouts anti-gay rhetoric & spreads inaccurate information about HIV.”
The first of the rants GLAAD are referring to begin four minutes into Gervais’ special. “Oh, women!” he exclaims at the start of the offending bit. “Not all women, I mean the old-fashioned ones. The old-fashioned women, the ones with wombs. Those fucking dinosaurs. I love the new women. They’re great, aren’t they? The new ones we’ve been seeing lately. The ones with beards and cocks. They’re as good as gold, I love them. And now the old-fashioned ones say, ‘Oh, they want to use our toilets.’ ‘Why shouldn’t they use your toilets?’ ‘For ladies!’ ‘They are ladies — look at their pronouns! What about this person isn’t a lady?’ ‘Well, his penis.’ ‘Her penis, you fucking bigot!’ ‘What if he rapes me?’ ‘What if she rapes you, you fucking TERF whore?’”
A few minutes later, while discussing Kevin Hart’s self-recusal from hosting the 2018 Academy Awards after homophobic tweets from his past surfaced, he returns to the subject. “[T]he worst thing you can say today is, ‘Women don’t have penises,’ right?” he asks. “You won’t find a ten-year-old tweet of someone saying, ‘Women don’t have penises.’ You know why? We didn’t think we fucking had to!”
Gervais adds a half-hearted caveat near the end of his special, claiming to support trans rights “in real life,” but it ends up being a set-up for another punchline, in which he tells trans women to “meet [him] halfway” and “lose the cock.”
The FADER has reached out to Netflix for further comment.