Ricky Gervais is no ‘transphobe’

Ricky Gervais knew what he was doing and why he was doing it when he took on transgender activism in his new Netflix special, SuperNature. Three quarters of an hour into his set, he told his audience: 

‘I talk about AIDS, famine, cancer, the Holocaust, rape, paedophilia…the one thing you should never joke about is the trans issue. They just want to be treated equally. I agree; that’s why I include them. But they know I’m joking about all the other stuff, but – they go – ‘no, he must mean that’.’

The backlash to Gervais’s jokes suggest he was right. For all the subjects Gervais made gags about, it was his description of the ‘new women’ as he called them, ‘the ones with beards’, that has caused outrage.

Gervais’s show was a full-fronted assault on the mantra that transwomen are women. Was this wise? It was certainly unkind, but since when did comedy need to be kind? Last year, Dave Chappelle, the American comedian, got into hot