Blake Lively is catching major heat for using the T-word multiple times in past interviews. Lively is already under fire following a chaotic It Ends With Us press tour, and this recent… Read More

Is it a big deal that Blake Lively said “tranny” over ten years ago?

That’s the question being asked all over the internet today after several quotes made by the embattled It Ends With Us star more than a decade ago have started resurfacing.

Lively is at the center of a lot of controversy right now after a chaotic press tour for her movie It Ends With Us and an alleged feud she had with her director and co-star Justin Baldoni. Now, people are digging into her past to find more reasons not to like her.

X (formerly Twitter) user @joshcharles_21 posted on social media “sometimes I’ll be quietly going about my day and then I’ll remember the time Blake Lively said this to a journalist,” along with a picture of her being quoted from a 2012 interview with Elle.

“I hope to have a few girls one day. If not girls, they better be trannies,” she told the magazine at the time when asked the prospective fashion interests of her future children. “Because I have some amazing shoes and bags and stories that need to be appreciated.”

Another clip, this one from NylonTV, has her talking with her Gossip Girl co-star Leighton Meester and shows the two actors being asked if they pay attention to rumors about them.

“You read the gossip magazines, and everybody is dating everyone, everybody hates everyone, everybody has had like tons of plastic surgery and they’re actually men and trannies,” she said. “It’s just like: you don’t listen to the rumors.”

And a third quote, from a 2009 interview with Allure, has Lively using the word yet again.

sometimes ill be quietly going about my day and then ill remember the time blake lively said this to a journalist pic.twitter.com/SIHZcrlzui

— joshua 🍒 (@joshcharles_21) August 18, 2024

“I feel like a tranny a lot of the time. I don’t know, I’m… large?” she said. “They put me in six-inch heels and I tower over every man. I’ve got this long hair and lots of clothes and makeup on… I just feel really big a lot of the time, and I’m surrounded by a lot of tiny people. I feel like a man sometimes.”

Now that’s something that nearly every woman on earth has related to at some point in her life!

She said it again here too. The early 2000s were a terrible time for language like this, so many people casually used these words. pic.twitter.com/cK8VLH3gFN

— alli. ✨ (@AlliApplebum) August 18, 2024

In the late 2000s the word “tranny” was thrown around with wild abandon, and even became a part of the catchphrase “hot tranny mess” thanks to beloved designer Christian Siriano coining the phrase on Project Runway.

Does this mean the anti-trans slur is okay, or was okay to use by cis people? No, absolutely not. But does it mean that a celebrity saying it ten to fifteen years ago has little impact on who that celebrity is now as a person? Probably.