On his Netflix special, team TERF's – Trans-exclusionary Radical Feminist – comedian Dave Chapelle said that this particular group of women look at transgender the way black people look at a black face. "Oh, this bitch is doing an impression of me.", that was Chapelle's impression of his fellow TERF's reacting to trans women.
Watching it, I was trying to believe Chappelle had been unfairly canceled up to this point. But that's when he lost me completely. Trans women are not trying to make an impression of ciswomen. To begin with, they are not on stage. Unless you call their life the stage where they perform 24/7 non-stop to an ignorant audience like er... Chapelle himself.
The comedian wants people to believe he is a feminist and has nothing against trans or LGBT community even though they are the butt – pun intended – of many of his jokes. But when he starts to defend Jk Rowling's statement that gender is a fact, things begin to get messy.
So,I went to Webster, just like Chapelle said he did to find out he was a feminist– yeah, he said that – looking for a definition of what gender is, and here is what I found: Gender is a subclass within a grammatical class (such as noun, pronoun, adjective, or verb) of a language that is partly arbitrary but also partly based on distinguishable characteristics (such as shape, social rank, manner of existence, or sex) and that determines agreement with and selection of other words or grammatical forms.
Oh boy, that is very wordy. I prefer this much simpler definition from WHO – World Health Organization: Gender refers to the characteristics of women, men, girls, and boys socially constructed. This includes norms, behaviours and roles associated with being a woman, man, girl or boy, as well as relationships with each other. As a social construct, gender varies from society to society and can change over time.
Chapelle's point defending that gender is a fact is because we all are born from a vagina. He compares ciswomen and trans vaginas, concluding that the latter is equivalent to an impossible whopper. Not the real thing, he tried to point out. Yea, bad joke.
First, it's kind of odd that he took the time to search online feminism, but he didn't google gender. But a 48 years old man looking for self-education deserves all support and cheers in the world. However, he could have spent a little more time in his quest for knowledge online.
Secondly, unwilling, though, he makes a case for what's wrong with people, celebrities or not, who want to talk about other people's identities and sexuality. They are, as the majority of us, complete ignorants on the matter.
He didn't know nor took the time to discover that sex and gender are not the same. Sex refers to a person's physical characteristics at birth, and gender encompasses a person's identities, expressions, and societal roles. Therefore, a person may identify with a gender different from their natal sex or with no gender at all. However, when it comes to giving birth, only people of the female sex can do it. That's because sex is a trait that determines an individual's reproductive function, male or female, in animals and plants that propagate their species through sexual reproduction. It took 0.74 seconds for google to offer me this answer on the top of the search results.
Chapelle says he has been targeted by transgender people who don't understand he has nothing against them, only white people. But, coming from someone who had his entire life dealt with issues related to being a minority, he should know better the sensitivities most of the times ignored by the vast white majority – the cisgender white majority, to be more objective. It proves that ignorance has no discrimination of race or gender identity. Stupid and ignorant people come in a rainbow of colors.
In the end, he is just a product of the environment and society he grew up in: a race-fractured and polarized country, not much different than many others around the world. So Chapelle shouldn't be canceled. Instead, he just needs to devote more than 3 seconds in his search for education.