You’ve seen the headlines, maybe read the articles, and (hopefully, if you have an opinion on it) watched the special itself.
You know Dave Chappelle admits to being transphobic, gleefully spits in the eye of those fueling “cancel culture,” and has always been willfully and aggressively provocative in his comedy.
You also know that he proudly claims to be “Team TERF,” i.e., a trans-exclusionary radical feminist, which means he denies that trans women are women. He argues, “Gender is a fact. Every human being in this room, every human being on Earth, had to pass through the legs of a woman to be on Earth. That is a fact.”
You also know that, after joking about his problems with LGBTQ+ activists for roughly 30 minutes straight, he ends with a long story about his relationship with a transgender comedian, Daphne Dorman. Despite Dorman’s status as a fledgling comedian, Chappelle invited her to be his opening act whenever he played in her hometown of San Francisco.
After Dorman used Twitter to defend the transphobic jokes in Chappelle’s last special — “He isn’t punching up or punching down. He’s punching lines. That’s his job and he’s a master of his craft” — trans activists “dragged her on Twitter.” Dorman suffered from severe PTSD, but Chappelle and Dorman’s family members believe the trans community’s overwhelmingly negative responses to her tweets contributed to her suicide. Chappelle set up a trust fund for his friend’s child, which the boy will receive when he turns 21.
Despite Chappelle’s heartbreaking and anger-fueled reveal of Dorman‘s suicide, the epiphanic moment of his story comes earlier. The first night Dorman opened (and bombed) for him, Chappelle invited her onto the stage with him, where she allowed him to ask virtually every question he could think of about the trans experience. The show became “a conversation between a black man and a trans woman.” At the end of it, Chappelle made an off-hand remark about how the conversation was fun, but “I have no fucking idea what you’re talking about.”
While the whole crowd laughed, Daphne responded as seriously as possible, passionately urging him, “I don’t need you to understand me…I just need you to believe that I’m having a human experience.”
In his special, Chappelle continues, “She didn’t say anything about pronouns. She didn’t say anything about being in trouble. She said, ‘Just believe I’m a person, and I’m going through it.’”
“I know,” Chappelle continues, “I believe you. Because it takes one to know one.”
Now, it’s easy for a critic to argue that Chappelle tells this story in a cynical attempt to cover his ass. As if he’s saying, “Despite all my jokes, how can I be transphobic if I became close friends with this trans woman, tried to help her career, and now that she’s taken her life (partially due to the hateful words of trans activists on Twitter), I continue to support her son?”
It is also easy for a critic to argue that Chappelle is tone-deaf. According to the American Academy of Pediatrics, “transgender adolescents disproportionately report higher suicide attempts” than their cisgender counterparts.
Over 50% of female-to-male trans adolescents attempt to kill themselves, while 41% of non-binary adolescents and nearly 30% of male-to-female adolescents attempt suicide.
It’s not just kids. Roughly 40% of trans adults report attempting suicide at some point in their lifetimes.
Dorman’s suicide personally affected Chappelle, but his insight – “Just believe I’m a person, and I’m going through it” – fails to see the forest for the trees.
Regardless of whether his jokes are funny, this man — who is, arguably, the Greatest comedian Of All Time — has continued to target a population that struggles perhaps more than any other.
He’s not shy about the oppression Olympics that fuels his transphobic comedy. He says it flat out:
We Blacks, we look at the gay community, and we go … ‘Look how well that movement is going. Look how well you are doing. And we’ve been trapped in this predicament for hundreds of years. How … are you making that kind of progress?’ I can’t help but feel like if slaves had baby oil and booty shorts, we might have been free a hundred years sooner.
The joke is funny. But Chappelle seems to forget that gender-nonconforming individuals have been a part of society for longer than the gay and trans rights political movements have been around. Like Black Americans, LGBTQ+ Americans have been trapped in their predicaments for hundreds if not thousands of years. Like Black Americans, they continue to suffer from prejudice and discrimination.
Chappelle’s perspective (not his jokes, per se, but the perspective they reveal) suggests social progress is a zero-sum game. LGBTQ+ rights only come at the expense of other oppressed groups.
{At this point, I must note the insidious concept of “social progress,” as if it is the obligation of oppressed peoples to throw off their oppressors and not the obligation of oppressors to stop oppressing!}
Simply put, Chappelle fails to engage in intersectional thinking. He conflates gay and trans political activists with white people, a conflation he admits to in his special.
Any of you who have ever watched me know I have never had a problem with transgender people. If you listen to what I’m saying, clearly, my problem has always been…with white people.
A fair critic can only agree, but his conflation neglects to acknowledge there may be no more oppressed person than (to paraphrase Jon Fishman) “a fat, black, poor, and handicapped, old, single-mother” trans woman atheist with a low IQ.
For this hypothetical woman to achieve her full complement of rights and privileges as an American, we would need to “make progress” on Black rights, trans rights, poor rights, disability rights, elderly rights, religious rights, etc.
Chappelle does not acknowledge the existence of this person, nor the existence of people like her throughout history.
“Just believe I’m a person, and I’m going through it.”
I recently asked several students to consider whether they would have joined the American Revolution if they had been of the proper age in 1776. The question came from a YouTube video produced by PBS examining the different reactions of Black Americans, Native Americans, Women, Poor Whites, and Landowning Whites to the colonists’ call to arms.
One of the students was a 19-year-old trans man. He responded that in 1776, he would have been fighting too hard to justify his daily existence to care about geopolitics.
His answer led us to research the history of gender nonconforming individuals in the colonial period. Among other examples, we learned of a new question around the sex of General Casimir Pulaski, the father of America’s first cavalry, one of George Washington’s most beloved officers, and one of the country’s most celebrated Polish Americans.
A 2019 study of Pulaski’s remains by the Smithsonian Institution found he had both male and female bone characteristics. This suggests the general may have been female or intersex.
Being intersex is not the same as being trans or gay. Still, General Pulaski’s existence points to the reality that individuals with atypical sexes and/or genders have been a part of this country’s story from its founding moments.
This is not a new thought, though it may be one for Chappelle. The comedian’s knowledge and understanding of the history of white oppression against Black bodies runs deep, as revealed in all of his previous Netflix specials, but his knowledge of LGBTQ+ history seems to stop at Stonewall.
The jokes have never been and never will be the problem with this master of his craft. The problem, in this instance, is his willingness to understand.
Thankfully, Chappelle said at the end of his special he wouldn’t make another joke about the LGBTQ+ community “until we are both sure we’re laughing together.”
And with thanks to Dorman, in his personal interactions, Chappelle confesses to understand that every individual he meets is “a person, and [they’re] going through it.”
He claims to know. Because he claims to be one too.
