Blake Lively can’t seem to get a break, even as the floral fashion-loving actor/entrepreneur’s much-discussed new film, “It Ends With Us,” continues to score at the box office in its second weekend, earning a total $180 million worldwide.
But the weekend also gave internet sleuths more time to dig up evidence that could fuel her “cancellation,” or the Blake Lively “hate train,” as Slate called it. Combing through print and TV interviews Lively gave when she was younger, they have uncovered multiple instances when she used a certain defamatory word to describe transgender people.
The interviews took place from 2008 to 2012, when Lively starred on “Gossip Girl.” To some, her use of “the T-word” word confirms that she’s long been an annoying, entitled, culturally insensitive “Mean Girl.” Lively has been under fire in recent weeks because of reports of her high-handed behavior on the set of “It Ends With Us,” which may or may not have sparked an alleged feud with director and co-star Justin Baldoni, and because of accusations that she promoted the film as a bubbly “Barbie”-like rom-com instead of addressing its serious look at domestic violence.
Lively’s possible new scandal involving her use of the transphobic slur comes after people shared images and quotes from those interviews. It started with one user, @joshcharles_21, writing, “sometimes ill [sic] be quietly going about my day and then ill [sic] remember the time blake lively said this to a journalist.”
@joshcharles_21 shared an image of a quote from Lively’s 2012 interview with Elle magazine, when she jokingly talked about one day having children and her hope of being able to share her fashion sensibility with them.
“I hope to have a few girls one day,” said Lively, who is now married to “Deadpool” star Ryan Reynolds and has three daughters and a son. “If not girls, they better be t******s. Because I have some amazing shoes and bags and stories that need to be appreciated.”
GLAAD’s media guide said the word is considered “defamatory” because it “dehumanizes” transgender people. GLAAD explained that some transgender people still use the word to describe themselves, but others find it offensive even when used by a transgender person. “This word should not be used unless the transgender person describes themself with the term or in a direct quote that reveals the bias of the person quoted,” GLAAD said.
Lively also used the word in an 2008 Nylon TV interview with her “Gossip Girl” co-star Leighton Meester, according to another post. This X user also echoed GLAAD’s explanation that people once used the word more freely and thoughtlessly. “The early 2000s were a terrible time for language like this, so many people casually used these words,” the X user said.
In the TV interview, Lively said, “If you read the gossip magazines, everybody is dating everyone, everybody hates everyone, everybody has had like tons of plastic surgery and they’re actually men and t******s. It’s just like, you don’t listen to the rumors.”
A year later, Lively reportedly used the word in an interview with Allure magazine in 2009, the Daily Beast reported. “I feel like a t***** a lot of the time,” Lively said. “I don’t know, I’m … large? 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.”
Revelations that Lively threw around this particular word brought out the Lively critics. “She deserves her cancellation 100%,” one person said.
@joshcharles_21 pointed out that Lively was warned to stop using “the T-word” by the TransAdvocate, an online news and commentary publication. The TransAdvocate said it first warned Lively to not use the word after her 2009 interview with Allure magazine, and then raised concerns about her use of the word again in 2012.
“Once again Blake, since you obviously missed it the first time we tried to point this out to you in 2009,” a TransAdvocate writer said,” explaining that the word is considered insulting “by increasing majorities of my community, not a term of endearment. If you consider yourself a trans ally, it is not cool, hip or edgy to use that word in referring to my community.”
Meanwhile, other X users were reminded of other times Lively did or said something objectionable, most infamously when she and Reynolds married on a former slave plantation in South Carolina in 2012 and she more or less used the occasion as a branding opportunity for her lifestyle website that swooned over the antebellum South.
They also brought up another recently unearthed “nightmare” interview from 2016 when Lively was visibly rude and dismissive to a Norwegian journalist who congratulated her on being pregnant. Lively turned around and congratulated the journalist on her “baby bump,” even though the journalist was not pregnant and later revealed revealed that she is infertile.
But other people were willing to cut Lively some slack over her use of the T-word more than 10 years ago. They also said she didn’t seem to intend to demean transgender people, but, in her way, she was expressing her appreciation and support.
“I’m actually not mad at this at all,” one person said in reply to the post by @joshcharles_21. “The word was throw (sic) around a lot back in the day. If it was said today it would be problematic, but nothing is wrong w wishing for a trans child.”
Someone else said, “I think back to the language we used back in the day and I’m so embarrassed we allowed it thankfully people have moved on.”
“That’s a very old quote … spoken at a less sensitive time in history,” another person said. She shouldn’t be punished for something said several years ago!”