Bette Midler says she has ‘love for any marginalized people,’ after ‘erasure’ of women tweet draws backlash
Bette Midler has clarified her controversial tweet from earlier this week about women “being stripped of our rights over our bodies, our lives and even of our name” after the remarks were slammed by some as problematic and transphobic.
The ”Hocus Pocus” star, 76, responded to the criticism in a Twitter thread Tuesday and elaborated on her earlier comments, which came on the heels of Roe v. Wade being overturned last month.
“PEOPLE OF THE WORLD! My tweet about women was a response to this fascinating and well written piece in the NYT on July 3,” she said, tweeting a link to a New York Times op-ed entitled, “The Far Right and Far Left Agree on One Thing: Women Don’t Count.”
“There was no intention of anything exclusionary or transphobic in what I said,” continued Midler. “It wasn’t about that.”
“Previously a commonly understood term for half the world’s population, the word [women] had a specific meaning tied to genetics, biology, history, politics and culture. No longer,” Pamela Paul wrote in the Times piece. “In its place are unwieldy terms like ‘pregnant people,’ ‘menstruators,’ and ‘bodies with vaginas.’
“Women didn’t fight this long and this hard only to be told we couldn’t call ourselves women anymore,” Paul continued. “This isn’t just a semantic issue; it’s also a question of moral harm, an affront to our very sense of ourselves. … In a world of chosen gender identities, women as a biological category don’t exist. Some might even call this kind of thing erasure.”
Paul, who pointed to the Supreme Court overturning the constitutional right to abortion on June 24, went on to write: “Tolerance for one group need not mean intolerance for another. We can respect transgender women without castigating females who point out that biological women still constitute a category of their own.”
Midler, in her initial tweet Sunday that was addressed to “WOMEN OF THE WORLD,” wrote: “They don’t call us ‘women’ anymore; they call us ‘birthing people’ or ‘menstruators’ , and ‘people with vaginas’! Don’t let them erase you! Every human on earth owes you!”
Irish drag queen and activist Rory O’Neill, better known by stage name Panti Bliss, called Midler’s reaction “anti-trans panic fake nonsense.”
“No one is erasing women,” continued O’Neill. “In a few small healthcare cases where appropriate they are using trans inclusive language. That’s all.”
On Tuesday, Midler added: “If anyone who read that tweet thinks I have anything but love for any marginalized people, go to Wikipedia and type in my name.
“I’ve fought for marginalized people for as long as I can remember,” she continued. “Still, if you want to dismiss my 60 years of proven love and concern over a tweet that accidentally angered the very people I have always supported and adored, so be it. … We must unite, because, in case you haven’t been paying attention, divided we will definitely fall.”
