Rock icon Alice Cooper, whose decadeslong goth-rock act and a name legally changed to that of a woman endeared him to audiences of outcasts, has been dropped by a cosmetics company over remarks with multiple misunderstandings of transgender identity.
“[T]here are cases of transgender, but I’m afraid that it’s also a fad, and I’m afraid there’s a lot of people claiming to be this just because they want to be that,” Cooper, 75, born Vincent Furnier, said in an interview published Aug. 23 on the music website Stereogum. “I find it wrong when you’ve got a six-year-old kid who has no idea. He just wants to play, and you’re confusing him telling him, ‘Yeah, you’re a boy, but you could be a girl if you want to be.’ ” He also repeated the discredited hoax of children identifying as cats.
Responding to the question “As someone who played around with gender expectations early on, do you have any thoughts on … [disparaging remarks] some of your contemporaries have said [about trans identity] before they walked those comments back?,” Cooper also stated, “If you have these genitals, you’re a boy. If you have those genitals, you’re a girl. There’s a difference between ‘I am a male who is a female, or I’m a female that’s a male’ and wanting to be a female. You were born a male. Okay, so that’s a fact.”
According to research by the American Psychological Association and studies published by Oxford University Press, the National Institutes of Health’s National Library of Medicine and others, sex and gender are different constructs. The presence of sex organs alone is not determinative due to elements including a variety of different chromosome combinations; naturally occurring testosterone and estrogen levels; brain morphology; and environmental factors. Transgender persons have been documented since antiquity.
The day after the interview, Vampyre Cosmetics ended its collaboration with the Rock & Roll Hall of Famer,
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