Bette Midler has attracted criticisms on social media for tweeting about the “erasure of women” in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade. Some people deemed her tweet to be transphobic.
More than 20,000 people responded to the tweet, sparking a firestorm of debate. A sizable portion of these comments criticized Bette Midler for using language that some considered anti-trans and for excluding trans people who require abortion care.
Users’ more extreme responses included accusations that Midler was a “TERF,” or trans exclusionary reactionary feminist, a term that has also been applied to J.K. Rowling. A boycott of the impending Hocus Pocus sequel on Disney+, in which Midler returns to the character of Winifred, was also proposed by some.
The criticism of Bette Midler comes at a time when some states want to limit the health care alternatives available to transgender persons.
Gregg Abbott, the governor of Texas, gave the go-ahead in February for state health organizations to start looking into the parents of transgender children who are enabling them to undergo gender-affirming surgery. Such operations were labeled “kid abuse” by Abbott.
In an effort to clarify her initial message, Bette Midler tweeted a Pamela Paul opinion piece from the New York Times on her Twitter account on Tuesday.
In his essay, Paul made the claim that “the far right and the far left have found the one thing they can agree on: Women don’t count.”
“PEOPLE OF THE WORLD!” Her rebuttal tweet began. “My tweet about women was a response to this fascinating and well-written piece in the NYT on July 3rd.”
“There was no intention of anything exclusionary or transphobic in what I said; it wasn’t about that. It was about the same old shit women – ALL WOMEN – have been putting up with since the cavemen. Even then, men got top billing.”
