Dave Chappelle has released a new Netflix special, The Dreamer, which is full of jokes about the trans community and disabled people.
“I love punching down!” he tells the audience, in a one-hour show that landed on the streaming service today (31 December).
It’s his seventh special for Netflix and comes two years after his last one, the highly controversial release The Closer.
That programme was criticised for its relentless jokes about the trans community, and Chappelle revisits the topic in his new show.
He tells jokes about trans women in prison, and about trans people “pretending” to be somebody they are not.
Mainly because they’re a child. When I was a young kid I thought I was and acted like a dog. If my mom then got me a collar and only let me potty outside that would also be child abuse.
That being said you have opened my mind more and I don’t think it’s nearly as bad as I initially thought. I still don’t think it’s great though. I also think choosing not to give your kid hormone blockers definitely isn’t imposing a choice on them. It’s literally just letting their body do what is was always going to do.
It’s imposing a choice on them by letting a permanent change happen to them without their consent. Similar to circumcision on babies based on religion rather than for medical reasons. Just because it aligned with your sense of self doesn’t mean that it wouldn’t be harmful for somebody else. For you, it was normal. For a transgender person, it could be like being the main character in a body horror movie. Watching your own body twist into something grotesque and alien while the people around you act bewildered at your distress.
Cleft lip and palate is also natural and “just letting their body do what it was always going to do”, but we still perform surgery on babies to fix it anyways and nobody would say that refusing to allow them to have that surgery wasn’t imposing a choice on them. Humanity has been defying nature since surgery was invented thousands of years ago. We were drilling holes into our heads to let the bad spirits out long before we started writing.