Fan who once wrote to Dave Chappelle says his transgender material is 'hateful'

On Dec. 31, Netflix released Dave Chappelle's latest comedy specials, Equanimity and The Bird Revelation. The former contains an anecdote about a fan who sent Chappelle a letter about his heavily-criticized jokes about transgender people, and it leads into more jokes in the same vein.

Tyler Foster published an essay on Medium claiming that he is likely the fan whose letter Chappelle references, a letter to which Chappelle sent a handwritten response just days later.

"You are a very kind person to nudge me gently, and your friends in the transgender community are lucky to have an advocate like you," Chappelle wrote, in a screenshot of the note added to the Medium post, adding, "I'm not perfect, but I do care." 

"At the time, I wanted to believe what Dave wrote," explained Foster in his essay. "Sadly...his statements in the letter that his intent 'isn’t malicious' and 'I do care,' his transgender material has only gotten more hateful across the board."

In his Medium essay, Foster describes his original letter to Chappelle, which he wrote after a performance in Seattle in 2016.

I praised the same things I’ve praised above but offered tempered criticism about his trans jokes. I cited his admission that he was working through his homophobia as another instance in which he’d admitted he was slow to change. I pointed out that black struggles and trans struggles, which he tried to rank against one another, are not mutually exclusive, as many trans women are also black women, and they tend to face the worst and most violent forms of discrimination. I mentioned that I have a friend who is a trans woman and also a stand-up comedian, in hopes of inspiring some professional understanding. Finally, I discouraged the use of the word “tranny.” While correcting this terminology wouldn’t fix the deeper problems with the jokes, elaborating further felt too complex to tackle in a one-way conversation.

In Equanimity, Chappelle describes the letter as being from a trans person (Foster is cisgender) but the criticism is the same, whether this is Foster's letter or not. Chappelle describes the fan letter and says he doesn't know what joke it was about, but uses that as a segue to say, "It was probably this joke I'm about to tell you right now."

The new special is full of jokes about the transgender community, from "It's funny when it's not happening to you" right down to an emphatic "yuck” for Caitlyn Jenner. Though it drew criticism for transgender jokes (and trivialization of sexual misconduct in The Bird Revelation), Chappelle's fan base expressed enjoyment on Twitter, praising him for the comedy they've come to expect.

Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable

Chappelle, like many comedians, lives by the credo of offending everybody – or at least reserving the right to.

But Foster notes that what needs to be taken into account here is "offensive to whom, and in service of what?" The transgender community is constantly fighting for basic rights like using the bathrooms that match their gender identity; the right to serve in the military, as denied to them by the Trump administration; the right to merely stay alive as trans people are attacked and murdered because of who they are.

"I don't understand all the choices that people make," Chappelle says in Equanimity. "But I do understand that life is hard and that those types of choices do not disqualify you from a life with dignity and happiness and safety in it."

If that truly is the case, then Chappelle and his comedy can do a whole lot better.

H/T Vulture