Wil Wheaton says he feels strongly about ‘people like’ Chappelle making trans jokes

Wil Wheaton has said that he feels “strongly” about “people like” Dave Chappelle “making transphobic comments that are passed off as jokes.”

Chappelle’s special, The Closer, which was released on 5 October this year, came under fire for being “transphobic” after the Emmy-winning comedian said he was “Team TERF (trans exclusionary radical feminist)” like Harry Potter author JK Rowling, and that “gender is a fact”.

In a lengthy post on Facebook, 49-year-old Wheaton narrated a story from his childhood, when he used to watch comedy shows that were “dehumanising to gay men”.

“One of the definitive comedy specials for me and my friends was Eddie Murphy’s Delirious, from 1983. It had bits that still kill me. The ice cream song, Aunt Bunny falling down the stairs, mom throwing the shoe. Really funny stuff,” the Star Trek alum wrote.

“There is also extensive homophobic material that is just f***ing appalling and inexcusable,” he wrote.

He added: “Young Wil, who watched this with his suburban white upper middle class friends, in his privileged bubble, thought it was the funniest, edgiest, dirtiest thing he’d ever heard.”

“It killed him,” he said, explaining that he “developed a view of gay men as predatory, somehow less than straight men, absolutely worthy of mockery and contempt”.

He noted: “For much of my teen years, I was embarrassingly homophobic, and it all started with that comedy special.”

Wheaton also apologised to the people he had hurt in the past through his words, before adding that Chappelle’s special “contributes to a world where transgender people are constantly under threat of violence because transgender people have been safely, acceptably, dehumanised”.

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The Big Bang Theory actor also wrote a message to everyone who is inclined to disregard queer voices: “I encourage you to reflect on your choices and think about who you listen to and why.”

“Too many of my fellow cishet white men are reducing this to some abstract intellectual exercise, which once again centres our experience at the expense of people who are genuinely threatened by the normalisation of their ‘less than’ or ‘outsider’ status,” Wheaton added.

The Stand By Me actor also called Chappelle a “despicable bigot” and criticised Netflix for announcing the 28-year-old comedian as a headliner in their upcoming comedy festival in a now-deleted post.

“Absolutely disgusted. Every single comedian who is on this bill should withdraw unless and until this despicable bigot is uninvited,” Wheaton wrote.

“Any comedian who is part of this should be ashamed of themselves. Netflix may not believe in holding this piece of s*** to account, but you all have to live with yourselves and the choices you make to perform with him,” he added. “And f*** everyone at Netflix who is part of this. Trans rights are human rights and words matter.”