As Ben Affleck’s daughter comes out as ‘Fin’, why are so many celebrities’ children trans and non-binary?

For Ben Affleck and ex-wife Jennifer Garner, it was a celebration of both an ending and a beginning. At a memorial service earlier this month for Garner’s father in Charleston, West Virginia, the couple also publicly endorsed their 15-year-old child’s new identity.

Their daughter, named Seraphina Rose, is now called Fin and uses the pronoun ‘she’. They wore dark suits and ties and had a decidedly unfeminine cut.

After an introduction (“Hello, my name is Fin Affleck”), Fin read a Bible passage at a service that, somewhat ironically, celebrated a grandfather who Garner previously said was so “conservative” that she and her sisters were not. they were even allowed to have their ears pierced.

Fin is, of course, the offspring of two movie stars who made their names by embodying traditional gender stereotypes – Affleck as the lead in films like Armageddon, Pearl Harbor and The Town, and Garner as a sleek killer in Elektra and sexy double agent Sydney Bristow in the TV series Alias.

The Afflecks — including Fin’s siblings Violet and Samuel — are certainly no exception when it comes to having a transgender family member in Hollywood. The upper echelons of Tinseltown are full of proud parents of trans, non-binary, and gender-fluid offspring — a fact that these A-list moms and dads, who suspend their usual fierce protection of their privacy, are often happy to talk about.

The extended Affleck clan already includes Finn’s step-siblings Emme, 16, the non-binary child of Jennifer Lopez – who is now Ben’s wife – from her marriage to singer Marc Anthony.

Lopez first called Emme “she” two years ago when she invited them on stage to sing with her at a baseball charity gala.

Garner, Affleck and Lopez join a long list of celebrity parents who have had to reconsider their offspring’s pronouns: Charlize Theron, Jamie Lee Curtis, Cher, Sigourney Weaver, Naomi Watts and her ex-boyfriend Liev Schreiber, Annette, among others Bening and Warren Beatty and Sex And The City star Cynthia Nixon.

Official estimates of the share of the U.S. population that consider themselves transgender vary. According to the Williams Institute, a research organization on sexual orientation and gender identities, 1.6 million Americans over the age of 13 identify as transgender. That amounts to about one in 170 people. Other studies say this figure is lower. So why does Hollywood seem so overrepresented?

Dr Hilary Cass’s long-awaited report on gender transition in Britain warned last week that many minors who question their gender identity are actually suffering from anxiety, poor self-esteem or body image issues. Given that being the child of a Hollywood star can be notoriously challenging – derailing many, sometimes with tragic consequences – could this help explain why so many experience ‘gender stress’?

Or maybe it’s simply because most of them live in the ultra-liberal enclave of California – where their parents work in a like-minded industry – where gender non-conformity is welcomed. And if a star has a transgender child, she might want to tell the world about it, as Hollywood has very decisively taken sides in the fierce culture war over trans topics. It is not surprising that the leaders of the movement are among the most vocal advocates of the trans movement.

Some, like actress Kate Hudson (daughter of Goldie Hawn) have even raised their children ‘genderless’ and let their children decide how they identify.

One thing is clear: stars who are open about having a trans child are – at least publicly – rarely anything other than wildly enthusiastic.

Hollywood A-listers are of course often filming. Some admit that they never saw their child’s transgender issues coming.

Jamie Lee Curtis is among those surprised. She revealed in 2021 that her adopted child, born Tom, is now a trans woman named Ruby. Curtis said she and her husband Christopher Guest had initially struggled to adjust – accidentally using Ruby’s “dead name” and getting the pronouns wrong – but insisted she was a “grateful student.”

“I’m not proselytizing, and I’m not trying to force anything on people,” she told People magazine in 2021, though her stance seemed to have hardened by the time The Advocate, an LGBTQ+ magazine, named her an Advocate. of the Year in 2023 for championing their cause. By then she was certainly converting.

“I hope to teach them that this is what you do as a parent,” she said. “You adapt and you show up with your heart open, your arms outstretched and your purpose true. And your job is to tell the haters to back off.”

Alien star Sigourney Weaver is a close friend of Curtis, but has been much more discreet about the fact that her only child, born in 1990 to Weaver and husband Jim Simpson, is now known as Char. In 2022, Weaver – briefly confusing pronouns – revealed: “We have an amazing daughter who is now 32 – I don’t know how, she still looks 12. … In fact, they are non-binary and they are learning [digital storytelling at New York’s Columbia University].’

Some children have even been identified as transgender by their famous parents while barely out of diapers. In 2019, actress Charlize Theron revealed that her eldest child Jackson, 11, who she adopted as a baby and introduced to the world as a boy, was now being raised as a girl.

“Yes, I thought she was a boy too,” Theron told the Mail. ‘Until she looked at me when she was three years old and said, “I’m not a boy!”

‘There you go! I have two beautiful daughters who, like any parent, I want to protect and see flourish.”

Theron tried to explain why she made the revelation, saying: “It became more difficult for us as she got older, that people were still writing about her in the wrong pronouns – and I was also still talking about her in the press with the wrong pronoun. . It really hurt her.”

Annette Bening and Warren Beatty married in 1994 and have four children, including Stephen Ira, a transgender poet. Like Jamie Lee Curtis, Bening has transitioned from a parent who admitted she was “very ignorant” about what it meant to be a trans child to an outspoken LGTBQ advocate, who last year won the Advocate Award from LGBTQ+ rights group GLSEN received.

“What I would like is for everyone to have someone in their family who is transgender, because when someone you love is transgender, you get it,” she has said.

Famous outspoken singer Cher has been very honest about the challenges that having a transgender child can bring. The 77-year-old actress and singer’s transgender son, Chaz Bono, was born Chastity in 1969 and underwent a gender transition from female to male between 2008 and 2010 – long before becoming a cause celebre in Tinseltown.

Cher has admitted that when Chaz first started the process, she was afraid to see him in case she didn’t recognize him. She even asked him to save his old answering machine greeting.

“It’s a strange change for a mother,” she said in a 2016 interview.

Cynthia Nixon – Miranda in Sex And The City – is one of Hollywood’s progressive firebrands and her own sexual preferences have changed over time. After dating men for years, she came out as a lesbian in 2004. In 2018, she revealed that her 21-year-old eldest child, formerly Samantha and one of the two children she had with college sweetheart Danny Mozes, is transgender.

“I am so proud of my son Samuel Joseph Mozes (named Seph) who graduated this month,” she said on social media to mark the 14th annual Transaction Day.

At the time, she was running as a Socialist candidate to become mayor of New York State, and critics accused her of trying to impress liberal voters.

Notorious Hollywood attention seekers Will and Jada Smith were often overshadowed by their children, son Jaden and daughter Willow. The latter have both described themselves as ‘gender fluid’, although 25-year-old Jaden was hailed as a ‘non-binary icon’ in 2016 after regularly wearing women’s clothing and high heels, insisting it was not ‘girl’s clothing’, but ‘ just clothes’ – he became the new face of Louis Vuitton’s womenswear.

Last year, Transformers star Megan Fox was accused by a Republican politician of forcing her three young sons – then aged six, nine and 10 – to wear girls’ clothes while they played in a park. The politician, who was her neighbor, said he had seen the children’s nanny comforting the unhappy boys.

Fox denied coercing them, but admitted she always encouraged them to be “gender fluid” and that her eldest, Noah, was teased by classmates for wearing dresses to school.

The actress claims that when she became pregnant with him, she could sense “through my mother’s intuition” that “he did not subscribe to gender stereotypes, so I decided early on to provide him with an environment where he could explore how he wanted to be.” to express themselves’.

But even Noah’s youthful gender experimentation was trumped by Shiloh Jolie-Pitt, daughter and eldest biological child of Brad and Angelina, who — according to her parents — explored her gender since she was two and asked to be called John. “She wants to be a boy,” Jolie told Vanity Fair in 2010 when Shiloh was four. “So we had to cut her hair. She likes to wear boys’ clothes. She thinks she’s one of her brothers.’

Both parents accepted that their daughter wanted to live ‘like a little guy’, although Pitt accepted that some people might find it ‘irritating’. Jolie said she openly supported her daughter because she found her choices “fascinating.”

In her case, however, it reportedly turned out to be a passing phase. Today, Shiloh’s parents, now 17, use feminine pronouns to refer to her.

For many other Hollywood stars, however, having a child who is trans or non-binary remains the pinnacle of fashion.