For Ben Affleck and ex-wife Jennifer Garner, it was a celebration of both an ending and a beginning. During a memorial service earlier this month for Garner’s father in Charleston, West Virginia, the pair also publicly endorsed their 15-year-old child’s new identity.
Their daughter, christened Seraphina Rose, now goes by Fin and uses the pronoun ‘they’. They were wearing a dark suit and tie, and sported a distinctly unfeminine buzz cut.
After making an introduction (‘Hello, my name is Fin Affleck’), Fin read a Bible passage in a service that, somewhat ironically, celebrated a grandfather who Garner has previously said was so ‘conservative’ that she and her sisters weren’t even allowed to get their ears pierced.
Fin is, of course, the offspring of two film stars who made their name embodying traditional gender stereotypes – Affleck as the squared-jawed leading man in films such as Armageddon, Pearl Harbour and The Town, and Garner as a svelte assassin in Elektra and sexy double agent Sydney Bristow in the TV series Alias.
The Afflecks – who include Fin’s siblings Violet and Samuel – certainly aren’t an exception in having a transgender family member in Hollywood. The upper echelons of Tinseltown are packed with the proud parents of trans, non-binary and gender-fluid offspring – a fact that these A-list mums and dads, suspending their usual fierce protection of their privacy, are often happy to talk about.
Indeed, the extended Affleck clan already has Fin’s step-sibling Emme, 16, the non-binary child of Jennifer Lopez – who is now Ben’s wife – from her marriage to singer Marc Anthony.
Lopez first referred to Emme as ‘they’ 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’ve had to rethink their offspring’s pronouns: it includes Charlize Theron, Jamie Lee Curtis, Cher, Sigourney Weaver, Annette Bening and Warren Beatty, and Sex And The City star Cynthia Nixon.
Official estimates of the proportion of the U.S. population that considers itself transgender vary. According to the Williams Institute, a sexual orientation and gender identities research organisation, 1.6 million Americans over the age of 13 identify as transgender. That works out at around one in 170 people. Other studies say the figure is lower. So why does Hollywood appear so over-represented?
Jennifer Lopez celebrates her twins Emme and Max turning 16 on a trip to Japan in February
Dr Hilary Cass’s long-awaited report on gender transition in the UK last week warned that many minors who question their gender identity are actually suffering from anxiety, bad self-esteem or troubles with body image. Given that being the child of a Hollywood star can be notoriously challenging – many come off the rails, sometimes with tragic consequences – could this help explain why so many are experiencing ‘gender distress’?
Or maybe it is simply because most of them live in the uber-liberal enclave of California – not to mention a like-minded industry – where gender non-conformity is welcomed. And if a star does have a transgender child, they may well want to tell the world about it, given that Hollywood has taken sides very firmly in the fierce culture war over trans topics. It is hardly surprising that its leading lights are among the trans movement’s most vociferous champions.
Some, like actress Kate Hudson (daughter of Goldie Hawn) have even raised their children ‘genderless’ – letting their children decide how they identify.
One thing is clear: stars who are open about having a trans child are – publicly at least – rarely anything but wildly enthusiastic.
Hollywood A-listers are, of course, often away filming. Some admit they never saw their child’s trans issues coming.
Jamie Lee Curtis is among those taken unawares. 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 adapt – accidentally using Ruby’s ‘dead name’ and getting the pronouns wrong – but insisted she was a ‘grateful student’.
Actress Jamie Lee Curtis with her daughters Ruby, left, and Annie at the premiere of Halloween Ends in 2022
‘I’m not proselytising, and I’m not trying to force-feed something to people,’ she told People magazine in 2021, although her attitude appeared to have hardened by the time The Advocate, an LGBTQ+ magazine, named her its Advocate of the Year in 2023 for championing their cause. She was certainly proselytising by then.
‘I hope to teach them that this is what you do when you’re a parent,’ she intoned. ‘You suit up and you show up with your heart open, your arms outstretched and your aim true. And your job is to tell the haters to back the f*** off.’
Alien star Sigourney Weaver is a close friend of Curtis but has been far more discreet about how her only child, born in 1990 to Weaver and husband Jim Simpson, is now known as Char. In 2022, Weaver – briefly muddling pronouns – revealed: ‘We have a wonderful daughter who’s now 32 – I don’t know how, she still looks 12. … In fact, they’re non-binary and they teach [digital storytelling at New York’s Columbia University].’
Some children have even been identified as trans by their celeb parents when they’re barely out of nappies. In 2019, actress Charlize Theron revealed that her elder child Jackson, 11, who she adopted as a baby and who she 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 am not a boy!”
‘So there you go! I have two beautiful daughters who, just like any parent, I want to protect and I want to see thrive.’
Theron tried to explain why she had made the revelation, saying: ‘It became harder for us the older she got that people were still writing about her in the wrong pronouns – and also I was still talking about her in the Press using the wrong pronoun. It really hurt her feelings.’
Annette Bening and Warren Beatty married in 1992 and have four children including Stephen Ira, a transgender poet. Like Jamie Lee Curtis, Bening has gone from admitting she was ‘very ignorant’ about what it meant to be a trans child to becoming an outspoken LGTBQ+ advocate, accepting the Advocate Award from LGBTQ+ rights group GLSEN last year.
‘What I would wish is for every person to have someone who is trans in their family because once somebody you love is trans, then you get it,’ she has said.
Ben Affleck with his ex-wife Jennifer Garner. The pair have three children together: Violet, Fin and Samuel
Famously outspoken, singer Cher has been very honest about the challenges that may come with having a trans child. The 77-year-old star’s transgender son, Chaz Bono, was born Chastity in 1969 and transitioned between 2008 and 2010 – long before it was a cause celebre in Tinseltown.
Cher has admitted that when Chaz first began the process of transitioning, she was afraid to see him in case she didn’t recognise him. She even asked him if he could save his old answering machine greeting.
‘It’s a strange change for a mother to go through,’ she said in a 2013 interview.
Cynthia Nixon – Miranda in Sex And The City – is one of Hollywood’s progressive firebrands. After years spent dating men, she came out as a lesbian in 2004. In 2018, she revealed that her 21-year-old eldest child, who was born Samantha and is one of two children Nixon had with college sweetheart Danny Mozes, is transgender.
‘I’m so proud of my son Samuel Joseph Mozes (called Seph) who graduated college this month,’ she said on social media in 2018 to mark the 14th annual Trans Day of Action.
At the time she was running as a socialist contender to become Mayor of New York, and critics accused her of trying to impress liberal voters.
Notorious Hollywood attention-seekers Will Smith and his wife Jada Pinkett Smith have often found themselves overshadowed by their children, son Jaden, 25, and daughter Willow, 23, who have both been described as ‘gender fluid’. Jaden was hailed as a ’non-binary icon’ in 2016 after he was made the new face of Louis Vuitton’s womenswear campaign, having regularly worn women’s clothes and high heels and insisted they weren’t ‘girl clothes’ but just ‘clothes’.
Last year, Transformers star Megan Fox was accused by a Republican neighbour of forcing two of her three young sons – then aged six, nine and ten – to wear girls’ clothes. The music video director, who ran for U.S. Congress in 2022, said he’d seen the children’s nanny consoling the unhappy boys.
Fox denied that she forced them but admits she has always encouraged them to be ‘gender fluid’ and that her eldest, Noah, had been teased by classmates for wearing dresses to school.
The actress claims that when she became pregnant with him, she could feel ‘through my mother’s intuition’ that ‘he was not subscribing to gender stereotypes, so I decided to provide an environment for him early on that would allow him to discover how he wanted to express himself’.
However, even Noah’s youthful gender experimentation was trumped by Shiloh Jolie-Pitt, the eldest biological child of Brad and Angelina, who – according to her parents – has been exploring her gender identity 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 boy [clothes]. She thinks she’s one of her brothers.’
Both parents accepted their daughter wanted to live ‘like a little dude’, although Pitt accepted some people might find it ‘obnoxious’. Jolie said she openly supported her daughter as she found her choices ‘fascinating’.
In her case, however, it reportedly proved a passing phase. Today, the parents of Shiloh, now 17, use female pronouns to refer to her.
For other Hollywood stars, however, the struggle not to let the side down by using the wrong words must continue.
