Robert De Niro shows support after daughter comes out as trangender: “I don’t know what the big deal is”
American actor Robert De Niro has expressed “love and support” for his daughter, Airyn De Niro, after she recently came out as a transgender woman.
“I loved and supported Aaron as my son, and now I love and support Airyn as my daughter. I don’t know what the big deal is . . . I love all my children,” De Niro said in a statement.
Airyn publicly came out in an interview with Them. Airyn was born in 1997 during De Niro’s relationship with her mother, Toukie Smith. She also has a twin, Julian De Niro. Despite her father’s status as an A-lister, Airyn has kept herself out of the limelight until recently, when recent tabloid articles accused her of nepotism, which she has denied in the new interview.
Airyn spoke of the importance of visibility in the interview, revealing that: “I’d want to hopefully be an inspiration for at least one other person like me who is Black, who is queer, who’s not a size extra small. I’d want to see more trans women, more Black women who are maybe bigger-bodied or don’t fit the mold of super thin.”
She noted of her parents that, “no parent is perfect, but I am grateful that both my parents agreed to keep me out of the limelight. They have told me they wanted me to have as much of a normal childhood as possible.”
Her father, Robert De Niro, has publicly supported LGBTQ+ rights and received the ‘Excellence In Media’ award at the GLAAD Awards in 2016.
Previously, De Niro had said that he would disown his children if they acted like Trump’s, in light of them acting like a “gangster family”, when discussing his disdain towards Donald Trump’s “serious” and dangerous politics.
Other celebrities, such as actors Pedro Pascal and David Tennant, have recently publicly shown their support for the transgender community, after a controversial ruling by the UK Supreme Court that determines a person’s gender based on the sex they were born as.
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