The daughter of Ben Affleck and ex-wife Jennifer Garner has “come out.” The 15-year-old girl, who was christened Seraphina Rose, now goes by the name Fin and uses the pronoun "they." That is, she identifies as non-binary, which means she considers herself neither a man nor a woman.
The daughter of the aforesaid famous actors made the announcement during a memorial service for Garner's father, earlier this month in Charleston. Fin was dressed in a dark suit and tie, and with a haircut that was clearly unfeminine.
After an introduction (“Hello, my name is Fin Affleck”), Fin read a passage from the Bible at a service that, ironically, commemorated the grandfather who Garner previously said was so “conservative” that she and her sisters weren’t even allowed to pierce their ears.
Affleck's extended family already includes Fin's half-sister, 16-year-old Emme, Jennifer Lopez's non-binary child. Lopez first called Emme "they" two years ago when she invited her on stage to sing with her at a charity baseball gala.
Garner, Affleck, and Lopez join a long list of celebrity parents—including Charlize Theron, Jamie Lee Curtis, Cher, Sigourney Weaver, Naomi Watts and ex-boyfriend Liev Schreiber, Annette Bening and Warren Beatty, and Sex and the City star Cynthia Nixon—who have had to rethink their children's pronouns.
Official estimates of the share of the US population who identify as transgender vary. According to the Williams Institute, a research organization on sexual orientation and gender identity, 1.6 million Americans over the age of 13 identify as transgender; that's about one in 170 people. Other studies say the figure is lower. So, why is this the case in Hollywood?
Dr. Hilary Cass' report on gender transition in the UK, published last week, warns that many minors who question their gender identity are actually suffering from anxiety, poor self-esteem or body image problems. Given that being the child of a Hollywood star can be extremely challenging—with many going off the rails, sometimes with tragic consequences—could this explain why so many people experience "gender distress?"
Or maybe it's simply because most of them live in ultra-liberal California—and their parents work in a like-minded industry—where gender nonconformity is approved. And if a star does have a transgender child, he or she may well want to tell the world about it.
Some, like actress Kate Hudson, are even raising their kids “genderless,” allowing them to decide how they identify themselves.
But one thing is clear: stars who openly announce the “birth” of a transgender child—at least publicly—rarely show anything other than wild enthusiasm.
Some admit that they never expected their child to have trans issues.
Jamie Lee Curtis also is among those caught off guard. In 2021, she revealed that her adopted child, born Tom, is now a trans woman named Ruby. Curtis said she and her husband, Christopher Guest, struggled to adapt at first.
Alien star Sigourney Weaver, a close friend of Curtis, is much more coy about the fact that her only child is now known as Char. In 2022, Weaver, briefly confusing pronouns, said: “We have a wonderful daughter who is now 32 years old. She's actually non-binary."
Some children were even identified as transgender by their famous parents when they were barely out of diapers. In 2019, actress Charlize Theron said that her eldest child, 11-year-old Jackson, whom she adopted as a child and whom she introduced to the world as a boy, is now being raised as a girl. “Yeah, I thought she was a boy too,” Theron told The Mail. "Until she looked at me when she was three and said, 'I'm not a boy!'”
Annette Bening and Warren Beatty married in 1992 and have four children, including Stephen Ira, a transgender poet. “I would love for every person in their family to have a transgender person,” she said.
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