Netflix showrunner says she’ll never work with company again after Dave Chappelle’s ‘transphobic’ stand-up

The top showrunner for the popular Netflix series Dear White People said that she will no longer work with the streaming platform, after describing the “blatantly and dangerously transphobic content” that was portrayed in Dave Chappelle’s latest comedy special, The Closer.

Speaking with Variety, Jaclyn Moore, who transitioned amid the pandemic, detailed why she decided to boycott Netflix.

For Moore, Dave Chappelle is one of her “comic heroes.”

“He’s a brilliant goofy comedian. He’s brilliant as a political comedian,” she told the outlet.

But she also wasn’t in favour of Chappelle’s “trans material.”

“I never loved Dave’s trans material before, but this time it felt different. This is the first time I felt like, ‘Oh, people are laughing at this joke, and they’re agreeing that it’s absurd to call me a woman.’ The fact is that’s the exact rhetoric and language that is used against us,” Moore told the outlet.

“It’s dangerous and it has real-world physical violence repercussions. It’s actually the same language used by people who seek to hurt us.”

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In another part of the interview, Moore also suggested that even if the comedy special is amended, and more trans people are hired at Netflix, it still wouldn’t be enough to justify the special to begin with.

“I don’t know what Netflix should do, but I feel something needs to be done. Whether that’s removing part of this special, whether that’s amending the special in some way, I don’t know,” she said.

Netflix and Chappelle faced major scrutiny for The Closer, which happens to be the sixth special that the comedian premiered with the company.

Within the special, Chappelle also said that “gender is a fact” and that everyone present had to be born from a woman to “be on earth.”

Netflix employees took to Twitter to out comments about the ridiculed special.

”Promoting TERF ideology (which is what we did by giving it a platform yesterday) directly harms trans people, it is not some neutral act...It is an argument with trans people who want to be alive and people who don’t want us to be,” one employee wrote, in part.

Chappelle has also received backlash from organisations like GLAAD for his previous specials containing anti-LGBT speech.

Indy100 reached out to both representatives for Dave Chappelle and Netflix.