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While Gabourey Sidibe often plays serious characters  on-screen roles, in real life, this dynamic actress is quite the jokester. The “American Horror Story: Coven” star recently appeared on “The Arsenio Hall Show” and repeated used the word “tranny,” causing major outrage in the LGBT community and beyond.

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Check out the snippet of the conversation:

Gabourey Sidibe: There was a bar that we would frequent and every time we’d go, when we were leaving every single time there was always like a gang of cops arresting trannies.

Audience: [Laughter]

Sidibe: Specifically trannies.

Arsenio Hall: Yeah…

Sidibe: And I don’t know what goes on with trannies but that tranny on tranny crime needs to stop!

Arsenio Hall and audience: [Laughter]

Sidibe [chuckling]: It is tearing our nation apart!

What Gabby is attempting to do here is to shine light on police brutality against transgendered individuals, but the lighthearted way she threw around a known derogatory term for a cheap laugh was disturbing. She has since apologized, taking to Twitter to express her sentiments:

Mara Keisling, Executive Director of the National Center for Transgender Equality, told The Huffington Post:

Using the word ‘tranny’ isn’t OK anymore. Using it to make fun of people is definitely not OK. And using it to make fun of any kind of violence is just plain wrong. I know she meant it in fun but that’s the problem in this case. It’s not just that she used the word ‘tranny’ but that she’s making fun of violence in a city where the police have a history of committing violence and discrimination against trans women of color. It’s the kind of thing that trans people listen to and say, ‘This is someone who is not thinking about our lives. This is someone who is making fun of our problems.’ Gabby is someone who has approached lots of different social issues with grace and class and so this is just such a disappointment.

According to a recent study, “trans people across the U.S. experience three times as much police violence as non-transgender individuals” and that “even when transgender people were the victims of hate crimes, 48 percent reported receiving mistreatment from the police when they went for help”). Gabby has a voice and it seems that with this incident she realizes it. Maybe her mea culpa could go as far as making her the face of LGBT advocacy? Just a thought.

What did you think of Gabourey Sidibe’s T-bomb?

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