Oscar-winning actress Jamie Lee Curtis stood up strongly for her transgender daughter in an interview that aired Friday on MSNBC’s Morning Joe.
“This life is about love,” Curtis told host Joe Scarborough in the interview, which was taped before the actors’ strike. “Being a parent is about love, and I love Ruby. Love her. And I, people have said, ‘You’re so great to accept her love.’ What are you talking about? This is my daughter — this human being has come to me and said, ‘This is who I am.’ And my job is to say, ‘Welcome home.’ I will fight and defend her right to exist to anyone who claims that she doesn’t. And there are those people.”
Ruby Guest came out as trans in 2020. Curtis and her husband, filmmaker Christopher Guest, have a cisgender daughter, Annie Guest, as well.
It’s “a really challenging time” for trans people, Curtis noted. “There’s a lot of political rhetoric, awful political rhetoric, particularly coming from your home state,” she told Scarborough, who once was a congressman from Florida. “I’m so sorry. As you know, my favorite Twitter is the ‘Waking Up in Don’t Say Gay Florida,’ someone waking up going gay.”
Curtis acknowledged that she’s still learning about what it means to be trans. “I’m trying to learn the most important thing is that I don’t know everything,” she said. “And I, I wake up every day sober, saying, I don’t know everything. I don’t know a lot. There are a lot of things I don’t know about. And there’s a lot of this that I need to learn. And I have gone to teachers, I’ve gone to people and said, ‘Please educate me, help me learn what the issue is, why that’s so important and what the other opinion is, so that I can hear both sides.’ Because if I only hear one side of an argument or an idea, then I have no ability to think and the whole idea here is we can think we have minds to think. And as you said, you’re like, how do you walk through this? Nobody said there’s no handbook. There are people who will be helpful guides.”
“But I get it wrong. And I said something wrong with the Academy Awards. The first question was something about gender equity within de-gendering things and just, I messed it up. And I got called out by somebody on Twitter or something saying she doesn’t know what she’s talking about. And she was right. I didn’t. Because … that wasn’t the point. I misunderstood the point.”
After she won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress this year, for her role in Everything Everywhere All at Once, Curtis was asked about the possibility of ending gendered categories for the awards.
“And of course ... that involves the bigger question, which is how do you include everyone when there are binary choices?” she said at the time. “Which is very difficult, and as the mother of a trans daughter, I completely understand that.”
But she added, “And yet to de-gender the category, also, I’m concerned will diminish the opportunities for more women, which is something I also have been working hard to try to promote.”
She concluded the interview with Scarborough by saying, “So I’m learning. I’m trying. I’m, I’m human. But at the bottom line is, I’m a mom.”
