As a public figure you are constantly being watched from all sides and everything you do or say is being watched. It is all the more important in such cases to always think carefully about how you express yourself in public. Not doing this can have massive consequences – as influencer Pamela Reif (26) recently felt.
Pamela Reif: Followers accuse her of transphobia
It all started with a face filter on the social media platform TikTok. The 26-year-old tried it out on herself last week and reacted to it. So she wrote to the resulting picture of herself, with a lot of make-up and a little changed facial features: “Why do I look like a tranny?” A violent shitstorm then broke out over the influencer, in which she was accused, among other things, of being transphobic.
Another video of the 26-year-old followed on Instagram on Friday, in which she apologized to her more than nine million followers for her statement. “I’m just so sorry. And what I said on TikTok yesterday was so wrong and so stupid,” she said at the beginning of the video. “I made such a transphobic statement with such a stupid choice of words that I really didn’t mean to convey from my heart and didn’t want to convey it that way.”
Influencer Pamela Reif admits mistakes and promotes more education
Then she tried to explain how it all came about. “Frankly, I personally didn’t realize that the word ‘tranny’ is not short for transgender people, but is considered an insult.”
At the same time, however, she emphasized that she should definitely know this given her level of knowledge, her age and her reach, and this case also shows her that she needs to delve much deeper into this topic and deal with it more.
However, since many people would use such terms privately, their faux pas could also be an opportunity, in their view, to report more about this topic in the future and to clarify it, so that it is also made clear to many which choice of words is appropriate and which is not.
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