Amidst 'It Ends With Us' Controversy, Blake Lively Faces Renewed Backlash for Past Use of Transphobic Slur

The Blake Lively saga continues.

Her recent controversies began when it became apparent that there was friction between her and other members of the "It Ends With Us" crew with director and co-star Justin Baldoni, according to Vox. "Hints that things were off first surfaced at the New York and European premieres," reported the New York Times. "Though Baldoni was in attendance, he wasn't posing for the cameras with anyone else involved in the movie and wasn't participating in joint interviews."

Lively, her husband Ryan Reynolds, and others from the film had unfollowed Baldoni on social media, and the reasons, the Times continued, had to do with incidents that happened while filming, all related by anonymous sources. Some of it had to do with Baldoni's annoyance with Reynolds' presence on the set. Lively also claimed that Reynolds wrote the film's "iconic rooftop scene," People Magazine said. Screenwriter Christy Hall, however, told People Mag that she was unaware of any rewrite, and instead thought the actors were improvising. Also, sources told The Hollywood Reporter that there was a fracture among the filmmakers in the postproduction process, wherein two different cuts of the movie emerged. "According to multiple sources, Lively commissioned a cut of the movie from editor Shane Reid, who was an editor on 'Deadpool & Wolverine,' and who cut the Lively-directed music video for Taylor Swift's 'I Bet You Think About Me.' It's unclear if any of this cut was ultimately used in the final project, which was credited to editors Oona Flaherty and Robb Sullivan," THR said.

E! News reported that Baldoni hired a veteran crisis manager to help him; but, as Vox pointed out, "the hullabaloo has many online looking a little more closely at Lively," who has promoted a film dealing with domestic violence as if it were a sunny rom-com, telling her fans on TikTok: "Grab your friends, wear your florals and head out to see it."

Plenty have, with "It Ends With Us" approaching $100 million in domestic gross this week. But in the 10 days since its opening, Lively has been scrutinized (amongst other things) for being rude to reporters, including one female reporter in particular. This happened in 2016 while Lively was promoting "Café Society" and Norwegian journalist Kjersti Flaa complemented Lively on her baby bump. "Congrats on your little bump," Lively sarcastically responded. After the video went viral, Flaa, 51, told the Daily Mail: "To be honest, it hurts because I obviously wasn't pregnant and I could never get pregnant. So to me, that comment was like a bullet."

Further investigating into Lively's interviews found numerous instances of her insensitivity to the trans community. An extract of an interview with Lively for Elle Magazine in 2012, which went viral on X over the weekend, quoted Lively as saying: "I hope to have a few girls one day. If not girls, they better be trannies. Because I have some amazing shoes and bags and stories that need to be appreciated."

The star, who went on to have three daughters and one son, also used the term in a 2009 interview with Allure magazine, according to the Daily Mail.

"I feel like a tranny a lot of the time. I don't know, I'm ... large? They put me in six-inch heels and I tower over every man. I've got this long hair and lots of clothes and makeup on ... I just feel really big a lot of the time, and I'm surrounded by a lot of tiny people. I feel like a man sometimes."

And in a third example, she repeated the slur in an on-screen interview with her then-"Gossip Girl" castmate Leighton Meester.

An off-screen interviewer is heard asking the pair about rumors they "didn't get on."

Lively replied: "If you read the gossip magazines, everybody is dating everyone, everybody hates everyone, everybody has had like tons of plastic surgery and they're actually men and trannies. It's just like: you don't listen to the rumors."

While some have come to Lively's defense saying that the term was more widely used at the time, a writer for the website TransAdvocate.com called her out twice on her using the term "trannies" in real time. First in 2009 when the then 21-year-old actress said she felt "like a tranny." Trans advocate Monica Roberts wrote at the time: "But next time, please refrain from using the word 'tranny'. While I feel you in terms of the emotions you expressed, the T-word coming from the lips of a cisgender woman is still a little problematic."

Lively must have missed that post because three years later she used the word in regards to her wardrobe for Elle. "It's three years later, and obviously Miss Thang didn't get the message or learn from the recent experiences of Neil Patrick Harris, Kelly Osbourne or Lance Bass," wrote Roberts on TransAdvocate.com.

"Excuse me?" Roberts continued. "Once again Blake, since you obviously missed it the first time we tried to point this out to you in 2009, tranny is considered an insulting slur word by increasing majorities of my community, not a term of endearment. If you consider yourself a trans ally, it is not cool, hip or edgy to use that word in referring to my community."

Roberts went on: "Many of us didn't have the advantage like you of growing up in a home with two actors or having TV or movie roles before we graduated from high school, or being on countless magazine covers, so let me break it down for you once again since it's becoming increasingly clear you really don't have a clue how trans people live, what we have to deal with, or what it costs to be a transwoman..."

But Lively being insensitive to changing cultural norms is nothing new. There was what was called her "Southern Belle phase" when she married Reynolds at a South Carolina mansion that was a setting for "for pre-Civil War human rights abuses, with brick slave dwellings also being a part of the (wedding's) backdrop," wrote SiliconValley.com this week. "The year before her wedding, the plantation (Boone Hall) was prominently mentioned in the New York Times as a popular Southern destination trying to address its slave-holding past." E! News wrote of the 2012 wedding: "Caught up in the weeds of tablescapes and menus, neither she nor Reynolds stopped to consider what it meant to actually wed at a plantation, the pretty backdrop not quite covering up the atrocities committed."

8 years later Reynolds apologized to make amends. He and Lively also "gifted $1 million a piece to the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and the Young Center for Immigrant Children's Rights and created the Group Effort Initiative through Reynolds' Maxium Effort production company, a plan to bring a minimum of 10 trainees "who are Black, Indigenous, people of color or people from marginalized and excluded communities," E! News said.