The latest edition of the New York Fashion Week that ended on September 15 has left a significant mark during the presentation of the Model of the Year Award at the Fashion Media Awards given annually by the American magazine The Daily Front Row. The winner was Kai Schreiber, the first transgender woman to receive it, whose last name is well-known in the film industry as her father is the actor Liev Schreiber (58) and her mother, Naomi Watts (57).
The 17-year-old, who knew from a very young age that she wanted to pursue modeling, made her runway debut last year with great success. "I've been practicing my runway walks in the kitchen for years; my mother can show you all the videos I made her record," she told Interview magazine.
In the same interview, she confessed, "I always wanted to grow up and be a beautiful, glamorous, and influential woman, like Marilyn (...) I want to be a supermodel. Period." In an interview with Variety, Liev revealed that "the most significant moment was when she asked us to change her pronouns. To be honest, it didn't seem like a big deal to me, simply because Kai had been very feminine for a long time."
This is not the only case in the entertainment world, as other actors and singers have supported their children from the beginning in gender identity issues. Jamie Lee Curtis (67), a star in her own right and daughter of the legendary luminaries Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh, proudly embraced Ruby Guest's (30) decision, but in 2022 admitted to Cadena Ser during the promotional tour in Madrid for Halloween Ends that "I have a transgender daughter. There are threats against her life, simply for existing as a human being. There are people who want to annihilate her and people like her."
After winning the Oscar in 2023 for Best Supporting Actress in 'Everything Everywhere All at Once', the actress responded to the hosts of the Today show on how she would address the statuette. Very emotional, she said, "I support my daughter Ruby. I will use the neutral pronoun 'elle/elles'" and added, "I will simply call her 'elle/elles'."
One of the veterans in the LGBTQ+ universe has been Cher (80), who from the beginning assumed that her daughter Chastity Bono (57) was a lesbian. However, from 2008 to 2010, she transitioned gender and since then, goes by Chaz. At that time, she told ABC News that "it wasn't a sudden decision. I've been in therapy for a long time. It's a long process that goes back almost a decade. I quit drugs and alcohol in 2004 and wouldn't have been able to do this before."
She also confessed, "I always felt male since I was a child. I had nothing feminine about me. I think gender is in the head, not in the legs. I discovered that in the early '90s. It was a long process to feel comfortable enough to do something about it. I was about to turn 40 and thought it was now or never."
For the singer and Oscar winner for 'Moonstruck' (1988), the transition was tough to assimilate, as she revealed in 2020 in a conversation with Christiane Amanpour on CNN: "It wasn't easy. I remember calling and hearing the old message —Chaz's old message— and that was very tough. But then you have a child, and you don't really lose them; they just have a different shape."
After the biographer of Warren Beatty (89) revealed in the book Star: How Warren Beatty Seduced America that he had slept with more than 12,000 women, the eternal Hollywood heartthrob found stability with actress Annette Bening (68), whom he married in March 1992. The couple has four children, Stephen (34), Benjamin (32), Isabel (29), and Ella (26).
Their eldest, who was born with the name Kathlyn, came out at just 14 years old to a group of friends as Stephen, as reported by The National Enquirer, and three years later confessed to being homosexual. In a video posted on social media in July 2012, the couple's eldest wanted to share their situation with the world: "My name is Stephen. I identify as a transgender man, a queen, a gay man, a nerd fighter, a writer, an artist, and a guy who needs a haircut."
Not one to talk much about her private life, Bening told AARP magazine in 2019 that her son had "achieved something very challenging with great style and great intelligence," while Beatty admitted to Vanity Fair a decade ago that "he is a revolutionary, a genius, and my hero, just like all my children."
More and more, numerous stars publicly speak about gender identity to support their children and, in this way, raise awareness in society so that respect and tolerance prevail above all. Among these important names are Charlize Theron (51), whose daughter Jackson declared herself a girl at three years old; Cynthia Nixon (60) has a transgender son named Samuel, and Robert De Niro (83) publicly and proudly supports his transgender daughter Airyn.