Ricky Gervais attacked for joking about ‘wax my balls’ transgender activist

“I was going to dress up as something weird and creepy for my Halloween party, but I’m bucking the trend this year and I’m going as brave female activist Jessica Yaniv,” Gervais tweeted the day before Halloween. “This also means I don’t have to wax my big old hairy balls.”

Yaniv is a Canadian transgender activist who shot to notoriety last year when she sued sixteen beauty salons for refusing to wax ‘her’ testicles. The women who ran the salons all refused to handle Yaniv’s male genitalia due to inexperience or religious beliefs. A human rights tribunal ruled against Yaniv last month, and ordered her to pay compensation to the salons she drove out of business with her complaint.

Though described as a “sex pest” and a “pervert” for her role organizing topless pool parties for children, Yaniv still has her fans, who turned out to slate Gervais for his “bigoted” and “transphobic” tweet.

“Come Ricky,” one wrote. “You’ve done some funny stuff over the years, but this is just odious and bigoted.” 

“This is his form of comedy now,” another wrote. “Punching down is all he does.”

Gervais was unmoved by the outrage, and retweeted his post a day later, joking “this tweet upset some people yesterday so I think I should apologize and delete it and never make offensive jokes like this again.”

One commenter captured the mood of those rolling their eyes at the ‘scandal’. “Imagine seeing a joke about what is clearly a sexual predator, and being offended about the joke, and not the target of the joke,” he tweeted.

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