Adele won big at the 2022 BRIT Awards last week, but one particular sentence she said in her acceptance speech for the Best Artist award seemed to strike a nerve with some users on Twitter.
The singer acknowledged her gender while receiving a genderless award, and while some are finding fault in this, many LGBTQ+ fans (and notably members of the transgender community) are coming to the singer’s defense. They claim that TERF viewers (acronym for trans-exclusionary radical feminists) were trying to “twist Adele’s words,” since she is an outspoken supporter of the LGBTQ+ community (and fans think unlikely to make transphobic comments).
Before diving into the controversy, here is a quick history on the BRIT Awards’ recent change made to be more inclusive, and why some viewers are airing their grievances after Adele said this while collecting her February 8th award: “I understand why they changed the name of this award [from best female/male artist], but I really love being a woman, I really love being a female artist.”
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Just for a refresher, last year, non-binary singer Sam Smith criticized the 2021 BRIT awards ceremony since their gender identity meant they couldn’t be nominated for the male or female-specific awards. Smith notably took to Instagram and wrote, “I look forward to a time where awards shows can be reflective of the society we live in,” pointing out that artists like them, (who use they/them pronouns and identify as non-binary) should still be able to be nominated for musical categories without a specific gender attached to the awards.
In November 2021, a major change was made to the BRIT Award categories, as all awards now include all genders (which aims to measure talent, ability and musical success without separating the nominees in the previous binaries of “male” and “female”).
This is why when Adele’s speech began to trend on Twitter, many users had trouble deeming who was *actually* upset with her comments, as many LGBTQ+ fans didn’t find Adele’s words to be harmful to the trans community. (As one put it, her simply saying she “loves” being a woman and female artist isn’t saying that trans women aren’t women as well!)
Tweets like the following, began to garner likes and retweets: “Please, no, ADELE can’t be a TERF,” wrote one viewer. “That last comment, though ambiguous, could be perceived as TERF-y. Please no.”
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In a personal essay for Glamour, Charlie Craggs wrote, “Out of almost nowhere it became global news that trans people were cancelling Adele, a woman, for saying she’s proud to be…wait for it…a woman, while accepting a gender-neutral Brit Award […] To warrant this becoming global news, you’d think it would have had to be tweeted by a lot of trans people, including prominent trans figures who represent and speak for the community.” Craggs continued, writing, “Instead, when you look up the hashtag on Twitter or look at the press around it, there’s only a handful of tweets – I found three. […] Most of the trans community was not tweeting, thinking, or feeling offended by Adele’s words.”
Other users, who identify as TERFs, seemed to use Adele’s words as fuel for their own arguments. As Ryan Smith wrote for Newsweek, many LGBTQ+ Twitter users “saw a risk in Adele’s comments being hijacked and reshaped as an attack on the trans people to push agendas.” Author Milli Hill, (who has faced backlash for own comments on the trans community), added her thoughts to the online debate. “Hopefully anyone who had any doubt that we are in the grip of a harmful ideology will have their eyes fully opened by seeing how controversial it has become for a woman to say, ‘I love being a woman,'” Hill tweeted.
Adele’s fans quickly added to Hill’s thread, with one notably writing, “Seeing people like Milli using the words of Adele, who has shown time and time again her support for the LGBTQ+ community, just shows they will use anything they can as a weapon in their attack on trans people,” wrote one viewer.
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Another agreed, tweeting, “Adele’s been away from the UK too long if she thinks she can say she loves being female and the terfs won’t take that as some twisted victory in their hate campaign against trans women.”
The singer’s history of supporting her LGBTQ+ fans goes back for years, and she recently posed with drag queen Cheryl Hole, star of RuPaul’s Drag Race UK, after making an appearance at the London nightclub Heaven among her many fans in that community.
Adele swiftly collected three awards throughout the night overall, after the release of her long-awaited and hit fourth record, 30. She scooped up major honors, including Album of the Year, British Song of the Year for the 30 lead single, “Easy on Me,” and, of course, Best Artist.
