Boy George isn’t one to let a little thing like a global pandemic stop him from being on the wrong side of history.
In a new interview with Britain’s The Sunday Times, the former Culture Club singer returned to his familiar criticism of modern pronoun usage, a favorite topic of George’s. He claimed that transgender and nonbinary people who ask to be referred to by pronouns that are consistent with their identities “want to be offended because they think that whatever’s going on for them is much more important than anything else.”
“When I was growing up nobody used the term ‘transgender,’ because it was almost like a medical term,” he told the conservative-leaning newspaper. “So this transgender thing is new, and, for our generation, it’s just getting our heads round it.”
George, whose androgynous appearance made him a queer icon in the mid-1980s, added that he is “reluctant” to “pander” to others’ ideas about gender because of what he “went through” to be who he is. “The area we get into trouble is what it is permissible to say to a gay person: ‘Address me as this, address me as that,” he said.
The comments are particularly ill-timed given that the U.K. government is currently floating the idea of banning medical transitions for trans and nonbinary children under the age of 18, but they are nothing new for George. Earlier this year, the musician caused controversy on Twitter after referring to individuals’ pronoun preferences as merely a “modern form of attention seeking.”
“Leave your pronouns at the door,” George tweeted in January.
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