People can’t stop hating this Vogue España video of Kendall Jenner wearing a tutu and acting like a ballerina.
The backlash from real dancers who are offended at Kendal’s masquerade has been intense — even Abby Lee Miller from “Dance Moms” chimed in on the ordeal with a now-deleted Instagram post.
“I cannot be a fan of this shoot,” she wrote. “There are so many amazing dancers in the world… Kendall Jenner is not one of them!”
A dance blog (yes, that is a thing) named Dace Spirit called it “facepalm-y.”
They decided to dress Jenner up in tutus and legwarmers and have her ‘do ballet,’ though she’s clearly not ballet trained. In the voiceover, she talks about ‘loving being a kid’ and missing childhood; the video is, apparently, a sort of little-girl fantasy on ballerina-ness. Which, OK. But to our eyes, the whole thing reads as pretty disrespectful to the artists who devote their lives to this demanding craft.
So, as it turns out, one cannot simply dress up as a dancer, hop around a room and identify as a dancer, because doing that is offensive to people who are actual dancers.
This brings us to Jenner’s father, the Olympic gold medalist formerly known as Bruce Jenner, who dresses up as and pretends to be a woman. As my colleague Denise McAllister has explained, he will never know what it’s like to be a woman because he was never born with XX chromosomes, nor did he grew up from a little girl into a woman.
You can’t become a woman without being a girl, complete with XX chromosomes that determine our sex. The man posing as a woman on the cover of Vanity Fair is a delusional mockery of every woman who knows what it’s like to be a girl with all the pains, humiliations, and joys of actually growing up and becoming a woman—and each one of us, in different ways, has faced it bravely through every stage.
No matter how many hormone injections or surgical procedures he undergoes, the man formerly known as Bruce can’t change his genetic makeup — which determines a person’s sex. Wearing high heels and walking around with fake boobs won’t make him a woman any more than Kendall’s decision to wear pointe shoes and a bun makes her a ballerina. Pretending otherwise is just as offensive to real women as it is to real ballerinas.
