‘Candyland‘, Bill Strobeck’s latest skate edit on behalf of mega-famous fashion brand Supreme, recently dropped, to much acclaim. More importantly, it came out with a clip of Cher Strauberry in it, doing one of her exquisite backside heelflips down the steps at EMB. She did it back to back with Beatrice Domond’s very steezy manual to front shove, adding a nice little cherry on top of the whole story. It’s just one trick, you might be saying, what’s the big deal? Well, the big deal is that Supreme has, for better or worse, become the bellwether of what’s cool and core in skateboarding, and they put one of skateboarding’s most visible trans people in their video. While ol’ Bill still does some kind of weird stuff when it comes to his long close-ups of random women on the street, putting Cher in a Supreme edit is him using his power as one of skateboarding’s anointed arbiters of cool to say, quite explicitly, that Cher is cool. He cemented that statement with the above photo of Cher and Sean Pablo, chilling at San Francisco’s most famous spot. To make his stance on LGBTQ+ people in skateboarding absolutely crystal clear, he also commented “LOVE WINS” on Cher’s post of the trick. Good shit, Bill.
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me n @beatricedomond back to back in CANDYLAND 🍓🖤 @williamstrobeck @supremenewyork
However, in our experience posting Cher’s clips, insecure men tend to ruin everyone’s enjoyment of her skating with extremely stupid and sometimes completely batshit transphobic comments. No disrespect to Strobeck and his boys, but given their fan base, I expected the comments on Strobeck’s Cher post to be ten times worse than one of ours. They weren’t, somehow. We know, because we have a surfeit of morbid curiosity, and we clicked through every single last one of them. Maybe he deleted them, a practice we wholeheartedly support, as free speech in the digital age means you have the right to yell all of the transphobic shit you want in a crowded mall (or, realistically, at the wall in your poor, eternally disappointed mother’s basement), but no such right to do it on someone else’s online forum.
Either way, out of 278 comments, we counted 5 that were explicitly transphobic, and another 4 that were unclear but definitely a little off. The rest were overwhelmingly positive, as I think every thinking person is ecstatic to see Cher getting the recognition she so rightfully deserves. Anyway, even if you count the “too close to tell” ones, 9 comments out of 278 is only 3%. Obviously 0% is the number we’re going for here, but we’ll fucking take it. Of course, not misgendering people online is the absolute bare minimum men can do, but at least they’re mostly doing it here. Whoo! Progress!
To conclude, trans women are women, using correct pronouns is super easy to do (our friend M even made you this helpful guide), and if you ever feel tempted to offer your opinion of someone’s gender identity online, don’t!
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Featured image via Bill Strobeck in Instagram.
