“He’s managed something that’s very challenging with great style and great intelligence. He’s an articulate, thoughtful person, and I’m very, very proud of him.”
BY ORLY LYONNE
In an interview last month with AARP four-time Oscar nominee Annette Bening spoke about her transgender son Stephen Ira.
Ira, 27, a poet and a writer, was assigned female at birth and began to identify as transgender at age 14.
Warren Beatty: “He’s a revolutionary, a genius, and my hero.”
“He’s managed something that’s very challenging with great style and great intelligence. He’s an articulate, thoughtful person, and I’m very, very proud of him,” she said.
Bening’s husband, fourteen-time Oscar nominee Warren Beatty also voiced his support for his first born son—telling Vanity Fair in 2016, “He’s a revolutionary, a genius, and my hero, as are all my children.”
Ira opened up about his transition in 2012 in a YouTube video posted on the site WeHappyTrans.com.
“My name is Stephen,” he began. “I identify as a trans man, a faggy queen, a homosexual, a queer, a nerd fighter, a writer, an artist and a guy who needs a haircut.”
At the time Ira said that his personal style icons include Truman Capote (he loved the writer’s long flowing scarves) and “any male-identified person who wears thigh-highs or garters.”
In 2015, in the wake of transgender teen Leelah Alcorn’s suicide, Ira spoke out on behalf of trans rights and the dangers of practices like conversion therapy (after it was revealed that Alcorn was subjected to this type therapy.)
“Give this young woman the peace in death that she deserves and work for what she wanted, work for the things she needed while she lived,” he tweeted. “If you can’t handle having a trans kid, don’t have kids.”
