Kim Petras is speaking up after noticing the recent negativity aimed at Hunter Schafer.
In a Monday (Oct. 19) post shortly after it was revealed in the Euphoria star’s Elle cover story that she’d recently gotten gender-affirming bottom surgery, Petras wrote on X that she’d seen “some really weird a– sh– on here about beautiful Hunter [Schafer] talking about getting vaginoplasty.”
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“Just wanna say it’s so brave of her to speak on this and it’s exposing so many of the gross ways in which trans women get fetishized,” the German pop star, who is a trans woman, continued. “The idea of someone aligning their body with how they feel on the inside and people saying YOU ARE WORTH LESS TO US NOW is what I wrote a song called brutalist about …”
“Brutalist” appears on Petras’ most recent album, Detour, which dropped in May. “My dad’s an architect, he used to show me it/ When he would drive me to the psychiatry/ Again and again, didn’t come back a man,” she sings on the track.
The post comes on. the heels of the Cuckoo actress telling Elle that she’d undergone the procedure in December, which she called “amazing.”
“I love it so much,” Schafer shared. “For a long time I’ve embraced the gender-expansive part of myself, and I really wanted to try to make that previous body work, because I thought there was something really cool and bada– about it.”
Ultimately, the Hollywood star — who identified as trans long before she shot to fame in 2019 playing Jules in Euphoria, acting opposite Zendaya — decided that vaginoplasty was the best option for her. When she was a teenager, Schafer joined as a plaintiff in the ACLU’s lawsuit against North Carolina’s anti-trans “bathroom bill.”
Similarly, Petras spent her teenage years advocating for trans rights, garnering national attention in her home country. She’s also said that she faced prejudice for seeking bottom surgery as well.
“I have people saying I ruined my body and I ruined my life,” Petras — who in 2023 made history as the first openly transgender artist to win a Grammy — told Fader earlier this year. “It saved my life and then there’s people who are like, ‘This saved your life, but you ruined everything.’”
Though it’s become a hot-button issue clouded by misinformation in recent years, studies show that bottom surgery is an effective way of relieving gender dysphoria and the mental health struggles that oftentimes accompany gender dysphoria. “People who regret gender-affirming medical treatment decisions are rare and most often report the reason for their regret being lack of support from those around them,” Dr. Joshua D. Safer, MD, executive director of the Mount Sinai Center for Transgender Medicine and Surgery, told Billboard in 2022.
“Genital reconstruction surgery is typically reserved for adults,” he also said at the time, dispelling some of the misconceptions around the procedures. “Prior to any gender-affirming medical or surgical intervention, all minors must have an intake with a knowledgeable mental health provider internal to our system. Once deemed ready for a medical/surgical intervention, the processes we have for adults are then brought into play.”
See Petras’ post below.
