This story originally appeared on Them.
TikTok has been abuzz this week with controversy surrounding Drew Afualo, a popular social media creator and podcast host known for her feminist content. Though her clips regularly go viral, often drawing adverse reactions from misogynistic men, this most recent controversy has prompted a response from several prominent transgender creators, including Zaya Perysian, Kayla Poyer, and Selyna Brillare.
In a recently resurfaced clip from an April 2, 2025 episode of her podcast The Comment Section With Drew Afualo, Afualo and her guest, nonbinary actor and musician E.R. Fightmaster, briefly discuss the different ways they believe cisgender women and trans women view womanhood. Though the full interview had been wide-ranging, focusing on Fightmaster’s acting career, the 2024 presidential election, and fighting back against TERFs online, the now-viral clip was just 40 seconds, taken out of context.
“My truest thought on this is I think trans women have a more beautiful understanding of what womanhood is,” Fightmaster says.
The bad-faith recirculation of the clip by right wing MAGA accounts prompted some commenters to take Fightmaster’s words as the actor saying trans women are “better than” cis women. While some called for Afualo and Fightmaster to apologize to cis women for the comments made, others picked at certain parts of their statements, and some critics used them as an excuse to be overtly transmisogynistic towards trans women in general. This led prominent trans women on TikTok to share their own takes, especially given the fact that no trans women were present for the discussion, despite receiving a great deal of the blame and vitriol for the clip online.
To understand the initial controversy and subsequent response, read below.
What did Drew Afualo and E.R. Fightmaster say?
In the conversation leading up to the now-viral clip, originally posted in April 2025, Afualo and Fightmaster discuss their public opposition to TERFs, or trans-exclusionary radical feminists. Afualo in particular has used her platform to feature trans guests like Dylan Mulvaney and Antoni Bumba, and has regularly spoken up against TERFs on her page. As a woman of color, Afualo said that she has grappled with some of the indirect impacts of transphobia as a cis woman, especially in her defense of trans people.
“It’s imperative that cis women hold other cis women accountable for being transphobic,” Afualo says. “It’s imperative no one’s free ’til we’re all free. Also to think that transphobia will not affect cis women at all is insane. It’s already affecting cis women [...] Women of color especially. That’s the part that I was like, ‘You think I don’t know?’ I experience it all the fucking time because I don’t fit into these Eurocentirc beauty standards.”
After discussing their opposition to trans sports bans, Fightmaster shared their own thoughts about the catalyst for transmisogyny among TERFs.
“My truest thought on this is I think trans women have a more beautiful understanding of what womanhood is,” Fightmaster says. “I think that unfortunately, the programming for cis women — it is sad sometimes. And I’m like, ‘No, actually, your womanhood is not your role. Your womanhood is not your status in society, and your womanhood is not your ability to be sexually assaulted.’”
They continue, “This trans debate that’s centering all on, ‘If a ‘man in a dress’ is in a bathroom he will rape me.’ I’m like, ‘OK, it sounds like the problem that we have is that men are going to rape and women are fearing rape their whole lives.’”
“When you talk to trans women about their womanhood, they talk about it — it almost gets me choked up — they talk about it in this beautiful, expansive way,” they say. “I don’t feel that from cis women right now because the propaganda is so strong, and I love women [...] I want cis women to stop letting men be a barrier to their identity.”
How did people respond?
After being reposted to TikTok in late July, the clip was swiftly met with many cis women stitching the video, some of whom responded with TERF talking points. Many of the negative responses towards the video included transphobic remarks about trans women, and their validity, despite no trans women being present in the interview clip.
“Yeah, it’s like a tourist in a foreign country,” a TikTok creator said in a response video to Fightmaster’s comment. “You get to pick and choose what parts of it you get to experience.”
“So sick of men mansplaining to WOMEN how WOMEN should feel about WOMANHOOD,” one commenter wrote. (Fightmaster is nonbinary.)
“Trans women are trans women… they aren’t actual women..” another wrote in the comments section of the clip.
In response to the backlash spurred by the clip being recirculated and taken in the worst faith possible, particularly by transphobes, several prominent trans women creators on the app offered their own responses.
“Look, I love Drew, we’re mutuals. She has stood ten toes down for my community,” creator Zaya Perysian said in a response posted to TikTok on August 11. “I just have one critique with this whole situation. Actually not even just this situation. Every situation like this that’s happening on a large scale or in front of a large audience. I would love, and I mean love, if conversations like this would stop happening when a trans woman is not present.”
@zayaperysian My opinion on this situation 😀 @Drew Afualo ♬ original sound - Zaya
In fact, many of the responses to Afualo focused on the fact that a trans woman was not present during the conversation, especially given the fact that it focused on their supposed experiences.
In a response posted August 10, creator Selyna Brillare said, “I know that we want to uplift trans women, sometimes we forget that in the context that we’re trying to uplift, we also kind of throw a jab at cisgender women as if we’re in competition with them, whether that was the intention or not.”
She continued, “In a beautiful, optimal world, we would be able to make a statement like that and it doesn't directly mean that cisgender women are this, that, or the third, or imply anything negative, but we don’t live in that type of society. Especially with the climate of how things are with trans people in general, this adds more fuel to the fire and unintentionally puts us in direct competition.”
@selyna.exe I fully support your work thank you for being an advocate @Drew Afualo ♬ original sound - selyna.exe
TikTok creator Kayla Poyer made an August 10 video discussing her experiences as a trans woman, and transphobes, citing Afualo and Fightmaster’s conversation, quickly descended on the comments section.
“Unsurprisingly, there’s a million conversations in the comments of the video I posted yesterday about being trans and most of them have nothing to do with me or what I said,” Poyer said in a follow-up video posted August 11. “A lot of them are about a clip from Drew Afualo’s podcast where somebody who wasn’t a trans woman made a comment about trans women and now we’re being asked to answer for that, because most of you don’t give a fuck about anything that any of us say. Most of you don’t know anything about us. Most of you have never even met a trans woman or spoken to a trans woman. You have stereotypical ideas about what or who we are.”
@ladymisskay_ Part 2 I guess
♬ original sound - Kayla Poyer
Poyer went on to contextualize why transphobia and the push to rescind reproductive rights in the United States are interconnected, detailing how trans liberation is also a fight against systemic misogyny.
“What is happening is that all of us and all of our rights and all of our bodies are being played with, our autonomy slowly being chipped away, because a victory against one of us is a victory against every single one of us,” Poyer said. “Never did I say that my experience was the same as a cis woman’s but that is what all of you assume because you think that we are all the same.”
How did Afualo and Fightmaster respond to the controversy?
Afualo posted an initial response to the transphobic backlash to the clip on August 9, addressing “all of the TERFs who are just now finding” her.
“You guys saw one alt-right MAGA-loving creator make a video espousing TERF rhetoric and now you want to get clicks and likes, too,” she said in a TikTok video. “There’s an entire discussion to it, maybe you should go watch it before you pretend to get mad. Either way, saying it’s misogynistic to agree with a trans woman on what it means to be a woman, and then in your defense of that talking point saying things like, ‘They don’t know what periods feel like’ or ‘they don’t know what childbirth feels like’ is really fucking stupid and embarassing for multiple reasons — overarching though, it’s bigoted and transphobic. Ironically though, it’s also misogynistic. ”
Fightmaster posted their own response to the transphobic backlash on August 11, addressing one of the most viral and controversial points of the original video.
“I’ve been given the chance to clarify a point and I’m so grateful for it,” Fightmaster said in an August 11 video posted to TikTok. “If when you make an argument for excluding trans women from womanhood, you focus on the bathroom debate — i.e. trans women are biological males and if you allow a biological male into a bathroom with a biological female, there’s a guaranteed risk of sexual violence — then you are equating womanhood with the inevitability of being sexually assaulted and you are equating manhood with the inevitability of sexually assaulting a woman. If you believe that it’s a guarantee that allowing a biological male into the bathroom with women is going to lead to sexual assault, then your problem is with men. It is not with trans women.”
They went on to say that “womanhood is a beautiful and expansive thing that blooms far beyond its relationship to oppression,” and the point they were trying to make in the original podcast is that when the debates are reduced to the transphobic bathroom argument, “we make womanhood all about sexual assault.” In addition to clarifying their original point, they also apologized, saying, “I’m sorry to anyone I offended while trying to explain this with anything less than eloquence, it’s a tricky subject.”
Beyond the actual content of the original podcast conversation, Fightmaster also said that while it’s OK to have a problem with their whiteness in the context of the discussion, they also want people to consider how they are criticizing Afualo as a woman of color. “If you have a bunch of thoughts and opinions about Drew because you don’t like her tone or her behavior or her existence, I do wonder if it is just racism,” they said.
@e.r.fightmaster A clarification on a thought about womanhood and r*pe culture from last year’s convo with my friend @Drew Afualo #transwomenarewomen #thecommentsection ♬ original sound - E.R. Fightmaster
Following conversations with several trans creators who made responses to some of the points where the video fell flat, and actually put a target on trans women, Afualo made a follow-up video and posted it to TikTok on August 12. In the video, she tagged Brillare, Poyer, Perysian, and @TSDocBaddie and thanked them for their insights, along with the caption, “I will always stand w the trans community!!!”
“What they’ve shared with me is that the biggest issue and critique they have with all of this is first of all that trans women are taking the absolute brunt of all of this,” Afualo said. “At the end of this entire discourse, trans women are being harmed and targeted and I am the metaphorical gun pointing at them. The main critique that they have shared with me is that there should have been a trans woman in the room if you’re going to talk about trans women’s experiences, which is fair to say."
@drewafualo @TSDocBaddie @Kayla Poyer @Zaya ♬ original sound - Drew Afualo
She concluded, “The entire intention behind the situation was obviously to have an open discussion about trans rights, which even E.R. themself has said they probably could have worded better [...] All of that to say, I have expressed to all of the women that I already mentioned, publicly and privately, that I am so incredibly sorry to the trans women who are now being targeted because of this entire discourse.”
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