Popular bootmaker UGG Footwear is taking heat and is facing boycott calls for teaming with a transgender activist on a pride collection and campaign.
The company has teamed with comedian and commentator Alok Vaid-Menon, who insists that people address him as “They/Them,” for the June launch of its URSeen line of merchandise, Newsweek reported.
The URSeen Collection consists of colorful platform slip-on shoes and terrycloth dresses, as well as slip-on shoes for children. The line is modeled on the company’s website by men and women and is considered a uni-sex style.
“So much of my childhood was about hiding myself, having to cover up, disappear, to not draw attention to myself,” Alok Vaid-Menon said in a statement about the new line of merchandise on the UGG website. “My goal with this was really to create a garment that actually celebrated queer bodies.”
Many seized on the collaboration and denounced UGG for exposing children to the transgender and gay agenda by making the products in kids’ sizes.
Libs of TikTok recently highlighted the partnership between the bootmaker and the transgender activist.
“UGG @UGG just partnered with Alok Menon for a pride month collection and campaign. Alok is a radical trans activist who said “little girls are k*nky” and suggests it’s their fault if a male uses the bathroom with them,” the conservative activist said on X.
The quote attributed to Alok originally appeared back in 2016 on his Facebook site, DarkMatter. It was a page created about a decade ago to push his transgender-themed poetry with partner Janani Balasubramanian. But Vaid-Menon has claimed that he did not write the quote, and it was instead penned by Balasubramanian.
In context, the quote was part of a discussion of how transgenderism and homosexuality has been outlawed, especially for fear of members of the LGBTQ community defiling “archetypical (white) (cis) innocent little girls.”
The full quote is as follows:
We totally need to challenge the white Christian supremacist, right-wing rhetoric around trans bodies, absolutely. But we also need to seriously overhaul the idea that there is a perfect victim anywhere.
I believe in the radical notion that little girls, like the rest of us, are complicated people. There are no fairy tales and no princesses here. Little girls are also queer, trans, kinky, deviant, kind, mean, beautiful, ugly, tremendous, and peculiar. Your kids aren’t as straight and narrow as you think they are. Like everybody else. I’ve been a cute little girl. And a gender nonconforming young adult. Let me tell you, everywhere along that spectrum, I’ve been complicated and strange.
“Look around: there are no princesses,” the Facebook entry concluded.
It seems the original Facebook account was closed down and is no longer accessible but there are screenshots of the entry out there. And Vaid-Menon has not disputed the actual quote. He has only insisted he didn’t write it himself.
Alok addressed the quote controversy three years ago.
“These forces have misattributed a 2016 Facebook status about girlhood to me that I did not write. These words, ideas, and life experience are not mine. This status—an analysis of a film I haven’t seen—was written by a former colleague who was born female. The author states this in the text (‘I have been a cute little girl’). This has been glossed over and erased in order to demonize and discredit me,” Vaid-Menon wrote on Sept. 5, 2021.
While it seems true that he didn’t write it, Alok also has not repudiated its message.
Follow Warner Todd Huston on Facebook at: facebook.com/Warner.Todd.Huston, or Truth Social @WarnerToddHuston
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.