Lady Gaga refused to deny rumours she was a man so others would not feel shame

Lady Gaga recently discussed the rumours that circulated early in her career about her gender identity and shared why she chose not to deny them.

Netflix’s new show, ‘What’s Next? The Future with Bill Gates’, was released earlier this week. The five-episode series includes discussions between Bill Gates, the billionaire Microsoft founder, and various thought leaders and celebrities about today’s most urgent challenges. According to ‘LGBTQ Nation’, in the second episode, Gates explores truth in the era of digital misinformation and consults Lady Gaga, who has personal experience with how false claims and rumours spread online.

“In my early twenties, there was a rumor that I was a man,” the ‘Born This Way’ singer tells Gates. “And I went all over the world. I mean, I traveled for tours, for promoting my records, and almost every interview I sat in they said, you know — well, there was this imagery on the, on the internet that had been doctored. And they were like, you know, like, ‘There’s this rumor that you’re a man.’ Like, ‘What do you have to say about that?’”

Image Credit: Canva

Rumours that Gaga had — as a dubious gossip site put it at the time — “both male and female genitalia” seemed to peak in 2009, a year after her debut album ‘The Fame’ was released. A photo from June of that year, taken during her Glastonbury Festival performance, appeared to show a bulge in her underwear, which gossip blogs of that era used to further speculative claims about the singer.

In August 2009, ABC News even covered the rumours, quoting the pop star’s manager as dismissing them as “completely ridiculous.”

However, Gaga consistently refused to directly address the speculation herself. In a 2011 interview with 60 Minutes' Anderson Cooper, when asked about rumors that she “had a male appendage,” she responded, “Maybe I do. Would it be so terrible?”

She elaborated, saying, “Why the hell am I going to waste my time and give a press release about whether or not I have a penis? My fans don’t care and neither do I.”

On Gates’s Netflix show, the 13-time Grammy winner explained her decision not to deny the rumours.

She stated, “The reason why I didn’t answer the question was because I didn’t feel like a victim with that lie. But I thought about, like, what about a kid that’s being accused of that, that would think that a public figure like me would feel shame?”

“I guess what I’m saying is, I’ve been in situations where fixing a rumor was not in the best interest of, I thought, of the well-being of other people,” she continued. “In that case, I tried to be thought-provoking and disruptive in another way. I tried to use the misinformation to create another disruptive point.”

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