Jamie Lee Curtis: ‘I have a trans daughter. There are people that want to annihilate her and people like her’

Actress Jamie Lee Curtis has spoken out against violence against trans people in a revealing interview with Spain’s Cadena SER radio network. The 63-year-old performer explained how her trans daughter receives death threats, and expressed alarm about the “terrifying” rise in transphobia.

“I have a trans daughter. There are threats against her life just [for] her existence as a human being,” she told Cadena SER on Tuesday. “There are people that want to annihilate her and people like her. The level of hatred... [It’s] as if we haven’t learned from fascism, [as if] we haven’t learned what the result of that is: the extermination of human beings. That is terrifying.”

“So Jamie Lee Curtis is scared, and you should be too,” she continued. “And Jamie Lee Curtis has a voice, and she’s trying to use it. And you should too. And that’s how we change things. We think about them, we learn about them and then we use our voices to bring attention to them and fight against them.”

The interview was shared on Twitter by trans activist Carla Antonelli, who was the first trans member of parliament in Spanish history. In the tweet, Antonelli asked: “Is someone going to stop this hate and injustice. Or only when it’s too late?”

The star of the Halloween franchise married actor and musician Christopher Guest in December 1984. The couple adopted two children, Annie, in 1986, and Ruby, in 1996. In 2020, Ruby told her parents that she was trans. “It was scary - just the sheer fact of telling them something about me they didn’t know,” Ruby said in a 2021 interview with People magazine. “It was intimidating – but I wasn’t worried. They had been so accepting of me my entire life.”

In the interview, Curtis also spoke about how she was trying to adapt to the new situation. “It’s learning new terminology and words,” she said. “I am new at it. I am not someone who is pretending to know much about it. And I’m going to blow it, I’m going to make mistakes. I would like to try to avoid making big mistakes.”

The actress said that she and Ruby decided to speak publicly about their journey to help break the stigma faced by the trans community. “If one person reads this, sees a picture of Ruby and me and says, ‘I feel free to say this is who I am,’ then it’s worth it,” she said.