As Ben Affleck's daughter comes out as 'Fin', why are so many celebrities' ... trends now

For Ben Affleck and ex-wife Jennifer Garner, it was a celebration of both an ending and a beginning. During a memorial service earlier this month for Garner’s father in Charleston, West Virginia, the pair also publicly endorsed their 15-year-old child's new identity.

Their daughter, christened Seraphina Rose, now goes by Fin and uses the pronoun ‘they’. They were wearing a dark suit and tie, and sported a distinctly unfeminine buzz cut.

After making an introduction (‘Hello, my name is Fin Affleck’), Fin read a Bible passage in a service that, somewhat ironically, celebrated a grandfather who Garner has previously said was so ‘conservative’ that she and her sisters weren’t even allowed to get their ears pierced.

Fin is, of course, the offspring of two film stars who made their name embodying traditional gender stereotypes – Affleck as the squared-jawed leading man in films such as Armageddon, Pearl Harbour and The Town, and Garner as a svelte assassin in Elektra and sexy double agent Sydney Bristow in the TV series Alias.

The Afflecks – who include Fin’s siblings Violet and Samuel – certainly aren’t an exception in having a transgender family member in Hollywood. The upper echelons of Tinseltown are packed with the proud parents of trans, non-binary and gender-fluid offspring – a fact that these A-list mums and dads, suspending their usual fierce protection of their privacy, are often happy to talk about.

Indeed, the extended Affleck clan already has Fin’s step-sibling Emme, 16, the non-binary child of Jennifer Lopez – who is now Ben’s wife – from her marriage to singer Marc Anthony.

Lopez first referred to Emme as ‘they’ two years ago when she invited them on stage to sing with her at a baseball charity gala.

Garner, Affleck and Lopez join a long list of celebrity parents who’ve had to rethink their offspring’s pronouns: it includes Charlize Theron, Jamie Lee Curtis, Cher, Sigourney Weaver, Naomi Watts and her ex-boyfriend Liev Schreiber, Annette Bening and Warren Beatty, and Sex And The City star Cynthia Nixon.

Official estimates of the proportion of the U.S. population that considers itself transgender vary. According to the Williams Institute, a sexual orientation and gender identities research organisation, 1.6 million Americans over the age of 13 identify as transgender. That works out at around one in 170 people. Other studies say the figure is lower. So why does Hollywood appear so over-represented?

Dr Hilary Cass’s long-awaited report on gender transition in the UK last week warned that many minors who question their gender identity are actually suffering from anxiety, bad self-esteem or troubles with body image. Given that being the child of a Hollywood star can be notoriously challenging – many come off the rails, sometimes with tragic consequences – could this help explain why so many are experiencing ‘gender distress’?

Or maybe it is simply because most of them live in the uber-liberal enclave of California – with their parents working in a like-minded industry – where gender non-conformity is welcomed. And if a star does have a transgender child, they may well want to tell the world about it, given that Hollywood has taken sides very firmly in the fierce culture war over trans topics. It is hardly surprising that its leading lights are among the trans movement’s most vociferous champions.

Some, like actress Kate Hudson (daughter of Goldie Hawn) have even raised their children ‘genderless’ – letting their children decide how they identify.

One thing is clear: stars who are open about having a trans child are – publicly at least – rarely anything but wildly enthusiastic.

Hollywood A-listers are, of course, often away filming. Some admit they never saw their child’s trans issues coming.

Jamie Lee Curtis is among those taken unawares. She revealed in 2021 that her adopted child, born Tom, is now a trans woman named Ruby. Curtis said she and her husband Christopher Guest had initially struggled to adapt – accidentally using Ruby’s ‘dead name’ and getting the pronouns wrong – but insisted she was a ‘grateful student’.

‘I’m not proselytising, and I’m not trying to force-feed something to people,’ she told People magazine in 2021, although her attitude appeared to have hardened by the time The Advocate, an LGBTQ+ magazine, named her its Advocate of the Year in 2023 for championing their cause. She was certainly proselytising by then.

‘I hope to teach them that this is what you do when you’re a parent,’ she intoned. ‘You suit up and you show up with your heart open, your arms outstretched and

read more from dailymail.....