Anne Hathaway Went Viral Eight Years Later: "Gayness Orbits Around Straightness"

On September 15, 2018, Anne Hathaway accepted the Human Rights Campaign's National Ally for Equality Award at its National Dinner in Washington, D.C., and used the speech to describe the machinery of who gets treated as the default and who gets treated as everything else. Nearly eight years later it's circulating like breaking news. Our read on why: the argument hasn't needed updating.

She used the speech to talk to a 10-year-old

Early on, Hathaway turned to a child. A 10-year-old transgender girl had written to her. The girl's name was Ella, after Hathaway's character in Ella Enchanted.

Hathaway spoke to her by name.

"Ella sweetie, I want to make something absolutely clear to you, it takes zero courage to love you."

Here's why we'd argue that line is the entire speech in miniature. If loving a trans kid takes courage, then the courage becomes the story and the kid becomes the burden — a thing to be brave about. If it takes nothing at all, then everyone currently withholding it is making a choice, and they don't get to call it a hard one.

She was also plain about her own state that year: "I'm pretty shell-shocked by what I see every day, what I hear every day. And I really don't like to admit this, but I get scared." And: "You guys just gave me my heart back."

The myth she named

The other piece of the speech in circulation — the piece Musk and company are angry about — is where she turns the argument on her own position rather than anybody else's.

"My ability to be visible to you comes from the world unfairly rewarding my particular type of visibility."

She put herself inside the problem — "…with the exception of being a cisgender male, everything about how I was born has put me at the current center of a damaging and widely accepted myth" — and then she named the myth.

"That myth is that gayness orbits around straightness, transgender orbits around cisgender, and that all races orbit around whiteness."

Here's why we think it works. In this passage Hathaway doesn't hand out a list of bad people. She describes a default setting — and our reading of the three sentences that follow is that its whole strength is how unremarkable it is.

"It is ancient, so it is trusted. It is a habit, so it's assumed to be the way things are. It's inherited, so it's thought immutable."

And then the turn that makes it a political speech rather than a gracious one:

"…it is a myth that keeps money and power in the hands of the few instead of being invested in the lives of the free."

She ends the passage with a promise instead of a plea: "…together we are not just going to question this myth. We are going to destroy it."

Elsewhere in the same speech: "You gotta roll up your sleeves and get to work every day until everyone gets it." And: "Let's tear this world apart and build a better one."

Why does it hit harder now than it did then? Our answer, and we'll own it as ours: the years in between have been one long public argument about whether trans people in particular are a legitimate center of anything at all. As we read it, she wasn't answering that argument in 2018 — she was describing the assumption sitting underneath it, before the assumption picked up a policy agenda.

Then Elon Musk found it

The clip that set off the backlash resurfaced around July 22, posted by an account with fewer than 3,000 followers. One account passed it off as a new speech. It has been watched nearly three million times, against roughly 30,000 for the full version on YouTube, as The Daily Beast reported.

Musk posted on July 26. He didn't point to anything in the speech he thought was factually wrong; his objection was that Hathaway hadn't arrived at any of it herself.

"She's just reading the script someone else wrote. No critical thinking is happening here at all."

He followed that with: "She's just a marionette. Whoever wrote her speech is the real douchebag." Buck Sexton wrote, "Imagine being so narcissistic and deluded that you'd say something like this." Tomi Lahren wrote, "A reminder that her standing up there on her perch in her fancy gown and updo delivering this self-righteous lecture cost her absolutely zero." Two others did take up the content: Don Keith said she was "blasting straight white people," and Link Lauren wrote, "You also don't have to apologize for being straight, white, rich and beautiful."

The split there is worth noticing, and this next part is ours. The loudest responses, Musk's included, never touched the claim — they argued that she couldn't have meant it, or that saying it cost her nothing, which is a strange line of attack on a speech whose subject is who gets automatically credited with having a mind of their own. And the two that did engage answered a speech she didn't give: in the passage they were reacting to, nobody is asked to apologize for anything. Her own word for the myth was inherited.

Context worth having: Hathaway plays Penelope in Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey, a cast Musk has gone after repeatedly — Lupita Nyong'o and Elliot Page included — and he has said his Grok Imagine tool will produce its own AI-generated version of the film before the end of the year.

Hathaway has not publicly commented on Musk's criticism.

The speech says the myth is trusted because it's ancient and assumed because it's a habit. Nearly eight years later, a clip of her saying so is the thing people are furious about. From where we sit, that's the habit defending itself.