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Sydney Sweeney Is Being ‘Transvestigated’ – Here’s What That Means
Sydney Sweeney is the latest celebrity to find themselves being ‘transvestigated.’
The Euphoria star has seen her fame supernova over the last couple of years, and said fame has brought a ton of controversy along for the ride.
Sweeney, 28, has become a darling of Donald Trump’s MAGA movement over the past few months, following a divisive ad campaign for American Eagle jeans, which prompted cries of white supremacy from academics, journalists, and scores of social media users after the White Lotus star’s ‘great jeans’ were highlighted in the commercial.
The pun on ‘jeans’ and ‘genes,’ coupled with Sweeney being blonde-haired and blue-eyed, saw a correlation being made with eugenics and white supremacy rhetoric by many.
Donald Trump supported the campaign, with Sweeney rapidly being heralded by much of the far right, especially after a GQ interview in which the actress failed to condemn white supremacy.
But it appears some members of the MAGA movement are not happy being affiliated with the Emmy Award nominee.
A rapid rise
Sweeney’s ascent to Hollywood superstardom began in 2017, when she appeared in a recurring role for the second season of The Handmaid’s Tale.
A year later, a major role in the critically acclaimed miniseries Sharp Objects, alongside Amy Adams, further propelled Sweeney into the mainstream, before Quentin Tarantino cast her in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood in 2019.
Sweeney’s supporting role for Tarantino came alongside the debut of Euphoria on HBO, in which Sweeney was cast as Cassie Howard. Her performances in the second season earned her an Emmy Award nomination for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Drama Series.
As if that wasn’t enough, in the same year, Sweeney was also nominated for a second Emmy, for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Limited or Anthology Series or Movie for her performance as Olivia Mossbacher in the first season of The White Lotus.
This flurry of high-profile roles, coupled with major brand endorsement deals with the likes of Samsung, Ford, and Guess, saw Sweeney evolve into an A-List megastar, commanding headlines with every Instagram upload and red carpet appearance.
A dramatic descent?
But while mainstream success continued throughout 2023 with her starring role alongside Glen Powell in rom-com Anyone But You, the last couple of years have seen the Spokane-born actress mostly struggle at the box office, despite her status as one of the most followed and talked about celebrities of the modern era.
2024’s Madame Web, in which Sweeney starred alongside Dakota Johnson, was a critically panned box office bomb, widely ridiculed while receiving three Golden Raspberry Awards.
Ron Howard’s Eden, in which Sweeney was also part of the supporting cast, was met with middling reviews and poor box office takings.
This past year, boxing biopic Christy, in which Sweeney plays former professional boxer Christy Martin, was at one point tipped to be a seminal role for the young actress. And while Sweeney’s performance was well received by critics, the box office takings were historically disastrous.
Taking in just $1.3 million on opening weekend across the United States, the Sweeney-led biopic became one of the 12 worst openings for a new release that opened on over 2,000 screens.
In its second weekend, Christy saw an almost 92% drop in takings, setting a new record for the biggest second weekend drop with just $108,487 at the box office.
However, after last summer’s Echo Valley (also starring Julianne Moore, Kyle MacLachlan, Fiona Shaw and Domhnall Gleeson) dropped on Apple TV to extremely lukewarm reviews and very little fanfare, throwback ‘erotic thriller’ The Housemaid, where Sweeney co-stars with Amanda Seyfried, seemed to mark a return to form at the box office, taking in $335 million against a budget of $35 million.
American Eagle and GQ controversy
Sweeney’s 2025 will be best remembered, however, for what she did away from the silver screen. Her starring role in an American Eagle jeans advert, which many people believed stoked white supremacist messaging, diminished the actress’s reputation with large sections of people.
In the commercial, Sweeney says: “Genes are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair color, personality, and even eye color. My jeans are blue.”
The slogan ‘Sydney Sweeney has great jeans’ appeared on television advertising also.
The campaign brought forth the subject of eugenics, a widely discredited belief that humanity could be improved through selective breeding.
Sweeney’s affiliation with the Republican Party was further boosted when, in a GQ interview a few months removed from the American Eagle campaign, the White Lotus star failed to acknowledge the controversy.
Clips of Sweeney from the interview instantaneously went viral, in which the two-time Emmy nominee fails to condemn white nationalism or distance herself from such messaging.
MAGA Republicans have celebrated Sweeney ever since the American Eagle campaign went live, with President Trump celebrating the actress on several occasions on his Truth Social platform.
After discovering that Sweeney was a registered Republican in Florida, Trump posted: “Sydney Sweeney, a registered Republican, has the HOTTEST ad out there. Go get ’em Sydney!”
In 2022, Sweeney shared a photograph from her mother’s 60th birthday party in which several family members were seen wearing MAGA hats and T-shirts reading: “Blue Lives Matter.”
Sweeney responded to the criticism at the time by saying: “You guys this is wild. An innocent celebration for my mom’s milestone 60th birthday has turned into an absurd political statement, which was not the attention. Please stop making assumptions.”
Sweeney is now being ‘transvestigated’
Now some members of the MAGA movement have taken it upon themselves to have Sweeney ‘transvestigated.’
A post on X, formerly Twitter, by a user by the name of @p8stie racked up over five million views, making disparaging claims about the 28-year-old’s appearance, mainly the size of her neck, saying: “Why is Sydney Sweeney’s neck so much wider than her head?”
The reason for the fixation on Sweeney’s neck size ties in with other ‘transvestigations’ into other well-known figures such as John Krasinski, French First Lady Brigitte Macron, and Olympic gold medalist boxer Imane Khelif.
What is a ‘transvestigation’?
A transvestigation is exactly what it sounds like. A transphobic conspiracy theory in which people try to prove that celebrities, athletes, politicians, and other well-known public figures are secretly transgender, as per Them.
The conspiracy theorists behind these investigations tend to fixate on body language, jawlines, collarbone shape, and even skull size when determining who they believe to be transgender.
As far as Sweeney’s transvestigation goes, @p8stie’s X post also stated: “I’m starting to get really worried that she’s actually a man.”
Despite being a practice that has thrived under the MAGA movement, even some staunchly far-right conservatives have not been spared, with Charlie Kirk being ‘transvestigated‘ after his death, along with his widow, Erika.
While this dark practice towards Sweeney only gathered serious momentum very recently, it does date back as far as October 2024, when a Facebook group called ‘Transvestigation Disclosure NOW 2.0’ called out Sweeney’s narrow hips as proof of her ‘real’ gender.
“Sydney Sweeney is a male to female,” one post by a group member began, accompanied by a photo of a bathing suit-clad Sweeney and another photo from the cover of Women’s Health.
The post continued: “This one is deceiving a lot of people but his male anatomy speaks for itself.”
Another post on Reddit also pointed out the appearance of Sweeney’s clavicle as being indicative of someone who is assigned male at birth.
Fortunately, despite the virality of the original X post last month, the replies to it widely mocked the user’s statement, with one commenter replying: “It’s happening, the right are transvestigating Sydney Sweeney,” while another added that the original poster was ‘f***ing insane’.
So at least there is some semblance of normality left in the world. For now.
Related Article: Erika Kirk Under Fire As Charlie’s Friend Leaks Audio Of Her ‘Giggling’ After Husband’s Death
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