Brian Flood of The Wrap reported on Twitter that NBC and MSNBC star Katy Tur is having trouble with her transgender father again. "Hanna Zoey Tur ripped daughter, NBC's Katy Tur, as 'transphobic'" in Facebook message: "My daughter does not support the LGBT community."
This is quite a surprise, given the negotiated peace between father and daughter as projected in Sunday's New York Times puff piece by Luisita Lopez Torregrosa. Ironically, although the Times headline was "You Can't Rattle Her," asking Tur about her father obviously rattled her:
Last July, in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Zoey Tur claimed that Katy Tur had been estranged since her gender transition. “It’s not that she’s transphobic,” Zoey Tur said. “It’s that her hero father has become this. And it’s fear of not fitting in. It’s the pressure of being on network television.”
When I brought up her father’s remarks, Ms. Tur went silent. After a pause, she disputed the accuracy of her father’s version and said that their rift had nothing to do with her father’s transition, and that they are speaking now. “We were not on speaking terms for a little while,” she said, “but that’s not because of the transition.”
Later, from Asia, Zoey Tur emailed me: “About my transition, I demanded early on that my children accept what even I don’t fully understand myself. No child should have to deal with a father in transition from male to female. Perhaps it will be the subject of Katy’s second book!” One day last December, she said: “Katy called to tell me she was sorry and that she loved and accepted me. We agreed to set things right and have been working on that goal.”
This sounded like a carefully negotiated truce so that a Times puff piece could proceed. But then Zoey Tur somehow found the Times article to be hurtful:
On June 8th a [sic] turned 57 and no call--not even an email. On Pride Sunday the NYTimes published a story about Katy that left me humiliated. The timing and optics couldn't be worse.
Truth is my daughter does not support the LGBT community. She's Transphobic and fearful it will hurt her career as a broadcaster in these alt-right times. Career before family. In the words of Paddy Chayefsky: She's pure television.
Is it possible it would be "transphobic" to insist that this transgender father is too self-absorbed for words? How positive do the press clips have to be to avoid "humiliation"? Or were the hurt feelings and the "transphobia" caused in negotiating the "I don't fully understand myself" portion of the Times piece?
