People are mad about Eddie Izzard saying she's been "promoted to she" on the cover of The Guardian, but the actual quote is a bit different than that, and much more interesting.
What she says in the piece is that she'd initially intended to go back and forth between using he/him and she/her pronouns, but that once she said her pronouns were "she/her" one time, that stuck—it was out of her hands.
So the interviewer asked how she felt about losing that flexibility, and she responded: "Great. I’ve been promoted to she, and it’s a great honour."
So when Eddie Izzard refers to being "promoted to she" in the interview, she's explicitly referring to something that was chosen for her (by the media, primarily), rather than something she chose herself. That's important context.
Eddie Izzard came out as trans years ago, so that's not what "promoted to she" refers to. In the interview, she's talking, again, about a shift in the culture, and how that shift affected her. theguardian.com/film/2021/mar/…
How we all collectively understand and respond to trans identity is in flux, and in flux in a way that's less predictable and less unidirectional than a lot of folks acknowledge. Here, as elsewhere, Eddie Izzard is reflecting on that complexity, and on that contingency.
(Also: Izzard has always been an idiosyncratic public figure, and that very clearly hasn't changed.)
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