On transgender day of visibility, Greg Baldwin, the voice of Avatar: The Last Airbender’s Uncle Iroh after the passing of Makoto Iwamatsu, tweeted his support for the trans community, offering to fight the monsters beside them. A few minutes later, he added a message for TERF in chief J. K. Rowling, in the form of an image of Uncle Iroh giving the middle finger.
Naturally, the transphobes that live on Twitter didn’t take this well, so Baldwin tweeted some followup thoughts.
Namely that he’s unafraid of transphobes and bullies, and unwilling to back down. Referring to them as “monsters,” “bigots and simpletons,” Baldwin added that blocking them isn’t just fun, but comes with the added bonus of getting to cost Elon Musk money at the same time.
Baldwin then dunked on the Twitter transphobes disingenuously shouting “groomer” at him, stating that he’s very well groomed actually and perhaps they should look into it for themselves, before reiterating that he’s not intimidated by bullies, now or ever.
Naturally, because the dedicated transphobes of Twitter refuse to find something better to do with their time, this wasn’t the end of it for him. So, Baldwin decided to keep tweeting.
After welcoming his new followers and explaining that no, you can’t insult him by pointing out he’s not his beloved predecessor because he knows that, Baldwin reaffirmed his support for the trans and queer communities. However, he added that he was also considering removing some of the tweets that followed, on the grounds that they may have been “unnecessarily mean spirited” and he wanted to be “part of the solution and not the problem.”
However, for those that worried we were going to see a retraction of his giving J. K. Rowling the finger, it turned out to be a false alarm. While he did delete some other tweets (which, full disclosure, I have not seen), the Rowling tweet is staying up “unless I’m ordered to cease and desist by lawyers representing Rowling and/or Nickelodeon!” Baldwin stands by his message to her Grad High TERFness, despite her known litigious tendencies, and we have to love him for that.
Not content to leave it at general messages of support and biting comebacks, Baldwin is one of those allies who puts his money were his mouth is, taking on hypocritical Republican bills and pointing out the ways they’re doing exactly what they falsely accuse trans and other LGBTQ+ people of. It’s not a new thing, either; Baldwin has been calling out transphobia as well as other forms of bigotry and abuses of power for some time now. (Rowling isn’t the first to get Iroh flipping the bird at them.) Plus, his pinned tweet is a thread about not trusting billionaires, so there’s that.
Uncle Iroh is one of those figures everyone wishes they had, especially kids who, like Zuko, don’t have the best family of origin. So, it’s really nice seeing his surviving voice actor going to bat for trans kids in this particularly toxic and hate-filled environment.
(featured image: Nickelodeon)
