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‘Halloween Kills’ Star Jamie Lee Curtis Shares What She’s Learned from Her Trans Daughter Ruby

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Actress Jamie Lee Curtis, who is the star of the Halloween horror movie franchise, and whose latest installment Halloween Kills is number one at the box office shares the lessons she’s learned from her trans daughter Ruby.

People: Last year, Jamie Lee Curtis‘s daughter Ruby sat down in the family’s Los Angeles backyard with her mother and her father, comedy director Christopher Guest.

Ruby had something to tell them. She was going to come out as trans. But she wasn’t able to.

“It was scary — just the sheer fact of telling them something about me they didn’t know,” Ruby tells PEOPLE, sitting down in their living room last week. “It was intimidating — but I wasn’t worried. They had been so accepting of me my entire life.”

So Ruby left, and then texted her mother. Remembers Jamie Lee: “I called her immediately. Needless to say there were some tears involved.”

The Hollywood Reporter: Curtis, who initially spoke about her daughter’s transition back in July, said she called Ruby immediately after receiving the text and that there were “some tears involved,” before going on to discuss how she’s learning, particularly in her language, when it comes to her daughter.

“It’s speaking a new language. It’s learning new terminology and words,” Curtis said. “I am new at it. I am not someone who is pretending to know much about it. And I’m going to blow it, I’m going to make mistakes. I would like to try to avoid making big mistakes.”

The actress pointed to Ruby using her dead name in the interview — something Curtis said she hadn’t heard from her daughter but that also “doesn’t fit anymore” — as an example of her learning process. “That was, of course, the hardest thing. Just the regularity of the word. The name that you’d given a child. That you’ve been saying their whole life,” Curtis explained. “And so, of course, at first that was the challenge. Then the pronoun. My husband and I still slip occasionally.”

Ruby shared that she doesn’t “get mad” at her parents when they occasionally use the wrong pronouns, with Curtis acknowledging that getting them right is “sort of evolutionary” and an “important step” in their household. “We have tried to maintain it in a big way. I’m learning a lot from Ruby.”

As for why Ruby has waited to talk publicly until now, she emphasized that she’s always tried her “best until now” to keep herself out of the public and media eye, but that people will “finally get to see who I’ve always been.”

“Me coming out has nothing to do with my mom being famous,” she explained. “I’ve tried to stay out of the spotlight for many years or at least done my best to. I’m happy to be more visible if it helps others.”

 

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