Nikki Glaser apologised to trans influencer Briel Adams-Wheatley after a joke about her body and her transition circulated online. Adams-Wheatley, who has 6 million TikTok followers and a resilience that most of us could learn from, handled the whole thing with more grace than she was owed.

What actually happened

Adams-Wheatley found out through a fan DM. Someone in the audience at Glaser's show in Ridgefield, Washington, reached out to tell her she had featured in the set, and not in a way the fan had enjoyed. The joke, as reported back to her, suggested that Adams-Wheatley had "a hard life with no limbs but still decided to transition," and then went further, implying she had somehow "rubbed her penis off" through the way she moves. Adams-Wheatley posted the screenshot and asked, simply, why Glaser was making comments about what is or is not in her pants.

Glaser responded directly and quickly. Her DM acknowledged that Adams-Wheatley should not have found out this way, said the reported version was not an accurate account of the joke, and called it dumb. She said she hates anti-trans jokes of all kinds, that she regularly told audiences to follow Adams-Wheatley and spoke warmly about her, and that she would drop the material immediately. Adams-Wheatley shared the apology. That was that.

The part that deserves a little more attention

I am not here to pile on someone who apologised sincerely and moved on. Glaser did the right thing: she heard the complaint, she responded to the person herself rather than through a publicist, she did not get defensive, and she let the material go. That is actually how this is supposed to work.

But there is something in the shape of the joke worth naming, because it is not an accident. Trans people and disabled people tend to get paired as comedy targets, and the pairing is not random. Both identities get read, in certain imaginations, as departures from a supposed norm. Comedy that punches at those departures tends to rely on the same move: treating a body or an identity as inherently incongruous, as something that needs explaining, as something the audience is invited to find absurd. When someone lives at both intersections, the logic just doubles down. It is not wit. It is a shortcut.

What strikes me about Adams-Wheatley is that she has clearly already worked this out for herself. She told People earlier this year that when she first started posting, she used to cry in the bathroom over comments. Then she realised that the people sending them were paying her bills through the attention they generated. "You decide what makes or breaks you," she said. That is not a cliché. From someone who has built a platform of 7.4 million followers across Instagram and TikTok as a beauty influencer, motivational speaker and creator of adaptive makeup tutorials, it is simply true.

Why the apology matters as much as the joke

Trans people, and disabled people, spend a great deal of time being told they are too sensitive, that it is just a joke, that the comedian meant well, that they should be grateful for the visibility even if it is unflattering. Adams-Wheatley did not accept any of those frames. She asked a direct question publicly, waited to see what happened, and shared the response when it came. She neither escalated nor let it slide.

And Glaser did not perform contrition. She did not issue a statement through her team, she did not say the joke had been mischaracterised while refusing to examine whether it was, and she did not wait to see whether the story would die on its own. She wrote directly to the person she had made into a punchline, called the material dumb, and dropped it. That is a reasonable human response, and it is rarer than it should be.

The question I keep coming back to is not whether this particular joke was transphobic by any precise definition. It is why the body of a trans woman is still, in 2024, being treated as a legitimate comic premise at all. Not her wit, not her content, not her perspective, but the fact of her body and her transition. We are still here, apparently.

Adams-Wheatley said she was rethinking her November tickets. I hope she goes. I also hope that when she does, the room knows who she is well enough that the idea of making her a punchline does not occur to anyone.