ACRE
World’s tallest woman Rumeysa Gelgi ‘transvestigated’ online
Rumeysa Gelgi (L) who has Weaver Syndrome, has a standing height of 7ft 1in (Getty)
The world’s tallest woman, Rumeysa Gelgi, recently met up with the world’s shortest woman, Jyoti Amge, in London to mark the 20th annual Guinness World Records Day.
The famous pair shared afternoon tea together at the Savoy Hotel and discussed their stories and life experiences in a video filmed by the world record organisation and shared on TikTok, where it went hugely viral – clocking up almost 50 million views and 5.4 million “likes.”
Gelgi holds the Guinness World Record (GWR) for being the world’s tallest woman at 215.16cm (7ft 1in), while Amge is the shortest woman at just 62.8cm (2ft 1in).
@guinnessworldrecords Shortest woman Jyoti Amge 🇮🇳 and tallest woman Rumeysa Gelgi 🇹🇷 just met for the first time! #GWRday ♬ original sound – Guinness World Records
“It was so amazing meeting Jyoti for the first time,” said Rumeysa Gelgi, who is a 27-year-old web developer from Turkey.
“It was difficult for us to make eye contact at times due to our height difference, but it was great,” she added.
Amge, who played Ma Petite in American Horror Story, has a form of dwarfism called achondroplasia. She and Gelgi have been honoured as Guinness World Record icons in the book’s new 70th anniversary edition.
However, Rumeysa Gelgi’s viral appearance in London also caused a spike in Google searches for the term “Is Rumeysa Gelgi trans,” as well as a similar increase in searches for “Is Rumeysa trans” on TikTok.
Rumeysa Gelgi is not transgender. She’s a cisgender woman. She has an extremely rare condition called Weaver syndrome, which causes accelerated growth – hers was only the 27th case ever to be diagnosed.
The trend of jumping onto Google and social media to investigate whether women – often women who don’t fit traditional, false societal assumptions of “femininity” – has skyrocketed in recent years.
It’s given rise to a new term, transvestigating – a mash-up of trans and investigating – which refers to conspiracy theories that falsely claim individuals, typically women, are transgender and are hiding their “true” gender identity.
Gelgi is not the only tall woman to have sparked this kind of “transvestigation” recently.
Daniel Radcliffe’s partner, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel star Erin Darke, is taller than the Harry Potter actor.
A photo of the pair standing next to each other was shared online in 2023 only to be “piled on” by social media users, who posted hundreds of comments suggesting that Darke – who was pregnant at the time – was actually a trans woman.
‘Gender-critical’ author Suzanne Seddon posted a photo of Darke with her boyfriend, with the caption: “This is Daniel Radcliffes [sic] (Harry Potter) Girlfriend. Now what do you see?”, followed by the ‘woozy face’ emoji.
When transphobic TERFs self-own. Note that despite Suzanne’s judgement that Erin Darke is not woman enough to be a woman, Erin (who is NOT trans) is currently pregnant in fact. pic.twitter.com/gnUqtQpou9
— 👑 Alyssa Miller 🦄🛩️ (@AlyssaM_InfoSec) April 6, 2023
Replies to the original tweet inflamed the issue, with anti-trans users writing “it’s a bloke” and others saying she “definitely leaves the toilet seat up.” Darke gave birth to her and Radcliffe’s child in April 2024.
Many other celebrities, political figures and professional athletes – including Olympian Imane Khelif and US rugby hero Ilona Maher – have all been “accused” of being trans with no evidence other than the conspiracy theorists’ own warped, often misogynistic, view of femininity and gender.
Female athletes in particular are often regularly “accused” of being trans after winning competitions.
An investigation by Teen Vogue found that the theories are most prominent on X/Twitter and YouTube, and are compiled by users who already have a predisposed hatred of transgender people.
Many of these users believe that the targeted celebrities, including Taylor Swift, Serena Williams and Michelle Obama, display vaguely defined “male” characteristics – a belief rooted in misogyny and transphobia.
This might all sound like something that’s confined to the more unhinged, conspiracy-theory filled backrooms of the internet, but increasingly this sort of discourse around who does, or doesn’t look enough like a “woman” has had stark and distressing real-world consequences, with cis women who don’t look stereotypically feminine targeted and harassed for using female bathrooms.
In October 2022, a viral TikTok video showed a cisgender woman, Jay, confronted over her gender identity in a public toilet because she had short hair – which her harasser assumed meant she was trans.
The video is captioned: “Being harassed for using the bathroom and trying to tell me the police would get me for peeing was definitely not on my list of things to do today”.
To clarify yet again, Rumeysa Gelgi is not trans. Neither are Michelle Obama, Taylor Swift, Serena Williams, Imane Khelif, Ilona Maher or Erin Darke. Obsessive transvestigation needs to stop, as it’s harming all women.
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