Halloween is still two months away, but there's already a horribly offensive new costume looming on the horizon.
The retailer Spirit Halloween plans to sell a Caitlyn Jenner costume at its pop-up stores in New York City this year, according to the New York Daily News.
“Caitlyn Jenner has proven to be the most important real-life superhero of the year, and Spirit Halloween is proud to carry the costume that celebrates her," Trisha Lombardo, the company’s head of PR and marketing, told the Daily News. She offered no further details about the item, which will go on sale within the next four to six weeks.
Lombardo rejected the notion that the costume was problematic in an email to The Huffington Post. "At Spirit Halloween, we create a wide range of costumes that are often based upon celebrities, public figures, heroes and superheroes. We feel that Caitlyn Jenner is all of the above and that she should be celebrated. The Caitlyn Jenner costume reflects just that," she wrote.
Still, Vincent Villano of the National Center for Transgender Equality expressed his concerns.
"There's no tasteful way to 'celebrate' Caitlyn Jenner or respect transgender people this way on the one night of the year when people use their most twisted imaginations to pretend to be villains and monsters," he said in a statement to HuffPost on Friday.
We couldn't agree more.
This story has been updated to include an additional statement from Trisha Lombardo.
Also on HuffPost:
