section_path: Personal life/Political views/LGBT issues
section_name: LGBT issues
paragraph_text: LGBT issues
  
  In an April 2022 interview with Rolling Stone, Donaldson announced that he had left evangelical Christianity and identified as an agnostic theist. He revealed that he had once agreed with Christian opposition to homosexuality, influenced by his upbringing in the Bible Belt, where religion was "beat into head every day". He recalled being told, "Gay people are the reason God's going to come and burn this Earth." He has since rejected those views and disavowed anti-LGBTQ rhetoric.
  
  In May 2018, The Atlantic published an article on Donaldson's history of using homophobic slurs. The article stated that Donaldson, while still a teenager, had a habit of referring to people as " fags " on Twitter and regularly treated being homosexual as a punchline and "gay" as an insult. Donaldson later removed the tweets, and in 2021, a spokesperson for Donaldson said that he had "grown up and matured into someone that doesn't speak like that".
  
  After Ava Kris (then Chris) Tyson, Donaldson's childhood friend and employee, acknowledged in April 2023 that she was receiving feminizing hormone replacement therapy, Donaldson defended her against backlash she had received: "Yeah, this is getting absurd. Chris isn't my 'nightmare' he's my fucken friend and things are fine. All this transphobia is starting to piss me off." Tyson subsequently came out as a trans woman.
  
  In an April 2022 interview with Rolling Stone, Donaldson announced that he had left evangelical Christianity and identified as an agnostic theist. He revealed that he had once agreed with Christian opposition to homosexuality, influenced by his upbringing in the Bible Belt, where religion was "beat into head every day". He recalled being told, "Gay people are the reason God's going to come and burn this Earth." He has since rejected those views and disavowed anti-LGBTQ rhetoric.
  
  In May 2018, The Atlantic published an article on Donaldson's history of using homophobic slurs. The article stated that Donaldson, while still a teenager, had a habit of referring to people as " fags " on Twitter and regularly treated being homosexual as a punchline and "gay" as an insult. Donaldson later removed the tweets, and in 2021, a spokesperson for Donaldson said that he had "grown up and matured into someone that doesn't speak like that".
  
  After Ava Kris (then Chris) Tyson, Donaldson's childhood friend and employee, acknowledged in April 2023 that she was receiving feminizing hormone replacement therapy, Donaldson defended her against backlash she had received: "Yeah, this is getting absurd. Chris isn't my 'nightmare' he's my fucken friend and things are fine. All this transphobia is starting to piss me off." Tyson subsequently came out as a trans woman.