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At this point, Demi Lovato is notorious for putting their foot in their mouth while advocating for social justice. After all, who could forget FroYo-gate of 2021? And now, once again, Demi Lovato is making headlines for a controversial–and frankly, bizarre–opinion they just shared. (Editor’s note: Demi Lovato identifies as non-binary and goes by they/them pronouns).

While promoting their new reality show, Demi Lovato claimed that referring to extraterrestrials as “aliens” is derogatory.

You read that right. And no, this isn’t an article from The Onion. Demi Lovato actually said that.

The topic came up while Lovato was being interviewed by E! News for their upcoming show “Unidentified”, which will follow them, their sister Dallas, and their best friend Matthew as they take a roundtrip to discover more about extraterrestrials, UFOs, and other unexplained phenomena. The show is available to watch on Peacock.

During the interview with E!, a fan floated a theory past Lovato that the singer became involved in “Unidentified” to promote an unreleased song called “Aliens”. Lovato quickly shot down that rumor before adding in their two cents about the term “aliens”.

“My fans should know that I do not call them aliens,” they said. “Because ‘alien’ is a derogatory term for anything, even extraterrestrials, which is why I call them ETs.”

Naturally, the comment confused a lot of folks because…no one has ever met an alien before.

There isn’t even a scientific consensus on whether aliens even exist. Therefore, there are no aliens around to tell us that their feelings are hurt when we use that term to describe them. At this point, it would be akin to saying the word “unicorn” or “leprechaun” is offensive to unicorns and leprechauns.

As when Demi Lovato says anything that has people raising their eyebrows, Lovato’s comments about extraterrestrials went viral.

Paparazzi even stopped famous astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson in the street to ask him what he thought of her comments. And his response was hilarious, to say the least.

“All the aliens that I’ve ever met, they have no feelings, so to be worried about offending them by calling them alien,” he started off by saying. “What is she thinking is going on in the heads of species of life from another planet?… I don’t care what [aliens] feel, I’m not worried about — plus, why should I even believe they know English? So yeah, I’m not all-in on that. I don’t get it.”

The comments on Twitter were similarly puzzled. “How does she know it is derogatory towards them specifically? Did she ask them during one of her psychedelic trips into outer space? What do they call us out of interest? What if we think that’s derogatory towards us?” wrote one Twitter user. “This takes being offended on someone’s behalf to a whole new world,” wrote another.

We couldn’t agree more.