Why Cher Refers to Son Chaz Using His Deadname in Her New Memoir

Cher is clearing up any confusion for readers as to why she’s referring to her son by his deadname in her new book.

“This memoir is based on my (sometimes imperfect) memory,” Cher, 78, wrote in the author’s note of Cher: The Memoir — Part One. “In this memoir, I refer to my son Chaz as Chas, the name he went by during the years covered in this book. Chaz has granted his blessing for this usage. In the next volume, at the appropriate point, I will refer to my son as Chaz.”

Cher dedicated her book — which hit shelves on Tuesday, November 19 — to her mom, Georgia, her sister, Georganne, and her two kids: Chaz and Elijah. (Cher welcomed Chaz in 1969 with Sonny Bono, five years before she filed for divorce from in 1974. The following year, she won custody over Chaz. Four days after finalizing her divorce from Bono, Cher married Gregg Allman. The pair welcomed Elijah in 1976 before splitting in 1979.)

While chronicling Chaz’s birth story in her memoir, Cher recalled Bono expressing his desire for a son. “‘Remember, Cher, I want a boy!’ he told me, laughing all the way,” Cher wrote.

After giving birth to Chaz, Cher said Bono gushed over their little one. “Sonny came the next morning and told me we had a seven-pound-eight-ounce baby girl, and she was beautiful,” she wrote. “He didn’t seem to mind at all that she wasn’t a boy. I named her Chastity Sun, ‘Chastity’ because it was my name in the film we’d just made and ‘Sun’ after her dad.”

Cher has been candid through the years about navigating motherhood after Chaz, now 55, first came out as lesbian before undergoing gender reassignment surgery in 2009.

“It was very unlike me to, in the beginning, have a problem with Chaz being gay, and it disappeared like that,” Cher recalled to CNN in 2020. “Then we talked about [whether Chaz was] transgender for many years. And [he] would say, ‘No, I don’t want to [transition]. And then he went and said, ‘OK, I want to do this.’

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Cher admitted that it “wasn’t easy,” adding, “I remember calling, and the old (voicemail) message … was on the phone, and that was very difficult.”

“But you don’t really lose them. They just are in a different shape,” she continued, adding that Chaz — who became the first transgender person to appear on Dancing With the Stars in 2011 — is “so unbelievably happy” now.

Cher: The Memoir — Part One hit shelves on November 19.