“True to herself since before filters” Chaz Bono’s family member savages Cher’s critics, defending the $380 million icon’s right to 100% self-reinvention.

Cher — the Oscar-winning performer with a six-decade career and an estimated fortune in the hundreds of millions — is again the focus of public criticism over her looks, with some online users asserting she has “gone too far” with cosmetic procedures and describing her face as unnaturally rigid.

The counter-argument this week came from within her family — a reminder that Cher’s image has always been self-determined, not crowd-managed. A family member close to Chaz Bono defended the singer by stressing her history of self-direction long before the era of digital editing: “My mother has been true to herself since before you knew how to use filters. Surgery is a personal choice, don’t use it to attack someone who has dared to live 100% as herself.”

The clarification on family ties matters only to the record: Chaz Bono does not have a biological son, though Bono’s fiancé has a child from a previous relationship. The sentiment, however, is consistent with long-standing internal support for Cher’s personal agency.

Cher has never made secrecy part of her brand. She has acknowledged select procedures openly, including a rhinoplasty and a surgical procedure on her chest in the past — and she has also publicly denied sensational rumors when they were false. She once said that conceding a single verified procedure often triggered exaggerated speculation: “You admit to one thing, and then everyone has you doing everything.”

The current criticism fits a familiar cultural pattern: discomfort with visible aging and with people — especially women — who choose their own mode of navigating it. Cher’s own history shows that late-career milestones, like the 1998 track “Believe,” arrived not in spite of her reinventions but through them — she was 52 when the song reached No. 1, setting a record for a woman on the U.S. singles chart at the time.

The family’s defense reframes the debate around agency, not aesthetics. Their point is that Cher’s continuous reinvention — from stagewear to musical innovation to her cosmetic decisions — is not a detour from her identity. It is her identity.