Abandoning Fake Trans Kids as Practice For Abandoning Real Ones

I have long been an animation guy. I love animation, I love cartoons. It is one of the most beautiful and impressive mediums of storytelling that humanity has, and I am fascinated by every aspect of it. The designs, the actual effect of motion, and especially the process of actually writing for an animated project. There’s so many challenges involved in writing for animation, not knowing fully what the final product might look like along the way while also trying to maintain a particular sense of tone and vision. I’ve long argued with people about how the vast majority of animation is actually not strictly targeted towards children, that they’re meant to often have much broader appeals to almost any viewer. The things that children get out of something will be different from what someone older gets out of it. It’s that simple.

Cartoons matter, I’ve always argued. They matter because they allow for a real sense of whimsy and joy, from all viewers. The medium simply lends itself to that. They also matter because the stuff geared towards families are foundational building blocks. For adults, they help to show you the way other people see the world, often how other parents are dealing with raising kids and existing in this hell we call Earth. For kids, they’re everything: they’re lessons about the world, they’re a chance to see yourself or an aspect of yourself reflected back at you, they’re a touchstone to look back on and build on as you get older.

But there’s a trend from the biggest companies that make our pop culture. It’s to sand down any perceived edges or friction that might upset some hypothetical general audience, parents in particular. More and more, that means selectively choosing certain minorities or representations that were fine a few years ago but now have the stink of the culture war on them, and making sure those elements and identities are no longer centered. It’s an active decision to not just shift those people away from the spotlight, but to cut them out altogether.

A lot of studios and networks choose to lean towards more conservative messaging, or forcibly temper down the more progressive ideas that their artists want to present. Some of that is being explicitly done, like Bari Weiss’s work over at CBS, but much of it is a capture of compliance ahead of time. It’s hard to think of a media industry giant that falls into that way of thinking more than the big mouse itself, Disney. Disney has a history of egregious cowardice. It’s worth discussing how that cowardice primarily targets their bread and butter: their animated shows.

Disney has long marketed itself as the premiere producer of family content, especially geared towards children. It’s hard to argue with that marketing, given the history of the company that I do not need to recite in detail here. You probably already know most of it. Instead, I want to focus in on Disney’s most recent incidences that have been weighing on my mind for the better part of a year.

Disney had two shows that stirred up almost the exact same controversy within months of each other. The controversies revolved around a season two episode of the show Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur called “The Gatekeeper” and an episode from the Pixar miniseries Win or Lose called “I Got It.”

Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur is a cartoon adaptation of the Marvel Comics superhero characters of the same name. It’s a very, very good and fun show, I can’t recommend it enough. (The same is true about Win or Lose, which is excellent, and I’m saying now to avoid saying it later). “The Gatekeeper” has a very straightforward premise: Lunella (Moon Girl) and her volleyball team are going to compete against a rival school’s team. The rival school’s coach discovers that Lunella’s team captain, Brooklyn, is a transgender girl. After failing to get Brooklyn removed from the match, she reveals herself to be a supervillain who locks Lunella’s team in their locker room and turns it into a magical escape room. The team has to find a way out before they’re forced to forfeit. The twist in the episode is that even when they unlock the door, they’re not allowed to leave, because the space they’re in follows the evil coach’s rules and because she doesn’t believe transgender girls belong here that means they’re breaking the rules and aren’t allowed out anyway.

The episode is very explicitly about what it is about, I don’t know how else to say it. It’s a direct commentary on the transphobia confronting young trans people, especially girls, and directly addresses the new school sports bludgeon that conservatives have taken to attack trans people with in the last few years. The episode was pretty much fully completed, and was set to air in the second season of the show. Word got out in November 2024 that the episode had been shelved and set not to air by Disney (though it would be leaked to the internet soon after). The initial reason given was the political climate immediately after Trump’s election victory. It’s since been claimed that Disney chose to shelve it a full year before that. If the latter is true, I think it’s actually infinitely more damning on Disney, for reasons I’ll get to later.

Win or Lose is a show about the struggles faced by both the adults and the kids involved in a little league softball team that is about to play at the state championship. “I Got It” revolves around a character named Kai. Her story is simply that she is caught between trying to find joy with her softball teammates and trying to impress her overly competitive father. Very simple. A few months before this episode aired, it was announced that the character of Kai was supposed to be explicitly transgender, and that the show had simply removed all references to that transgender identity. This includes a sequences that was seemingly storyboarded before being cut that would revolve around the character Kai dealing with gender dysphoria, staring at a bathroom mirror and her face shifting into a conglomeration of abstract shapes (it should be noted that this leaked animatic may have been cut long before the rest of the transgender stuff that was cut, so the exact reasons for it missing could be separate. The final episodes bears out the idea that this was cut because it didn’t fit the artistic choices made in the episode).

The thing about “I Got It” is that it makes less sense if you don’t know Kai is supposed to be trans. It feels like the scenes and moments that were supposed to be there simply got cut before it was packaged to air. As a result, there are moments in it that feel empty or missing. Kai’s father’s initial concerns, in a scene that seems like it was supposed to be Kai coming out to her father as a girl, instead become about her quitting baseball for softball. There are artifacts that make less sense, and instead turn the explicit trans story into trans undertones instead. Kai pulling every old picture of herself off a wall and hiding them, Kai’s obsession with watching a girly soap opera with her grandmother to her father’s confusion, Kai’s moment of announcing her name to the Pickles softball team as though she just decided on it, Kai’s joy of being called “one of the girls” by one of the mothers of the kids, one of her positive points for joining softball being that its “co-ed,” the emphasis on her new outfit that is much more feminine in appearance, the bright pink bloom of light that happens any time Kai experiences something you might call gender affirming. It bleeds out of the episode, but Disney wants me to see Kai as just a normal cisgender girl.

Disney have always been cowards. It’s not hard to say that, because they have a long track record of it. The executive class at the studio always prefers to take the most conservative angle on things. Even when they’re progressive, it’s with the understanding that they’re only going to go so far as the perceived popular opinion is willing to take it. For a long time, Disney has had a reputation for cutting or minimizing all queer representation in their projects. The story goes that animated series Gravity Falls was supposed to feature a gay couple that appeared briefly as part of a joke relating to a Cupid-like character, and Disney made sure that shit got cut. Actually, there were a number of stories of Disney fearfully cutting anything that might be considered a little too gay from Gravity Falls and DuckTales and numerous other shows.

We’ve had over a decade now of Disney projects introducing queer characters and couples that are touted as huge steps for the studio but they are footnotes even in their own projects, like the live-action Beauty and The Beast or Avengers: Endgame or Star Wars Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker. It permeates the whole company.

It does mean that when a project does get to go all out, it becomes a moment of celebration. Amity and Luz kissing, finally, in The Owl House was a significant moment. Disney would proceed to make The Owl House’s final season three episodes long and limit them to being hour-long specials instead of a full season of narrative. Is it connected? It’s been suspected and discussed that that was the reason, but never explicitly confirmed. But would it shock me? No.

It wouldn’t shock me because Disney is an extremely conservative company that relies on the art of progressive-leaning folks (because conservatives mostly make terrible fucking art) to maintain their position as a cultural juggernaut. This observation isn’t new. The awful nuance of talking about major corporations like Disney is that it’s the company, the executives and shareholders running things, that I despise. The artists they hire are often making incredible things that are kneecapped by the political leanings and fears of the people above them. Disney isn’t alone in that. All of their direct competition do the same damn thing, but Disney is so goddamn big. The things Disney does worries me, because it has enough weight to be consequential.

At the height of The Owl House mania, in 2022, Disney was trapped in the middle of a discourse cycle of their own making. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and Florida Republicans were pushing the Parental Rights in Education Act (HB 1557), which has become known as the Don’t Say Gay Bill, into Florida law. The law makes it illegal for teachers to mention any concepts related to “sexual orientation” or “gender identity” for young students (Kindergarten through 3rd) and prohibits such instruction to all grades if the presentation is deemed to be against state standards. The vague and nebulous concept of those state standards is, of course, on purpose so that the biggest assholes you know can attack any teacher or school official they don’t like for any perceived “woke” offense.

In the middle of all of it, Disney was heavily scrutinized for donating nearly five million dollars to various Florida Republican re-election campaigns in 2020. Disney seemed to stand in tacit support of the Don’t Say Gay bill. Publicly, Disney’s stance was that they had no stance, that there was no intention of getting political on this topic. Those familiar with this story may know about a specific response given by the company, which I intend to return to in detail. Instead, I have to acknowledge the thing many people have: Disney didn’t say they supported the Don’t Say Gay bill specifically, but they donated an amount of money most of us will never see to the people who wanted this bill, to make sure they could get reelected. Because Disney is a conservative company, just like pretty much all of them are.

I’m not going to bog myself down in the details of the Don’t Say Gay controversy. There are major moments. The walkout of Disney’s workers, the massive pushback that every section of Disney seemed to perform against the main body of the company, Dana Terrace’s (creator of the Owl House) response video on Twitter and follow up tweets featuring the phrase "I'm fucking tired of making Disney look good” that burned into my brain. Eventually, Disney would take a public stance against Don’t Say Gay, and the following battle between them and the spurned anti-woke snowflake Ron DeSantis would be dragged out in court.

My focus instead lingers on something that Bob Chapek, Disney CEO during this particular run of debacles (2020-2022), said during this whole ordeal. An internal memo saw Chapek declare, in part, that “The biggest impact we can have in creating a more inclusive world is through the inspiring content we produce.“ Much of the pushback against Disney from inside the company’s component parts (Pixar, Marvel, etc) came in response to this memo. This included a spark out of Pixar, where employees declared that Disney had been making them remove LGBTQ+ content from their projects.

It’s hard to even pretend that Disney, or its various executive leaders, actually believe that statement about their “biggest impact.” The company already gave millions to people who are mostly still running Florida on platforms set to destroy that “more inclusive world.” This is to say nothing of the wider Trump 2.0 regime. It’s clear, as well, that these conservative ideas of art are ingrained at every level. They’ve become company dogma. Pixar’s head, Peter Docter, gave an interview with the Wall Street Journal in March 2026. In it, he basically takes credit for excising LGBTQ+ storylines from Pixar’s most recent projects, primarily discussing Elio, but it’s hard not to presume he took the same approach to Win or Lose. There seems to be division in the studio spawning out of this as well, but who can say if it’ll mean anything.

This brings me to the much more damning thing about “The Gatekeeper” and “I Got It.” If the decision to shelve “The Gatekeeper” really was a full year before the election, it means that, within a year of the Don’t Say Gay debacle, Disney had already decided which side of the political fence it wanted to stand on. Long before the surge of Trump 2.0 and all of the bigoted bullshit that came with it, the execs at Disney had already chosen all of the ways they were going to comply in advance towards hateful conservative talking points.

Pete Docter’s reasoning for cutting LGBTQ+ stories from Pixar projects was that “We’re making a movie, not hundreds of millions of dollars of therapy” (fucking rich coming from the Inside Out guy) and “As time’s gone on, I realized my job is to make sure the films appeal to everybody.” This falls in line with something else Disney said, discussing their usual review processes and justifying why “The Gatekeeper” wasn’t going to air with the rest of MGDD’s second seasons: "We have a level of care that we take very seriously and are respectful of the role parents play in making choices for their children and having discussions on their own timeline."

So far, I like to think I’ve been writing in a restrained, more diplomatic way of approaching this. I’m done with that. This shit is cowardly. These opinions are utterly fucking deluded. They were nonsense and bullshit a few years ago, but they’re unforgivable right now.

We are currently living through the conservative cultural pushback, and we have been trapped in the spiral of it for about twelve years now. The spiral has gotten worse since November 2024. So much of this conservative backlash is built on the back of anti-trans sentiment specifically. Smarter minds than I have been warning for years that the anti-trans sentiment was their way back into the mainstream, so they could use it to leverage their anti-gay and anti-immigrant hate. I have no friends who are safe. Most of my family is not safe. I am not safe.

It would be a false exaggeration to say that Disney is the reason for everything bad happening to trans folks right now. It would be wrong to say that Disney is the reason there are so many anti-trans legislations currently making their way through the state-level, including the ongoing (as of June 2026) attempts to collect all medical records belonging to trans folk of all ages to make a trans registry. Disney is not responsible for Trump’s “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government” executive order from January 2025 declaring that the federal government shouldn’t recognize trans people by their preferred gender. Despite the subjects of “The Gatekeeper” and “I Got It,” Disney is also not responsible for Trump’s “Keeping Men Out of Women's Sports” executive order that threatens to pull funding from any school that allows transgender athletes to compete. Or the other collection of trans-targeting executive orders that I can’t list in full.

What Disney is responsible for is their reaction to it all. Their choice was to remove the offending trans narratives and proceed as though nothing was wrong. Disney is not only company doing this, and I want to stress that again, but they are the biggest media corporation on Earth right now. They could weather the hypothetical blow that comes with having a fucking backbone. They could put Brooklyn and Kai, in all their trans joy, in front of children who need to see it. Children and families who need to know that kids like this are out there, that people like this are out there. That the people in the living room watching these shows might find something recognizable in them.

Cutting these stories from the world is, once again, giving tacit support to the conservative freaks who are driving this hatred. It’s throwing your hands up in the air before the fight’s even started and saying “you win, just take it.” It’s sacrificing taking a chance on art that actually has something to say to instead seek this fictional ideal of mass appeal.

No, what Disney did to Brooklyn and Kai is the not the root of the problem, but it’s a branch. It’s a signal to bigots that they are winning, and their pressure needs to continue. It’s appealing to these people hoping it’ll appease them, but it won’t. It will just make them more confident to try harder. No, the only real effect is that you’ve signaled that it’s alright to cut out the trans stuff from life. It’s saying that we don’t need trans stuff in our art, so maybe we can just start ignoring all that trans stuff altogether. Someone might read that as an overreaction, but Florida already passed their Don’t Say Gay bill in 2022. It turns out that was way ahead of the curve, because now the Don’t Say Gay bill feels fairly quaint. Just another of dozens of bills like it that are currently circulating at every level in every state.

Cutting the trans kids out of your family-oriented fiction just makes it seem more taboo, like conservatives want it to be. It gets it into your head that maybe there’s something wrong with it. Suddenly, if your kid starts having gender questions, it seems like there’s something wrong with them. Depending on where you live now, your kid might be on the track to be breaking the law by simply wanting to experiment with gender, whatever age. You’re breaking the law by supporting them. Because it’s all taboo. Disney is aiding in the process of not just anti-normalizing, but vilifying the concept of being trans altogether.

It sucks for the artists who just want to make something they can stand by, a specific experience to show kids and families. It sucks for everyone trying to experiment with their genders, whether they’re children or senior citizens. And I’m still only talking about the issues happening here in the States, that’s to say nothing of the anti-trans legislations currently ravaging its way through the United Kingdom, some of which literally passed into practice while this article was in its outline stages. Here in the States, there are credible claims that the federal government are enacting a genocide on trans folks, meeting the legal and academic definitions of the law. Every single step that we concede to these bigots, whether its in our courts or our culture, is a step closer to that reality.

I’ve been uncertain about writing this piece for a while. I’ve been upset about both of these little incidences since they occurred, but I figured it was too much to put the censorship of two cartoons up against the weight of every other challenge we’re facing right now. Even as I finished my rough outline of this piece, I was unsure if I should write it.

I was at a Pride event on the first weekend of June. I didn’t really care to be there. I’m not as social as I once was, and I was barely social then. Plus, I’ve always struggled with whether or not I’m queer enough for these spaces. But, you know who else was there? Kids. A pretty decent number of kids. Some of them were there because they’d been brought by other family members, a queer parent or sibling perhaps. But there were some who were clearly there for themselves. Kids, around the same age as Brooklyn or Kai are depicted on their respective shows, playing around decked out in rainbow flags, in trans flags.

God, these kids were so happy. Their parents were happy that they were happy. I could see the flashes in my mind of my father, who once told me if he caught me even thinking about dressing up like “a girl or a faggot” that he’d disown me. But here were these queer kids, free from that kind of hate. I thought, the world can only benefit from seeing queer kids happy, from seeing trans kids happy. “The Gatekeeper” and “I Got It” don’t pitch the idea that being trans is the be-all-end-all for happiness. Both shows present the idea, instead, that being who you want to be is the key to crack open the gate holding you back from happiness. There will be struggles, personal and external. You might have days where you’re fighting for your joy, or maybe there are days where you have to fight someone else to maintain it.

There are a lot of things we need to do for each other, and for those kids. One of those things is giving them art they can see themselves in. The world can only benefit from trans kids on TV, being happy.

Happy Pride.