I'm Not Surprised That There's an Anti-Trans Backlash; I'm Surprised At Its Ugliness and Intensity
In 2020, which was somehow simultaneously both four and several million years, Pixar put out an ad seeking a fourteen year old trans girl to voice a trans teen in a new animated show.
Chanel Stewart, an African-American trans teen from Los Angeles with some commericals to her credit, leaped at the opportunity to play a pioneering role for one of the most respected and successful brands in entertainment.
She got the role for what would become a Disney+ spin-off to the top-grossing animated film of all time, Inside Out 2, called Win or Lose. With a worldwide box-office gross of just under one billion and seven hundred million dollars, Inside Out 2 was also the top-grossing film of 2024 and the eighth top-grossing film of all time.
That’s good! That’s VERY good. It’s not just good; it’s the best.
The title ended up being sadly prophetic. If the casting of a trans teen as a trans teen in a hotly anticipated Disney+ show represented a win for the trans community, particularly trans children and teenagers, then what happened next was a loss.
Shortly after Donald Trump was re-elected president despite two impeachments and thirty-four felony convictions, Pixar shocked no one by announcing that, actually, the trans teenager voiced by a trans teenager in what looked to be a groundbreaking show would no longer be trans.
She would remain in the show, but all references to her gender identity were cut. Disney confirmed the move in a press release stating, “When it comes to animated content for a younger audience, we recognize that many parents would prefer to discuss certain subjects with their children on their own terms and timeline.”
Pixar was being spineless and cowardly for the sake of the children, the precious, precious children.
In a related development, Pixar was very concerned that Riley Anderson, the hockey-loving thirteen-year-old protagonist of Inside Out and Inside Out 2, seemed gay, so they very consciously edited the film so that her fascination with an older girl on her team would come off as platonic rather than romantic.
Disney’s decision was undoubtedly informed by the underperformance of two animated films with positive depictions of LGTBQ characters, Lightyear and Strange Worlds, both of which flopped. Lightyear and Strange Worlds commercial failures seem attributable to their own weaknesses, but when audiences failed to show up in droves for the half-assed mediocrities, homophobes gleefully took credit and claimed it was even more incontrovertible proof of the adage “Get Woke Go Broke.”
Wow! What an authentic supporter of LGTBQ rights!
Disney was once synonymous with wholesome, family-friendly, All-American fare. Now, the right sees Disney as a Marxist organization shoving LGTBQ propaganda down its impressionable audience’s throat. Making a trans character cishet won’t do anything to change the MAGA contingent’s hatred of the company, but it will at least not antagonize them further.
So much of our current culture war boils down to the oft-memed image of Helen Lovejoy crying out, “Won’t somebody please think of the children?”
The fierce anti-trans backlash we are experiencing now, which kicked into high gear with Trump’s dispirting victory, has been posited a matter of defending children.
It’s an old tactic. When I was a kid back in the 1980s, right-wing hysterics were convinced that gay men were pedophiles and groomers who would try to molest children and/or turn them gay unless measures were taken to protect them. That has evolved, or rather de-evolved, into the right wing trying to convince the public that trans women are pedophiles who will try to make children trans or molest them unless measures are taken to protect them.
It’s the same bigotry, fear-mongering, and hatred in a slightly different package.
I’ve been horrified by the intense surge in transphobia over the last year or so.
Trump and Vance ran a fear-based, anti-woke campaign that posited toxic white men as protectors of children and foes of the dreaded Woke Mind Virus and the trans community as predators and abusers.
Here’s the thing: Harris and Waltz did not run on “Woke” issues. They did not run on identity politics. The opposite occurred. Harris and Waltz ran away from “Woke” issues. They ran away from identity politics.
Harris campaigned extensively with the Cheney family and responded to Trump’s delusional claims that she would try to take away everyone’s guns by bragging about being a gun owner herself.
It didn’t matter. The Republicans succeeded in defining their opponents as pro-trans, pro-open border, Marxist, America-hating extremists who wanted to tell everyone what to say and think.
The trans community was doubly fucked by the election. They were screwed by an incoming administration that promises to undo all of the progress trans folks have made over the past few decades. But it also suffered from the widespread conviction that undocumented migrants and the trans community lost the election for the Democrats. Trump did much better with Hispanic and black men this election because he appealed to their transphobia, fear of change, fear of inflation, and fear that criminals were sneaking across the border in record numbers to threaten them and their families and steal their black jobs.
Disney didn’t need a weatherman to see which way the wind was blowing. Disney bigwig Bob Iger, a former Trump critic, signed off on Disney subdivision ABC News giving Trump a fifteen million dollar settlement for a defamation suit after George Stephanopolous said that a jury had determined that the 45th president had“raped” E. Jean Carroll.
The jury had ruled that Trump had sexually abused Carroll and was guilty of battery and later defamation charges, but it did not explicitly find Trump guilty of rape.
That might seem like semantics to you and me, but it allowed Trump to sue a media company for saying something he dislikes. Iger seems to have concluded that it’s better to give up preemptively than to find yourself in a legal battle with the most powerful man on earth, a famously petty, messy little bitch who loves drama almost as much as he likes filing nuisance lawsuits.
The interview in question was with Nancy Mace, the South Carolina congresswoman who has seized upon the election of Sarah McBride as the first trans congresswoman as an opportunity to re-brand herself the face of Republican transphobia.
Last month, she introduced a bill to keep people from using bathrooms other than those of their sex assigned at birth. It was a blatant play for media attention that succeeded wildly.
Two months ago, I had no idea who Mace was. Oh, how I envy those innocent days! Now, she’s sold herself to her transphobic base as the J.K. Rowling of Washington, D.C.
Only a few years ago, Mace told the Washington Examiner, “I strongly support LGBTQ rights and equality. No one should be discriminated against.”
Then, the culture shifted sharply rightward, and suddenly, the media-hungry opportunist strongly supported discriminating against the trans community.
Does Mace genuinely hate trans people, or does she see the hot-button issue as a stepping stone to national fame, a position in Trump’s cabinet, and eventually, her own FOX News show? It ultimately doesn’t matter if she has hate in her heart when her actions are so deplorable.
The same is true of Trump, who was ostensibly pro-LGTBQ when that was fashionable, or at least wouldn’t hurt him with Republicans, but now warns voters that their innocent child will go to school a boy and come back a girl.
Disney saw Trump’s election as a sign that the American people shared his ideas and solutions. The truth is that the Republicans don’t have ideas; they have hatred. They have fears. They have incoherent rage that he was able to exploit. THAT’s what people who voted Republican were voting for. And less expensive eggs, of course. Can’t forget that.
The Republicans trafficked in fear. The Democrats tried to sell a more hopeful, inclusive vision of the future. That’s why the GOP has tarred the idea of DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) as the most America-hating, Commie, evil idea in human history. Nothing could be more offensive to them than diversity, except for equity and inclusion. They HATE that shit.
They had ideals of equality, cultural sensitivity, and progressiveness that voters rejected in favor of mass deportations, Draconian anti-trans laws, and tax cuts for billionaires.
There is no progress without a backlash. I’m not surprised that there’s an anti-trans backlash, but I am horrified by just how intense and ugly it has been and how much uglier it will get now that people like Trump and Mace think they have a strong mandate to travel back in time and return the trans community to an era where they were expected to suffer in silence and deny their true, authentic selves rather than risk making cishet folks uncomfortable.
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