Disney Bans Trans Stories, Embraces Hate

The studio’s excuses are bullshit.

Actress Chanel Stewart, from Instagram

This week the Hollywood Reporter confirmed that Disney engaged in transphobic censorship. The company decided to cut references to trans identity and trans experience from its forthcoming Pixar animated sports series “Win or Lose”. Trans actor Chanel Stewart, who was brought onto the series specifically to play a trans character and speak to trans experience, was blindsided. She was also, she said, “very disheartened.”

As you’d expect, Disney provided a bland, self-justifying, corporate boilerplate statement attempting to downplay their cowardice and bigotry. “When it comes to animated content for a younger audience,” they blustered, “we recognize that many parents would prefer to discuss certain subjects with their children on their own terms and timeline.”

This statement is bullshit. Let us count the ways.

Disney cares about parents (if they’re bigots)

Disney frames their decision as a form of parental empowerment. Some parents don’t want their kids to see cartoons with trans people in them. They want to deny the existence of queerness and trans people, and Disney wants to help them do that. All power to parents!

But. What about parents—like, say, me—who think that trans kids are awesome, and think that all kids, trans and cis alike, should learn that trans kids are awesome? Where are the Disney movies and stories for those parents?

Disney believes that parents should be able to have complete control over the information their children receive. But a fair number of parents would like their kids to see that trans people are normal and cool and that they have a place in the world and in pop culture.

You could say, well, sure, show your kids trans content! But the problem is that trans content is limited—and mainstream trans content for kids even more so. A Disney product with trans characters is a particular, powerful message; it tells young people that trans kids are valid, normal, mainstream. It says that you don’t need to go searching for them; it says that you don’t need to hide them away. It says they aren’t embarrassing or ugly or evil. It says they fit into the culture in an unambiguous way. That’s not a message that smaller studios or venues can put across in the same way.

Disney is not actually giving parents a choice. Giving parents a choice would mean creating a trans storyline and then letting parents choose whether to have their kids watch it or not. Instead, what Disney has done is to give bigots a veto over the choices of everyone else.

The right has decided that trans people are evil and that they should not exist. The only world anyone is allowed to see on Disney screens for kids is a world without trans people. Parents can choose to have their kids see a Disney world without trans people—or they can choose to have their kids watch a Disney world without trans people. There is no other option.

Disney cares about parents (not about kids)

Disney shows contempt for parents who aren’t bigots. It shows contempt for kids as well.

Parents have a great deal of control over what media their kids can consume, over what clothes their kids can war, over what health care their children can receive. It’s somewhat verboten to point out that this level of control is not always positive or healthy. But especially for queer kids, sweeping parental power, including sweeping parental vetoes on media, can be extremely harmful.

Amanda Marcotte has a recent piece in Salon describing the authoritarian, and abusive, parenting style that is normal, and normative in many right wing families:

In her new book "Wild Faith: How the Christian Right Is Taking Over America," journalist Talia Lavin devotes the second half to exploring the widely-read marriage and parenting manuals of Christian nationalist subculture. These books or websites explicitly argue for hierarchical relationships, with women and children chastened to live their lives in unquestioning submission to patriarchal authority. As Lavin lays out in painful detail, this worldview is frequently enforced through violence, at least on children. The parenting manuals treat physical discipline not merely as an aspect of parenting, but as a parent's main tool.

"They see violence and authoritarianism as normal, in both the private and public spheres," Lavin told Salon. "When you're raised seeing violent authoritarianism in the family sphere and come to accept and embrace it in adulthood, you're the model authoritarian subject: someone for whom violence and authority are intertwined, who accepts and expects brutalization of the most helpless."

Right wing parents often frame themselves as the aggrieved parties when they are estranged from their children. But right wing, homophobic parents are in fact often the ones who separate themselves from their kids, either by kicking them out of the house or by making their lives so horrible at home that they feel safer on the street. According to the Trevor Project, 28% of LGBT youth report experiencing periods of homelessness or housing instability; for trans girls, the number jumps to a terrifying 38%. For trans boys it’s 39%; for nonbinary youth, it’s 35%. That means that more than 1 in 3 trans youth are homeless for part of their lives.

As this suggests, parents are not infrequently the chief, and most dangerous, oppressors of their trans children. When Disney says that transphobic parents should have absolute control over content for kids, up to and including stifling it in its crib so no one on earth can see it, then what Disney is really saying is that transphobic parents can and should have the power to torment their children without any limit or check. Bigoted parents demand the power to prevent their queer kids from existing, or finding resources, or finding support. Disney has decided to collaborate with them.

Disney joins hands with bigots past

This isn’t the first time mainstream media has taken orders from the worst people on earth. Hollywood banned images and narratives about “miscegenation”—or mixed race sexual relationships—for some thirty years in the early and mid twentieth century. Over the same period, from 1930 to 1968, mainstream motion pictures banned depictions of queer sexuality and positive portrayals of gay and lesbian life and identity.

The rationale for these elisions has a familiar ring: the industry claimed that depictions of certain lives and certain relationships were immoral or improper and that normalizing them would harm society. Marginalized people needed to remain marginalized for the good of all, in theory. In practice, they needed to remain marginalized because bigots were determined to enforce their bigotry, and amoral Hollywood studio execs feared that defying hate would affect their bottom lines.

Corporations are never going to be a progressive vanguard. They are spineless by nature; they are afraid of change; they sign up to help crush minorities for the simple reason that majorities are by definition more numerous and have more money to spend on tickets.

But while media companies tend to genuflect to fascist reactionaries, they don’t really want to piss off anyone; they want everyone to love them. That’s why Disney put out that weasily excuse trying to frame their capitulation to bigotry as a common-sense effort to help out parents.

And that’s why it’s important to point out, clearly and with appropriate fury, that Disney is not helping most parents. They’re not helping most kids. They’re giving outspoken frothing bigots a veto over the worlds we can imagine for our children and for ourselves. That’s not empowerment; it’s not choice; it’s not care. It’s authoritarianism and homophobia. It’s de facto rule by the great, smiling anthropomorphic Disney mouse of hate.

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