Disney’s Transgender Reversal Is as Unsurprising as It Is Dangerous
Image; Disney’s Pixar
For the past half-decade, Disney has been at the center of a vicious culture war around what conservatives would call “wokeness” and what everyone else would label as not making it a big f@cking deal when a non-white straight person is in a movie. The company’s very public fight against Florida’s Don’t Say Gay Bill in 2022 had it recast as a “woke” entity in the minds of many conservatives. Whenever a gay person appeared in a Marvel movie or a Black person starred in a film, conservative hate influencers would lose their shit.
However, in December of 2024, Disney created headlines by pulling back from showing a trans storyline on the Pixar streaming series Win or Lose (note: the character still exists; it’s just all references of them being transgender have been scrubbed). Disney CEO Bob Iger justified the decision as not wanting his company to be too political, saying: “Infusing messaging is not what we’re up to. We need to be entertaining.”
The assumption here is that transgender people are by our very nature politically uncomfortable — a direct pivot away from the more progressive angle the company had been courting before Trump’s second term.
While this may go against the conservative framing, this action is not surprising to anyone paying attention. Disney, or more accurately, the leadership driving it, has always been rather conservative. And as our country moves further to the right, they are merely responding to the conservative center that they so crave to appeal to.
Standing on the line
When we talk about the viewpoint of a company, we are speaking in generalities. It’s important to note that a company is always a site of struggle among many different forces. In the case of the Don’t Say Gay Bill (one of the inciting incidents in the conservative narrative), there was not a united position.
Leadership was not very keen to oppose the law when it first passed, particularly then-CEO Bob Chapek. It was only when Disney’s workers created a stink about the issue — the highlight of this being a massive employee walk-off where hundreds marched out of the company’s headquarters in Burbank — that its leadership “reassessed” its position and publicly condemned the law’s passage. As summarized by Devan Coggan:
Chapek and Disney soon received pushback, both from inside and outside of the company. A group of Pixar employees penned a public letter decrying Chapek’s response and arguing that Disney has a history of censoring LGBTQ representation in films. And last week, Disney employees staged a walkout in protest — a move supported by celebrities and Disney stars including Oscar Isaac, Raven-Symoné, and Mark Ruffalo. Chapek later reversed course, apologizing for the company’s weak response and vowing to pause political donations in Florida.
When I look at Disney’s history, I see that there has been a constant battle over adopting more left-leaning issues. This is the same company whose early history included a notorious animators strike in ’41 and, as recently as 2024, has had employees allege that they were discriminated against for wearing pro-union buttons (something they are legally allowed to do). Disney is not “woke” by any stretch of the imagination and usually only does the right thing after immense pressure from workers inside the company and frustrated consumers outside of it.
It’s the same with representation in media. Disney has a long history of cutting out queer content in its films for foreign and sometimes domestic releases. While it may be cutting out a trans character in America now, not too long ago, it was doing the same for same-sex kisses in Star Wars and the like. Its inclusion of diverse characters now only makes sense as a milestone when you factor in the company’s historic conservativism. As I argue in Does Disney Care About Diversity?:
Given this company’s history, it seems weird to be lauding Disney for projects they barely want to put out and are only socially relevant because of their deeply rooted conservatism. We are rewarding a company’s recalcitrance over the creators who actually break ground in this area, and then allowing Disney to pretend like this representation means anything more to them than dollar signs.
Disney, the company, has rarely been at the forefront of any left-leaning issue — either in real life or in the case of representation. It has merely been reacting to cultural trends and then branding its milquetoast acquiescence as going “above and beyond.” In the words of one assistant editor at Pixar:
Disney has not been in the business of making great content. They’ve been in the business of making great profits. Even as far back as two years ago when I was at Pixar, we had a meeting with [then-CEO] Bob Chapek, and they were clear with us that they see animation as a conservative medium.
What right-wing reactionaries have been responding to is not that Disney is woke or Marxist or whatever boogeyman they have conjured up, but that for a brief period, they (i.e., the right) lost the culture war around queer representation. There was an accelerated acceptance of queer rights in the late 2010s, with the high point probably being the legalization of same-sex marriage by the Supreme Court in 2015. This normalization made Disney’s leaders feel safe enough to greenlight content with queer characters, and even then, only after a very protracted timeline.
Yet progress is never linear, and the right did not stop trying to undo these gains. Its powerbrokers invested billions into media apparatuses, such as The Daily Wire, that were partly dedicated to reversing course on America’s increased acceptance of LGBTQIA+ people in both real life and in media. This infrastructure allowed a cottage industry to boom of various influencers spending much of their time decrying whenever IP, such as Star Wars, The Little Mermaid, and The Lord of the Rings, incorporated Black and queer characters.
As a consequence, Disney, as one of the largest entertainment companies in the world, often found itself at the center of this outrage for creating media that was (at the time) mainstream. While American culture was decidedly in the anti-right-wing camp, the company was willing to take the heat (at least rhetorically, as they largely continued to censor queer representation in their films abroad).
Yet, in the aftermath of Donald Trump’s successful 2024 election, the political mainstream appears to be shifting again. The right successfully used culture war grievances, particularly that of transgender rights, to retake power, which means that talking about diversity, at least to the conservative leadership of the Disney company, no longer seems profitable.
With the latest removal of this trans storyline in Win or Lose, Disney is doing what they have always done: appealing to America’s conservative base. The company’s official line now appears to be framing transgender people as intrinsically not family-friendly. As one Disney spokesperson said in a statement of the company’s decision to axe the trans representation in Win or Lose:
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.
This response is not that of a liberal defender or even of a far-right reactionary, but Disney’s media team doing what they have always done: covering their asses. We are undergoing a rightward turn on trans representation, and Disney is responding to it in the same way they were responding to the increase in trans rights when Disney first commissioned Win or Lose back in 2020; they are readjusting.
Its leadership is trying to remain on the line of what is and is not acceptable, and that doesn’t include trans people anymore.
An unmagical conclusion
The worst part about this recent indicator, and the disgusting PR language above, is that this turn was transparent to anyone aware of the company’s inner workings. As I argued back in 2022:
[For Disney], whether racism goes up or down, you meet viewers where they are. Does that sound like a company that cares about diversity? Does it sound like a company that will combat white supremacist narratives if and when our country’s opinions on “diversity” change?
Well, here we are, experiencing a reactionary backlash, and I don’t think the Mickey Mouse company is coming to save us.