Why Democrats Lag Behind Disney In Retreating From Trans 'Culture War'

It's the parents, basically

A promotional image for Win or Lose, a new Pixar production for Disney+

The Pickles, a co-ed middle school softball team portrayed in the upcoming Disney+ streaming series by Pixar, will not include a transgender player, after all. A later episode of the new show Win or Lose, which is scheduled to premiere in February, was changed “several months ago” due to concern about parental blowback.

“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,” a Disney spokesperson tells The Hollywood Reporter. While the character is still in the show, “a few lines of dialogue that referenced gender identity are being removed.”

Meanwhile, despite “the clear evidence that Democrats lost in no small part because of cultural issues,” the Democratic Party remains in utter denial that the blinkered demands of the transgender lobby are incredibly unpopular, Ruy Teixeira observes. They simply refuse to believe they can possibly be on the wrong side of history.

“This mistaken assumption has been a disaster for the party,” Teixeira writes at The Free Press today, citing a number of issues. Voters “believe biological sex is real, that spaces limited to biological women in areas like sports and prisons should be preserved, and that medical treatments like drugs and surgery are serious interventions that should not be available simply on the basis of declared gender identity, especially for children.”

Responsive to their consumer culture, companies are ditching DEI, ‘woke,’ and everything rainbow-colored as fast as they can. Democrats meanwhile lag far behind the broader culture and the corporations because they still dismiss culture war issues as “distractions ginned up by Republicans,” thinking they can just “change the subject and talk about mustache-twirling corporate villains” without having to change their minds. Everyone who has spent any time in ‘gender critical’ discourse will have encountered Democrats who actually respond this way.

A company like Disney does not turn on a dime, as major media projects can take years to complete. The decision to drop the trans storyline from Win or Lose follows a series of financial disasters in Disney distribution resulting from conscious bad decisions in LGBTQAlphabetical political programming under CEO Bob Iger.

When his hand-picked replacement Bob Chapek tried to steer Disney away from politics in 2022, Iger engineered a corporate coup and returned to the executive suite so that he could lead a crusade against Florida’s so-called “don’t say gay” bill. While the legislation did not actually compel schoolhouse silence about the existence of homosexuality, it does prohibit instruction on sexual orientation or gender identity, such as the notorious gender unicorn.

In response, Gov. Ron DeSantis had the state legislature repeal the statute which had governed Walt Disney World, replacing the Reedy Creek Improvement District with a new Central Florida Tourism Oversight District supervised by a board selected by the governor. According to one estimate, Disney has lost a trillion dollars over the next century as a result of Iger’s Democratic presidential ambitions. Dana Waldon, a close friend of Kamala Harris, sits on the Disney board and has been Iger’s rumored future replacement for years.

Under Iger’s new regime, DEI initiatives redoubled at Disney. White male animators with decades of experience and recognized skill were pressured out, while new hires were recruited from Tumblr. Quality immediately declined as identities replaced talent. The 2022 feature film Strange World, which included a gay character, was the biggest box office bomb of the year, still outperforming Lightyear, a Pixar movie that completely forgot what its main character was about, having many more problems than a same-sex kiss. Then the 2023 Disney feature film Wish was widely panned for its amateurish visuals and became the biggest box office bomb in Disney’s history. Even Moana 2, this year’s animated feature, is badly underperforming compared to its smash hit predecessor released in 2016, in no small part because the company has lost half of its audience.

From Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny to the new Captain America 4: Brave New World, multiple re-shoots and frenetic script changes, responsive to test audience reactions and controversial story elements leaked to cultural critics, have ballooned production costs for movies that audiences avoid in droves. Even the parks were not spared: male cast members were clocked in female character costumes, while Splash Mountain, the world’s most popular amusement park ride, was torn down — and replaced with an inferior ride that constantly breaks down — because of its association with Song of the South. Unsurprisingly, park attendance has declined.

Meanwhile, Iger’s biggest bet — that Disney+ would become the key future revenue generator for the company — cost billions in overproduction. Iger says that Disney+ will finally turn a billion-dollar profit next year. If he is right, it will be the result of belated decisions he has made to reverse course on ‘woke’ content in general and all things ‘transgender’ in particular. It surely won’t be Disney+ original programming. By far, the most popular show on the platform is Bluey, a non-Disney property streaming under license.

Iger’s learning curve was expensive. The Acolyte, supposedly a Star Wars series, featured campy lesbian space witches immaculately conceiving children and chanting hilarious mantras. Promoted by its own creators as “the gayest Star Wars ever,” the streaming show was universally panned by the end of its run. Season 2 was canceled soon after. Agatha All Along, celebrated in advance for being the gayest Marvel show ever, repelled audiences with its cringe level.

The belated decision to remove references to transgender identification from Win or Lose took place in the context of woke going broke, as audiences rejected alphabetical political agends injected into their entertainment. But this does not register in ‘access media’ outlets yet. Predictably, Deadline Hollywood turned to Chanel Stewart, the 18-year-old transgender-identified male voice actor who was recruited for the role four years ago, to express his disappointment.

“I was very disheartened,” Stewart said. “From the moment I got the script, I was excited to share my journey to help empower other trans youth. I knew this would be a very important conversation. Trans stories matter, and they deserve to be heard.” Never mind the audience that wants good stories, as long as “trans stories” get told. According to his own story, Stewart is “a part of queer history” simply by showing up. “It’s just that my character would now be a cis girl, a straight cis girl.” Boring!

Stewart’s mother shares his disappointment. “Everyone deserves to be recognized,” she says. The change to the Pickles lineup “felt like it was just another setback for the LGBTQ community, because it’s very hard on transgender teenagers” such as her castrati son. His story is more important than telling a good story. Teamwork, fair play, and other wholesome values are less important than queer identity messages.

The Win or Lose nontroversy comes a month after a similar story that Disney had shelved “The Gatekeeper,” an episode of Marvel’s Moon Girl and the Devil Dinosaur, that reportedly focused “on a transgender character and themes.” Perhaps it was even the same Disney spokesperson who said: “We have a level of care that we take very seriously, and we are respectful of the role parents play in making choices for their children, and having discussions on their own timeline.”

Like Win or Lose, the shelved episode features a sporting event. However, instead of a co-ed softball league — a perfectly acceptable venue for transgender players — Moon Girl and the Devil Dinosaur centers a “trans girl” (read: a boy) preparing to compete in a girls’ single-sex volleyball game. “A coach from an opposing team tries to stop her from playing, but Moon Girl and her friends help Brooklyn stand up to the coach and play volleyball,” KidScreen reports. “The episode is very explicit in its LGBTQ+ themes around inclusion, from its handling of Brooklyn’s identity to the use of different pronouns.” Transgender actor Indya Moore provided the voice of Brooklyn, who wears Pride-themed kneepads.

Pixar employees were at the forefront of Disney’s hard left turn in 2022. “We at Pixar have personally witnessed beautiful stories, full of diverse characters, come back from Disney corporate reviews shaved down to crumbs of what they once were,” according to a letter from a group purporting to represent LGBTQIA+ employees. “Nearly every moment of overtly gay affection is cut at Disney's behest, regardless of when there is protest from both the creative teams and executive leadership at Pixar.” Imagine that, Disney executives not wanting to inject adult issues into their programming for kids, or pick a fight with parents over controversial content.

Woke simply went broke. At Iger’s behest, Pixar announced the biggest layoffs in company history this May, reducing their overall output while putting 14 percent of their workforce on the unemployment line. Released this August, Inside Out 2 finally broke a string of five feature flops in a row by the animation studio. Turning Disney around will take years, but the turnaround is in progress.

Democrats are not responsive to market mechanisms. Indeed, for the younger, hip generation of progressive Democrats, market mechanisms are anathema. Democrats are only responsive to electoral mechanisms, which take place according to calendar cycles rather than business cycles. If they persist in being “culture denialists,” to use Ruy Teixeira’s term, then Democrats will have to lose ground in the 2026 midterms before they give up on trying to ‘message’ their way past the problem. Americans simply aren’t buying left-wing populism from the same candidates who espouse the elitist virtues of luxury beliefs, such as ‘trans kids.’

Teixeira notes the role of “the groups” — “the advocacy nonprofits that push so many of these radical policies” — in pushing Democrats to adopt these policy positions and then discipline them for breaking ranks. “Point out the obvious,” such as the fact that male bodies have distinct sporting advantages, “and you will face an onslaught of criticism from the groups and their allies across social and mainstream media, foundations, academia, think tanks, and within the Democratic Party infrastructure itself.” He thinks that denialism is the more insidious problem.

What I think Teixeira misses is the role that parents of ‘trans kids,’ especially mothers like Chanel Stewart’s, play in sustaining the hegemonic narrative of ‘trans joy’ and ‘acceptance.’ Helen Joyce has explained how this phenomenon has shaped media coverage by forcing the exclusion of critical voices like her own.

This same principle applies to the Democratic Party. It is impossible to attend a progressive networking conference without meeting transgender Democrats. Everyone in Democratic Washington knows transgender people involved in Democratic politics, forming emotional attachments. Deputy HHS Secretary Rachel Levine has friends. Sarah McBride, the newly-elected Democratic representative from Maryland, has been a close friend of the Biden family for over a decade. Parents of ‘trans kids’ enjoy special status in this coalition.

Whereas Disney can lay off its most problematic employees and make sweeping content policy changes, being responsible to shareholders, Democrats are responsive to ‘stakeholders,’ a political euphemism for the interests and organizations which lobby them. Transgender activists, especially the parents of ‘trans kids,’ remain powerful stakeholders in the Democratic coalition.

No matter how fast the culture turns, the party seems determined to resist change until forced by electoral attrition. And there will be political blood. As Disney has discovered, the number of parents frustrated by ‘gender identity’ is far greater than the number delighted by pediatric sex changes. Indeed, families either split, or turn against the ideology of ‘trans,’ all the time because of their experiences.

To cite one example from a podcast here at The Distance, Ashly, a mother of an ROGD daughter, has a husband and two sons now grown up to voting age. Her daughter ran away from home at 14, whereupon Oregon state services rolled out the red carpet, while police and school officials blocked every attempt to return her daughter. As a result, the ‘rescue’ of one ‘trans child’ from a perfectly normal, once Democratic-aligned home has produced four adults who vote Republican. This effect does not show up in Ruy Teixeira’s polling, either, but Democrats ignore it at their own risk.

The ‘trans family effect’ is powerful within the party, while the ‘families rejecting trans’ — the blowback — is already the more potent political force, and that problem is going to get worse in the years to come. Just as Disney lost billions pursuing a nonexistent “modern audience” that supposedly wanted greater LGBTQAlphabetical “representation,” the Democratic Party is betting that a rising generation of youth wants more pronoun nonsense. In reality, of course, American youth culture is going in the other direction, and the Democratic ‘family’ is just fooling itself.

They have become the party that actively hates parents and families. They will reap the whirlwind for it.