Disney’s Transgender Reversal Is as Unsurprising as It Is Dangerous

An analysis of what cutting the trans storyline in ‘Win or Lose’ means

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…