One transgender child and one pansexual child
Pronouncements from the company declare that “the employees of Disney believe” such-and-such, but … the Disney parks division is an incredibly diverse melting pot of physical, philosophical, religious, and political variations. We largely mirror the surrounding cultures of Southern California and Florida, but with a decided lean toward more conservative tendencies. It turns out that businesses which brand themselves as family-friendly tend to draw employees who like family-friendly content.
For a company that claims to listen to the voices of their cast members, the Disney corporation has spent the last couple years ignoring vast swathes of its own workforce. In recent months, they have gone further, actively supporting one group while actively suppressing or simply ignoring the other … Ignore the bloviating of Disney executive leadership … They do not represent the members of the Disney parks and resorts division. We are as diverse as the country itself, and the company’s attempts to use us as a bloc to push their political agenda is intolerant, exploitative, and profoundly un-Disney.
In a related controversy, footage gay hookup apps from an internal Disney meeting on the Florida law was obtained by the populist-right activist Christopher Rufo, who posted clips to his Twitter account.
And especially with trans characters you can’t see if someone is trans
I worked at small studios most of my career. And I’d heard things like, oh, you know, “They won’t let you show this in a Disney show. They won’t let you show that in a Disney show.” So I was a little, like, sus when I started. But then, my experience was bafflingly the opposite of what I had heard … my leadership has been so welcoming to my not-at-all-secret gay agenda … Then all that momentum that I felt, that sense of I don’t have to be afraid to have these two characters kiss in the background, I was just, wherever I could just basically adding queerness––if you see anything queer, I was basically just like, no one would stop me and no one was trying to stop me.
I’m here as a mother of two queer children, actually. And also as a leader … We had an open forum last week at 20th, the home of really groundbreaking LGBTQIA stories over the years, where one of our execs stood up and said, “You know, we only had a handful of queer leads in our content.” And I went, “What? That can’t be true!” And I realized, “Oh, it actually is true.” We have many, many, many LGBTQIA characters in our stories, and yet we don’t have enough leads and narratives in which gay characters just get to be characters and not have to be about gay stories.
And so kind of the only way to have these canonical trans characters, these canonical asexual characters, these canonical bisexual characters is to give them stories where they can be their whole selves
Part of the work I feel like I can put in is, [our show] takes place in modern-day New York, so making sure that’s an accurate reflection of New York. So I put together a tracker of our background characters to make sure that we have the full breadth of expression. We got into a very similar conversation of like, Oh, all of our gender-nonconforming characters are in the background. So it’s not just a numbers game of how many LGBTQ+ characters you have. The more centered a story is on a character, the more nuanced you get to get into their story. There’s not one way to look trans.
Some Americans regard the testimonials as welcome evidence that Disney is living up to its promises to be inclusive and acculturating young people to be wonderfully accepting of difference. Here’s Michelle Goldberg again, after watching the actual show that first speaker worked on:
