Anti-Trans Rhetoric Helped Trump Retake the White House – What Effect Will It Have on Hollywood?

Anti-transgender rhetoric may have helped hand the presidency back to Donald Trump — his campaign spent $215 million on ads calling out Kamala Harris’ support for the trans community — but how big of an impact will that have in Hollywood?

Since the election, two major media companies have taken steps that indicate the industry is backing away from support of trans issues. Last month, animators reacted with dismay to the news that Disney pulled a trans-centric episode of the Marvel animated series “Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur.” And HBO threw its support behind vocal trans opponent J.K. Rowling, an executive producer on the upcoming “Harry Potter” TV series, saying the author had “a right to express her personal views” and would be significantly involved in the show.

Vocal pushback on trans rights and representation seems to be growing in the wake of Trump’s win on a campaign that brazenly demonized policies aimed at supporting trans people. Experts told TheWrap this could be reflected in a reduction in trans characters in film and TV even as representation in Hollywood has already been decreasing over the last few years.

“If the analogy is a five-alarm fire, this is a 15-alarm fire,” TransLash Media founder Imara Jones told TheWrap of her concerns about dwindling LGBTQ+ rights and visibility under Trump. “You’re going to see a big impact, for sure,” she said about shifting tastes in the industry and Washington. “It is hard for people to imagine the scale of the challenges and the scale of the crackdown that we’re going to see on trans identity.”

Hollywood has long been the petri dish for the nation’s culture wars, with progressive policies from gay marriage to gender-affirming care being impacted by shows like “Will & Grace,” Amazon’s Prime Video show “Transparent” in 2014 and this year’s Netflix hit “Baby Reindeer.”

But President-elect Trump’s victory may shift that decades-long momentum, and there are signals that even on the left, some believe that the trans issue had become too prominent.

In fact, the “growing skittishness” to appear pro-trans, as Jones described it, had been building even before the election. When trans influencer Dylan Mulvaney promoted Bud Light as part of the brand’s new social campaign on April 2023, the reaction from Trump backer Kid Rock and other conservatives was to boycott the company, often via social media videos in which they threw their beer cans in the garbage. Bud Light subsequently distanced itself from its own campaign as the company’s CEO offered an apology and Mulvaney went dark on social media for weeks as a result of the backlash.

Some Harris supporters like Charlamagne tha God balked over the vice president’s support for a federal regulation that pays for sex change operations for prison inmates. “Hell no, I don’t want my taxpayer dollars going to that,” he said, in a quote that was used in one of Trump’s viral ads. (He later filed a cease-and-desist order to ask Trump to drop the quote, but admitted the ads were “effective” and “impactful.”)

Self-described libertarian Bill Maher is no fan of Trump — on Dec. 3 he said he may quit his show rather than live through the second Trump term — but he has long indicated that Democrats’ support for trans rights was a bridge too far. In 2022, the veteran TV host dismissed the growing number of people identifying as trans as “trendy,” saying that teens are merely trying to “shock and challenge the squares who brought you up.”

In an October conversation with conservative podcaster Megyn Kelly, Maher agreed that the “trans insanity” has gone too far. Kelly, a former Fox News host, said that opposing sex change operations was her “single issue” when it came to voting.

On her own show, Kelly recently recalled when she was still at NBC and participated in a roundtable about the public pressure that forced Scarlett Johannson to bow out of playing a trans man.”They were so angry that we did not have a trans person at the table,” she said, adding that she couldn’t believe that NBC apologized “tail between their legs.”

The transgender backlash comes as 2024 emerges as a banner year for high-profile trans representation, with a trans actress centered prominently in the Cannes-winning feature “Emilia Pérez” and a trans comedy writer at the center of the documentary “Will & Harper,” both from Netflix.

That momentary upswing follows GLAAD’s August report which found that 5% of characters across scripted broadcast, cable and streaming in 2023 were transgender. (Approximately 0.5% of the adult population in the United States identifies as transgender, according to the Williams Institute at UCLA School of Law, which studies sexual orientation and gender identity law.)

And 42% of those trans characters were on shows that have since been canceled, including “9-1-1: Lone Star,” which featured trans man Brian Michael Smith as one of Station 126’s fire crew, and “The Umbrella Academy,” which starred Elliot Page.

This is the second year in a row with a dramatic decrease in transgender characters, down to 24 from last year’s 32, per GLAAD. That’s the lowest since 2017-2018, when Trump was in the White House for his first term. (The Biden-Harris administration has been much more LGBTQ+ friendly, including overturning Trump’s ban on transgender people serving in the military.)

Even an “uptick” of more trans characters onscreen in 2024 can’t really be considered progress, Jones told TheWrap.

“It seemed like momentum because there were a few trans actors [in the spotlight this year],” Jones said, “but that just underscores the dearth of trans actors and writers. The fact that we thought that a handful was progress tells us both the history and the amount of work that hasn’t been done.”

Julianna Kirschner, a lecturer at Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism who focuses on pop culture, entertainment, diversity and inclusion, told TheWrap that the current “backlash effect” is “not new, but how it plays out in the trans community and their representation is still developing.”

“We are at an inflection point for trans representation, as more public figures, media and sports increasingly feature trans people,” Kirschner added. “Some current media examples, such as ‘Will & Harper,’ highlight the trans experience and coming out, but there is still a long way to go when it comes to representation.”

Is Hollywood already “obeying in advance”?

When Disney pulled the episode of “Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur” that would have featured a trans character voiced by “Pose” star Indya Moore, comics fans and the animation community saw that as “obeying in advance,” a reference to author and historian Timothy Snyder’s rule No. 1 to resisting tyranny.

Although an unnamed Disney rep told Polygon that the trans character in “Moon Girl” was not the issue, storyboard artist Derrick Malik Johnson, who worked on the Marvel series, wrote in a since-deleted Bluesky post that he believed it was “shelved because of which party won the recent election.”

If the analogy is a five-alarm fire, this is a 15-alarm fire.

— TransLash Media founder Imara Jones

Cartoonist Molly Knox Ostertag tweeted, “Do I KNOW that the show I worked on at that company for 4.5 years was killed right before greenlight because two out of the six main characters were trans? No. And I’d genuinely love to be wrong. However, a fully animated episode of a popular show being pulled because of trans content certainly lends strength to that idea, which I’ve always wondered about.”

Disney did not respond to TheWrap’s request for comment for this story.

Meanwhile, when asked to elaborate further on HBO’s backing of Rowling and to highlight any other trans-related programming on their slate, a Warner Bros. Discovery rep forwarded the same statement from November that “J. K. Rowling has a right to express her personal views,” and that the characters she created “speak to the power of friendship, resolve and acceptance.” (The rep declined to comment further.)

In the end, money is always the bottom line, and if content is a hit with viewers, it’s not in danger of going anywhere, industry insiders told TheWrap at the Power Women Summit on Wednesday, when asked about the issue.

“It’s not universal,” Jones said. “It’s not even necessarily even universal within companies, but we’re going to see an increased reticence to be overt and explicit about trans issues in more kinds of entertainment, and it just flows with everything else that’s happening.”

Is there a “backlash to the backlash”?

Politics and pop culture continue to clash in Washington as the dust from the 2024 election settles. After Sarah McBride became the first openly transgender senator in the country, Rep. Nancy Mace (R-North Carolina) introduced an anti-trans bathroom bill to prevent McBride from using the women’s bathroom on Capitol Hill.

In more liberal circles, however, McBride’s election was cause for celebration amid constant anti-trans messaging from the GOP.

“I’m actually already seeing a backlash to the backlash, on cable news and among my friends, at least when it comes to the focus on trans issues and representation, thanks in part to Sarah McBride’s historical election and the ensuing coverage over ‘Waterclosetgate,’” said John Griffiths, the founder of LGBTQ critics group GALECA, which is based in Los Angeles. Mace did not respond to TheWrap’s request for comment on this story.

“In the long run, some people will be more exasperated by hate and bigotry than by what they perceive to be trendy, overwrought words that some in our vulnerable communities use to express themselves,” Griffiths said. “People need to ask themselves what kind of world, onscreen and off, they really want.”

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