Disney removes cartoon episode about transgender character: ‘It breaks my heart’
Polygon, the episode titled “The Gatekeeper” is about the transgender character Brooklyn, who is voiced by “Pose” star Indya Moore.
Brooklyn is competing on the girl’s volleyball team and faces discrimination from the opposing team’s coach, Greer (voiced by Amy Sedaris).Greer reportedly uses a magical key to lock Brooklyn and her teammates in the girl’s locker room.
Brooklyn breaks down to her teammates and tells them, “I’m trans, my very existence breaks Greer’s rules.”Brooklyn also wears pride-themed kneepads and has a “Trans is beautiful” sticker on her water bottle in the episode, according to Polygon.Derrick Malik Johnson, a member of the show’s storyboard revisionist team, addressed the episode being pulled in a since-deleted post on the new social media microblogging app Bluesky.“So guess I finally got hit with one of the projects (episode) I worked on is getting shelved because of which party that won the recent election,” he wrote. “It breaks my heart knowing this impactful and amazing is now about to be consider a lost media episode.”Other animated artists spoke out on social media and similarly speculated that the episode was removed because Donald Trump won the presidential election.Emmy Cicirega, a storyboard artist on “Gravity Falls,” wrote on X, “Disney should be ashamed of themselves for canning this episode.
You don’t get to approve approve approve something and then destroy it at the last minute, shattering the crews hard work and hopes.”Matt Braly, who created “Amphibia,” responded to Cicirega’s post and said, “If an episode got this far, it was approved multiple times by multiple divisions, only to suddenly be struck down at the last second?
