Pixar’s Win or Lose debuts on Disney+ on Wednesday, February 19. But the animated series courted controversy and lost LGBTQ+ viewers months ago.
Each of the eight episodes of Win or Lose, Pixar’s first original TV series, follows a different character in the run-up to a championship softball game. “The series reveals what it actually feels like to be in the shoes of each character — the insecure kids, their helicopter parents, even a lovesick umpire — with incredibly funny, very emotional, and uniquely animated perspectives,” Disney+ says.
The emotions that came out on December 17, 2024, however, weren’t what Disney had scripted. That’s when The Hollywood Reporter revealed that a storyline about a transgender character had been edited out of a Win or Lose episode.
A Disney spokesperson confirmed the decision to THR, saying, “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.”
According to the outlet, the character remains in the show but the lines of dialogue about their transgender identity were edited out because of a studio decision made months prior.
Chanel Stewart, the young transgender woman who voiced the character, told Deadline that same day that she responded to a 2020 Pixar casting call looking for trans girls to voice a trans teenager in a new animated series.
“I was exactly what they wanted to a T, and that’s why it felt so right. It felt just so right,” Stewart said. “I wore [the role] as a badge. I wore it with pride. I wore it with honor because it meant so much to me. The thought of authentically portraying a transgender teenage girl made me really happy. I wanted to make this for transgender kids like me.”
Stewart’s mom, Keisha, added: “There may be some parents out there who are not ready to have that conversation, but this is the world that we live in and everyone should be represented. Everyone deserves to be recognized. And it felt like it was just another setback for the LGBTQ community because it’s very hard on transgender teenagers … transgender people, period.”
Both Stewart and her mom were heartsick when they found out about Disney’s decision on the eve of the THR story.
“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.”
Former Pixar staffers were also disheartened, to put it mildly. “It hardly surprised me, but it devastated me,” Sarah Ligatich, a trans ex-Pixar assistant editor who consulted on the episode, told The Hollywood Reporter in a follow-up piece. “For a long time, Disney has not been in the business of making great content. They have been in the business of making great profits. Even as far back as two years ago, when I was at Pixar, we had a meeting with [then-CEO] Bob Chapek, and they were clear with us that they see animation as a conservative medium.”
One former Pixar employee who spoke to THR noted that several of Disney’s animated films have featured “certain subjects” that parents might want to discuss with their children “on their own terms and timeline,” such as the death of a parent in Bambi and The Lion King or substance use in Alice in Wonderland and Pinocchio.
And the Win or Lose decision is just the latest in a long line of disappointments for Disney’s LGBTQ fans and employees and their supporters. In 2022, Disney staff members criticized the company for remaining silent about an anti-gay bill in Florida, per Variety. Amid that uproar, a group of LGBTQ Pixar employees and allies issued a statement accusing Disney of cutting “nearly every moment of overtly gay affection” from Pixar films, only after that statement’s release was a same-sex kiss restored to the film Lightyear, Variety reported at the time. And last year, staffers who worked on the Disney Channel series Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur said an episode featuring a transgender-centric storyline had been shelved, though Disney disputed those accounts, per Polygon.
“It’s 100 percent political,” a trans ex-Pixar staffer said of the Win or Lose decision in an interview with THR. “We saw it recently with the [Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur] episode that was cut. All of us who knew about Win or Lose and this character were all just clenching: ‘Please don’t hit us next.’”
Former Pixar employees told IGN last year there’s an internal push to avoid LGBTQ themes. “It is, as far as I know, still a thing, where leadership, they’ll bring up Lightyear specifically and say, ‘Oh, Lightyear was a financial failure because it had a queer kiss in it,’” one source said. “That’s not the reason the movie failed.”
IGN’s sources also cited rumors that the workers behind Pixar’s Inside Out 2 had to take care to avoid any inferences of romantic chemistry between two teenage girls — main character Riley and supporting character Val — and even adjusted the lighting and tones of certain scenes to ensure the relationship seemed platonic in the final cut.
Disney’s Win or Lose decision, meanwhile, has many social media users accusing the company of censorship — and even vowing not to watch the show.
“Hey, remember Pixar’s new [TV show], Win or Lose, that got rid of [a] scene of the trans girl athlete? We needed that more than ever,” one X user wrote, sharing a video of President Donald Trump signing an executive order banning trans women from women’s sports.
Another X user wrote, “It’s sad how, from what I can see, the pre-release hype for Win or Lose has been almost completely extinguished by the controversy over the removal of the trans-inclusive storyline. Ultimately, Disney has nobody to blame but themselves for this.”
One user took issue with Disney’s stated rationale for cutting the Win or Lose storyline, asserting that trans kids “don’t experience their transness on their parents’ timeline” and “deserve the language and tools to understand and describe themselves.”
And someone else wrote, “I’ve watched the Win or Lose scene and the Moon Girl episode; there’s nothing ‘problematic’ about them unless one has an issue with trans kids existing. If there’s any disclaimer, it should be an apology from those responsible for all this censorship nonsense.”
Adding insult to injury is that Disney scrubbing the storyline meant that the company spent money to rework what was a completed episode, ex-staffers told THR.
“The episode in its final form was so beautiful — and beautifully illustrated some of the experiences of being trans — and it was literally going to save lives by showing those who feel alone and unloved, that there are people out there who understand,” said one. “So it’s just very frustrating that Disney has decided to spend money to not save lives.”
Win or Lose, Series Premiere, Wednesday, February 19, Disney+
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This story originally appeared on TV Insider
