Former Pixar staffers disappointed, but not surprised, at trans storyline being cut

Last week, news broke that Pixar’s first long-form TV series, Win Or Lose—which tells the events of the week leading up to a middle school softball championship from multiple perspectives—would be excising one of those perspectives from the show. Specifically, the series would be cutting all references to the fact that the character Kai—played by teenage trans performer Chanel Stewart—was trans, making it clear that any references to her gender identity would be cut from the show.

Now, former Pixar employees, many of whom worked in some capacity on or adjacent to Win Or Lose, are speaking out about the decision, suggesting they’re disappointed, but not surprised, to see Disney cutting the storyline. “It hardly surprised me, but it devastated me,” Sarah Ligatich, a former assistant editor at the studio who consulted on Win Or Lose, told THR this week. “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.” THR spoke to a number of former Pixar employees (there are a lot of those out there at the moment, after the studio instituted its first major staffing cuts in a decade last year in the wake of Lightyear‘s box office failure), many of whom praised the original version of Win Or Lose, and decried the decision to cut Kai’s story. Noting that a) re-cutting the already-completed series was going to be very expensive, and b) that trans-positive stories are seen as a hopeful way to help trans kids feel more accepted, and less in danger of taking their own lives, one unnamed former staffer put it bluntly: “It’s just very frustrating that Disney has decided to spend money to not save lives.”

Although Disney continues to claim it made the decision to make the change months ago—presumably attempting to distance itself from accusations that it made the move in the wake of U.S. election that saw transphobia become a potent marketing tactic for the Republican party—another former employee noted that the writing had been on the wall since the company’s earlier decision to cut an episode of Moon Girl And Devil Dinosaur that also focused on a trans character. “We saw it recently with the Devil Dinosaur And Moon Girl 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.’” Disney has put forward the same company line on Win Or Lose as it did on Moon Girl, claiming it just wants to avoid starting conversations for families that parents themselves aren’t ready to initiate—a “protection” it doesn’t seem to extend to pretty much any topic that doesn’t have to do with LGBTQ+ identity.