The press tour for Willow might have just dropped a bombshell about LGBT milestones in Disney films. Why Disney and the media didn’t focus on this more, we may never know.
Yet again, the big news flies under the radar, but at That Park Place, we are cursed with the burden of actually paying attention.
On December 8, 2022 NBC News ran a segment called Flipping The Script in which Joe Fryer interviewed Talisa Garcia about Garcia’s role in the Disney+ Willow series. The Flipping the Script series focuses on diversity issues and made two bold claims about the historic nature of Garcia’s casting.
The first is that “Garcia is the first trans person cast by LucasFilm.” Although Disney has recently has a pell mell parade of ever-more complicated “firsts” recently, there is no reason to doubt that such a specific claim is true. It does leave the possibility that someone was cast a later time but appeared onscreen before Garcia. It also does not take into account the other trans people that have been cast by Disney at large or appeared onscreen in some form.
The second one is more interesting:
“It also marks the first time in Disney’s history that an openly trans person will play a cisgender role”
Forgive me a moment while we unpack that statement.
“Openly trans” implies the possibility that there are other performers in the history of the Disney company that were trans, but not out of the proverbial closet. That’s quite possible. Going on, this is the first time a trans person “…will play a cisgender role” for the Disney company.
That’s a blink-an-you’ll-miss-it statement right there.
Taken altogether, Talisa Garcia and NBC News have seemingly confirmed that if there were a trans performer in a Disney production, that their character is also trans.
Which begs the question: have trans performers appeared in previous Disney productions? If you have been following That Park Place, then you might already know the answer.
Patti Harrison, a biological male appeared in the 2022 She-Hulk series in episode 6 as Lulu, the bride-to-be in a wedding that Jennifer Walters (aka She-Hulk) attends. We speculated at the time that this was the MCU’s first trans character. The statements from NBC News and Talisa Garcia would seem to confirm that.
But that was not Patti Harrison’s first role for Disney. Harrison played the chief of the Tail tribe in the Walt Disney Feature Animation picture Raya and the Last Dragon.
I’m going to go through these steps one more time:
- Talisa Garcia and NBC News confirm that Garcia is the first transgender person to play a cisgender character in a Disney production.
- Patti Harrison is a transgender person.
- Patti Harrison played the Chief of Tail in Raya and the Last Dragon
Before we conclude, let’s circle this back around to where we started: NBC News must have known that they were doing press for Willow at the same time that they were making the claim that Garcia is the first transgender person in a cisgender role at Disney. That exact wording would have been cleared by Disney if it didn’t just come verbatim from Disney itself. In order to produce that statement, someone in Disney had to acknowledge that there were internally talks about transgender actors playing transgender roles in Disney productions. In fact, analyzing the statement can only lead to one conclusion: that any openly transgender person in a previous Disney production was definitely playing a transgender character.
One unexpected result of this might be that it pigeonholes actors of particular sexual, gender, or identity preference and/or designation to be only available for roles that match that preference. We have seen this issue arise in the past when heterosexual actors were heavily criticized for taking roles of a different representation.
In light of this, the Chief of Tail in Raya and the Last Dragon is not cisgender. Therefore, Raya and the Last Dragon is the first Walt Disney Animation Feature to have a transgender character. If the protocol at Disney remains in the way it has been presented, it may not be the last time. Your opinion of whether that is good or bad is dependent on your own thoughts and positions. We’re not here to tell you what to think, only to present the information in an unbiased manner.
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