The Timeline

From famous Disney villains inspired by drag queens, to the openly non-binary characters of new fantasy cartoons, the way that trans and genderqueer characters are described, voiced and treated has shifted massively over the years. This post will cover several canonical transgender and non-binary characters, as well as those who are genderqueer-coded, to present a timeline of tropes and common language we see used around these characters. While admittedly, there aren’t a huge amount of them in animation yet, as GLARe contributor, Ellie Leatherby, points out in her post on genderqueerness in Nimona (Bruno & Quane, 2023), there’s enough to explore three categories here: genderqueer-coding in classical and renaissance era Disney, transfeminine representation in the animated adult sitcom genre and finally, ‘canonizing’ trans+ characters in newer kids cartoons. If a lot of the gender-related terminology I’m using here is new to you, feel free to check out our post explaining common terms related to genderqueer, trans and gender non-conforming identities in animation.

1930s – 1990s:

As discussed in our basics post for trans and genderqueer identities, queer coding can result in either negative or positive representation. Putnam (2012) explores how many of the Disney villains from the classic to renaissance films are coded as transgender, from Cinderella’s (Geronimi, Jackson and Luske, 1950) Lady Tremaine, to The Lion King’s (Allers and Minkoff, 1994) Scar and The Little Mermaid’s (Musker and Clements, 1989) Ursula. GLARe contributor, Jasmin Awoodun, has also looked at the genderqueering of Hercules’ (Musker and Clements, 1997) villain, Hades, in more detail in her post. The negative representation these characters give comes from how the traits that code them as gender queer (e.g. Hades’ feminised language and Ursula’s inspiration/imitation of drag queen Divine) are simultaneously used to code them as villains. Associating genderqueerness and transgression solely with evil and immorality, while the protagonists are a shining beacon of cisgender-heterosexual norms, obviously creates a demonising representation of trans and gender queer coded characters.

Still today, whether queer-coded or canonical, genderqueer villains are often considered offensive and overdone stereotypes; Double Trouble from the reboot of She-Ra and The Princesses of Power (Stevenson, 2018-2020) has been criticised by some fans for presenting the only non-binary character in the series as deceitful, evil and non-human.

Even within Disney films though, there are protagonists who can easily be read as subtextually genderqueer. The titular Fa Mulan (Mulan (Bancroft and Cook, 1998)), for example, is a very clear representation of transmasculine experience, although her gender ‘transgression’ is explained away in the plot as an action she had to take to save her father. The typical ‘I want’ song that’s in almost every Disney renaissance film, for Mulan, is about her dissatisfaction with her role as a woman and having to hide her true self from her family. ‘Reflection’ highlights Mulan’s inability to be “a perfect bride or a perfect daughter”, going on to question “can it be I’m not meant to play this part?”. Furthermore, Mulan finds happiness in being perceived and performing as a man – quite literally during a song called ‘I’ll Make A Man Out of You’. Obviously, some of this theming comes from the original poem that the film is based on – The Ballad of Mulan (木蘭辭)(Northern Wei Dynasty ~ 400AD). However, the idea that Mulan is unhappy with her gender before she is forced to join the army to take her father’s place is entirely invented for the film.

Mulan’s character manages to capture many aspects of a transmasculine experience, from chest-binding to the fear of not ‘passing’ as a man and the complications of disclosing your gender in potential romantic relationships. This appears to be one of, if not the only, Disney film of this era to offer a sympathetic representation of gender transgression. The villain here, Shan Yu, is overtly masculine and gender conforming, while the protagonist is, if not transgender, at least a cross-dresser. Of course, there is some of the typical humour you’d expect around crossdressing, such as in the final act where the rest of Mulan’ s troop dresses up as concubines to sneak past Shan Yu’s men. They are described as “just ugly concubines” and proceed to pull fruit from their fake chests and use them to fight. Obviously here, the entire scene is a joke about men in dresses, but it is luckily a lot shorter compared to how long Mulan spends in ‘disguise’. This example highlights the importance of framing in queer-coded representations; if the gender queer traits of a character are treated sympathetically and the audience is encouraged to relate to them, then it creates a far less harmful depiction.

1990s – mid 2010s

Since the 1990s there has been a trend in animated adult sitcoms to use trans characters’ identities as jokes; the language used around them makes it clear that queer coding here is for the audience’s ridicule, not for the sake of representation.

“I’m not really a woman. I’m just a guy with a mutilated penis”

This quote comes from the first episode of South Park (Parker, Stone and Graden, 1997-present) to feature a trans woman: ‘Mr. Garrison’s Fancy New Vagina’ from 2005. The episode revolves around Kyle, one of the show’s four main characters, being inspired by his gym teacher’s sex reassignment surgery to undergo a surgical race change. The comparison is made that if a ‘man’ can get surgery to become a woman to be more comfortable, then he should be able to transition to African American to give him an advantage at basketball. Kyle’s dad, Gerald, also undergoes ‘dolphinoplasty’ to look like a dolphin because he likes them. The episode focuses on the medical aspect of Mr. Garrison’s transition (who is continually misgendered as ‘Mr.’). The comparison between a real surgery, vaginoplasty, and the fictional ‘negroplasty’ and ‘dolphinoplasty’ reinforces the idea that Mr. Garrison is not actually a woman, but a deluded man resulting to plastic surgery. The episode is both racist and transphobic and clearly displays a trope that will be carried through several other shows of this genre. Again, as recently as 2019, transfeminine characters on the show have been called men masquerading as women – Heather, from the episode ‘Board Girls’, is a competitor in a Strong Woman competition, who is shown to win because she’s actually a man.

A similar character is Ida from Family Guy (Macfarlane and Zuckerburg,1999-present), featured in the show since 2010. She is shown to sleep with a dog, who openly and repeatedly calls her disgusting and gross, calling it “goofball sex”. The pronouns used to reference her are often ‘it’ or ‘he-she’. Obviously, this language is demonising at best, and at worst completely dehumanises the character. There are many other examples of the same trope in shows like the Simpsons (Brooks, Groening and Simon, 1989-present) and Futurama (Cohen and Groening, 1999-present). Bob’s Burgers (Bouchard and Dauterive, 2011-present), on the other hand, offers an interesting twist on this.

The initial appearance of Marshmallow in the episode ‘Sheesh! Cab, Bob’ falls into a very similar representation to the other examples mentioned. She is a transfeminine character, who is hugely sexualised and mislabelled by other characters. She is often referred to with the masculine pronouns ‘he/him’ and is shamed for being hired as a prostitute by the episode’s antagonist, Pesto. Particularly offensive is how often the character is called a ‘transvestite’, despite being described as a transgender woman not a cross-dresser. However, since this episode was released in 2010, the show has taken steps to create a more humanising and respectful representation. In more recent episodes, she is referred to with the feminine pronouns ‘she/her’ and her gender and sexuality become less of the focus in jokes. Additionally, all of the shows mentioned so far in this section cast cis men to voice trans women. Naturally, it’s very easy for us as the audience to read the character as ‘not really a woman’, when the casting choice purposefully makes them sound like men. Initially, Marshmallow was voiced by a cisgender white male actor, however, since last October (2023), black transfeminine actress, Jari Jones, has taken the role instead. Obviously, it will always be precarious to portray an African-American transgender prostitute as a comedy character without falling into stigmatising tropes like the ones mentioned in our other examples. However, using an actor who does actually represent the identity of the character can be a very good start.

Finally, there are some more positive example of representations in this genre too. Natalie el-Khoury is a transfeminine character who appears in three episodes of the show Big Mouth (Flackett, Goldberg and Kroll, 2017-present), again voiced by a trans woman. Other characters still treat her with confusion and ask incredibly intrusive questions. However, within the text, Natalie is able to respond to these questions and treatment, rather than it being treated as a one-time joke for the main characters’ and the audience’s amusement. Big Mouth is a show about puberty – a very explicit but occasionally educational one – and Natalie’s character is treated no differently. Even in her short run on the show, she’s able to explain and depict the medical, social and legal issues faced by transfeminine teens. Each character in the show has a ‘puberty monster’, including Natalie, but hers is shown to be stopped by her puberty blockers because it isn’t the correct puberty that she wants to go through. She is still very much a comedy character, the audience is allowed to laugh at her jokes and jokes made about her, they just don’t revolve around misgendering or sexualising her like they do for other characters of the genre.

2010s – Present

More recently, we’ve seen a call for ‘canonical’ queer representation across a range of LGBTQ identities, and showrunners are beginning to have more freedom to create them. GLARe contributor Ellie Leatherby has already talked about genderqueer representation in her post on Nimona, as well as the struggle with Disney to get a show with queer elements released. As part of this shift in representation, cartoons like  Adventure Time (Ward, 2010- 2018) have faced accusations of queer-baiting when queer subtext doesn’t become concrete. Consequently, many shows have pushed to make queer representation ‘officially’ textual, including for trans and gender queer characters. However, as we’ll see in the next four examples, canonizing a character as trans or gender queer can happen in a few ways and there’s no universally ‘correct’ representation.

“They thought I was a doe, but.. I knew. I always knew. I was a buck.”

This is the only line in The Dragon Prince (Ehaz and Richmond, 2018-present) that tells the audience that the character Terrestrius is transmasculine. In some cases, trans characters have little to no textual or subtextual reference at all. This conversation, and Terrestrius’ trans flag coloured garden of flowers serve as the entire reference. Both Terrestrius and Jewelstar, from the 2018 reboot of She-Ra and The Princesses of Power, are voiced by transmasculine actors who later confirmed online that the characters they play are trans. In Jewelstar’s case, there is no textual reference to his gender identity at all – both in character design and dialogue, he is identical to the show’s cisgender male characters. The only possible subtext to hint that his character could be trans is the fact that in the original 1985 She-Ra: Princess of Power (Scheimer, 1985-1987), Jewelstar is a woman, one of three sisters. Whilst fans admit to often missing these characters’ trans identities, they seem to have garnered little backlash and are generally accepted as ‘easter eggs’ of representation in the shows’ minor characters.

Other shows have included more major characters who are trans or gender queer. For example, Raine Whispers is the ex-partner of Eda Clawthorne, one of the main characters in the Disney show The Owl House (Terrace, 2020-present). Raine is Disney’s first non-binary character, again voiced by a non-binary actor to match the character’s identity. Vogt (2022) explains how much impact a character’s voice can have on our perceptions of them – in Raine’s case, the mid-range pitch helps to dissuade audiences from automatically assigning them female or male. Of course, there’s no such thing as one way that non-binary or trans people talk, but this casting choice does make sure that it is somewhat authentic. In both real life and animation, voice tone and pitch play a huge part in gender presentation, especially, as noted by Stecher (2023), for trans and non-binary people. Raine is also one of the first gender-queer characters in a cartoon to be consistently referred to by singular they/them pronouns. This is a decision which helps to mark them as undeniably gender non-conforming.

In some translations of the show, it’s proven difficult to maintain this, such as in the Latin American Spanish dub where masculine pronouns (él/lo) were initially used instead; however, workarounds have been found in response to backlash from fans and the voice actor for Raine themself, e.g. only referring to them by name, excluding pronouns or using neopronouns, like in the German dub, where ‘xier’ is used.

Another character shown to use they/them pronouns is Stevonnie from Steven Universe (Sugar, 2013-2019). They are, textually, neither male or female and visually designed to have intersex characteristics, with a curvy, muscular frame and long hair, but also facial hair and relatively androgynous facial features. Stevonnie is the result of the main character, Steven, physically fusing with his best friend, Connie, to create a new character. Typically, all other fusion characters are referred to with she/her pronouns and treated as female as the only characters capable of fusion are ‘Gems’ – an all-female alien species. However, Steven is half-human and therefore both the only male Gem, and the only one capable of fusing with another human (Connie). They are clearly written as a separate character, not a boy and a girl sharing one body. They only ever refer to themself using singular pronouns, and another character, Garnet, explicitly tells them shortly after their first appearance “You are not two people”. Unlike the other examples given here, Stevonnie is voiced by a cis woman, although the pitch is lowered to avoid being perceived as explicitly feminine. Steven as well is often voiced by women in different language dubs of the show, so this choice may or may not be considered to contradict the character’s identity. Stevonnie is an interesting example of ‘canonical’ genderqueerness, both in the fact that they are so closely related to the main characters but also that their identity is integrated into the fantasy system of the show and that it has more detailed backstory than any of the other character’s we’ve covered in this section.

The examples here aim to explore a range of approaches to ‘canonizing’ trans and genderqueer characters’ identities through language. Whether that’s through the casting choice for voice actors, pronoun use or textual explanation, each seems to have been received by audiences as positive trans representation and could provide ideas on how to create a trans character, beyond their visual design.

Why is any of this important?

In making this timeline, I’ve found how truly sparse trans and genderqueer representation is in cartoons. Hopefully, in putting all these characters together, it’s easier to see what tropes we might want to leave behind and how a respectful representation might be written and voiced. Calling to light some of the best and worst representations in animation outside of just visual discourse gives a sense of optimism for its future, as well as a warning of what has proven harmful in the past. Although there are still not many, from the first non-binary character in Disney, to the shift away from using trans bodies as jokes, the future of representation for genderqueer and trans characters is slowly looking more positive, across genres of animation.

REFERENCES AND FURTHER READING

Allers, R., & Minkoff, R. (Directors). (1994). The Lion King [Film]. Walt Disney Pictures.

Bancroft, T., & Cook, B. (Directors). (1998). Mulan [Film]. Walt Disney Pictures.

Bouchard, L., & Dauterive, J. (Executive Producers). (2011-present). Bob’s Burgers [TV Series]. Fox Broadcasting Company.

Brooks, J., Groening, M., & Simon, S. (Executive Producers). (1989-present). The Simpsons [TV Series]. Fox Broadcasting Company.

Bruno, N. & Quane, T. (Directors). (2023). Nimona [Film]. Blue Sky Studios.

Cohen, D., & Groening, M. (Executive Producers). (1999-present). Futurama [TV Series]. Fox Broadcasting Company.

Ehaz, A,. & Richmond, J. (Executive Producers). (2018-present). The Dragon Prince [TV Series]. Netflix Inc.

Flackett, J., Goldberg, A., & Kroll, N. (Executive Producers). (2017-present). Big Mouth [TV Series]. Netflix Inc.

Geronimi, C., Jackson, W., & Luske, H. (Directors). (1950). Cinderella [Film]. Walt Disney Pictures.

Macfarlane, S., & Zuckerburg, D. (Executive Producers). (1999-present). Family Guy [TV Series]. Fox Broadcasting Company.

Musker, J., & Clements, R. (Directors).(1989).  The Little Mermaid [Film]. Walt Disney Pictures.

Musker, J., & Clements, R. (Directors).(1997).  Hercules [Film]. Walt Disney Pictures.

Parker, T., Stone, M., & Graden, B. (Executive Producers). (1997-present). South Park [TV Series]. Paramount Global Distribution Group.

Putnam, A. (2012). Mean Ladies: Transgendered Villains in Disney Films. In Diversity in Disney Films: Critical Essays on Race, Ethnicity, Gender, Sexuality and Disability (pp. 147–162). McFarland & Company, Incorporated Publishers. https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/lancaster/reader.action?docID=1109590&ppg=156

Scheimer, L. (Executive Producer). (1985-1987). She-ra: Princess of Power [TV Series]. Filmation Associates.

Sugar, R. (Executive Producer). (2013-2019). Steven Universe [TV Series]. Cartoon Network Studios.

Stevenson, N. D. (Executive Producer). (2018-2020). She-ra and the Princesses of Power [TV Series]. Dreamworks Animation.

Terrace, D. (Executive Producer). (2020-present). The Owl House [TV Series]. Disney Television Animation Company.

Vogt, O. (2022). “You Are an Experience!”: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Transgender and Gender Nonconforming Characters in Children’s Animated Series [Ph.D., North Dakota State University]. In ProQuest Dissertations and Theses (2721219508). ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global. https://www.proquest.com/dissertations-theses/you-are-experience-critical-discourse-analysis/docview/2721219508/se-2?accountid=11979

Ward, P. (Executive Producer). (2010- 2018). Adventure Time [TV Series]. Cartoon Network Studios.