Once again, Mike White's epic HBO series The White Lotus is sparking online discourse – but this time, it's for a scene that never made it to air.
In a recent interview with Harper's Bazaar, White Lotus star Carrie Coon, who plays middle-aged, mom-on-vacation Laurie, praised the show and its creator for its "transgressive" themes. She also revealed that, at one point, her character would discuss having a nonbinary child. But a scene exploring that was cut following the election.
"You originally found out that her daughter was actually nonbinary, maybe trans, and going by they/them," Coon told Harper's Bazaar. "You see Laurie struggling to explain it to her friends, struggling to use they/them pronouns, struggling with the language, which was all interesting."
However, Coon noted "the season was written before the election," and "considering the way the Trump administration has weaponized the cultural war against transgender people even more since then, when the time came to cut the episode down, Mike felt that the scene was so small and the topic so big that it wasn't the right way to engage in that conversation."
To some, this may seem like yet another example of trans erasure in the media at a time when that kind of erasure is happening more and more often. This year, Pixar cut a scene from its kid's show Win or Lose that would have shown a character to be trans. And earlier, Disney didn't air an episode of another cartoon, Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur, that centered around a trans child.
The stage has also been impacted. President Trump has taken over the Kennedy Center, declaring, "Just last year, the Kennedy Center featured Drag Shows specifically targeting our youth — THIS WILL STOP," and canceling a children's play called Finn about a young shark who "wants to let out his inner fish," reports Deadline.
It's clear that the right is trying to erase trans people from the public eye, and erasing us from media is one of the tools it is using. But would a 90-second scene of three privileged cis white women fighting about an offscreen trans child have been a good counter-argument to the attacks trans and nonbinary kids are facing these days?
As a trans woman who has been covering trans representation in the media for the last decade, I say no.
For far too long, trans stories have been centered around how our transitions affect the cis people around us, especially our families. When this happens, cis family members are given more space to talk about trans issues than the actual trans people themselves, pushing us out of the discussion of our own lives and turning us into talking points instead of human beings.
The media is also guilty of this cisgender-centered approach to covering trans issue. As a Media Matters for America and GLAAD study showed, The New York Times "failed to quote a trans person in 66 percent of its stories about anti-trans legislation."
One of the most common critiques of last year's controversial Oscar-winning Emilia Pérez (prior to the Twitter debacle) was that the film was a trans story told from a cis point of view that also failed to allow trans people speak for themselves. Referencing an essay by Casey Plett, critic Harron Walker said that the film is an example of "fiction that utilizes transness as a metaphor to help cis people learn something new about themselves," pointing to a scene where the title character's cis lawyer and doctor argue about her transition as another example of "two cis people debating the ethics of transness without any trans people present."
Instead of two cis people, The White Lotus could have given us a scene where three cis people debate the ethics of transness without any trans people present.
I would much rather have TV shows where trans people can speak for themselves, instead of having their family members argue about them when they're not there.
Carrie Coon's hard-drinking Laurie is not an ideal ambassador for trans kids either. The show depicts the toxic relationship between her and her longtime friends, as manifested through backstabbing gossip and arguments over, say, an affair with a Russian hotel worker. No one holds the moral high ground in that group.
If Laurie had stood up for her nonbinary kid, while Kate said something against them, and Jaclyn waffled between the two, it wouldn't have come across as a bold statement in support of trans kids. It would have been one of countless cacophonous conversations between privileged cis people talking about trans issues without any actual trans people in the room. It would have likely been yet another time when trans kids are dehumanized and marginalized — and made into nothing but hypothetical talking points.
Or worse, anti-trans activists may have seized upon the storyline for political gain. TERFs already took another scene from this season of The White Lotus that was very clearly not sending a political message and interpreted it as a rallying cry for their cause. In episode 5, viewers met a new character played by Sam Rockwell, who is a former hard-partying friend of Walton Goggins' Rick; he had had become a sober Buddhist after sleeping with Thai ladyboys and wondering if he, himself, wanted to be an Asian woman.
Instead of understanding the speech to be about the principles of Buddhism and the "never-ending carousel of lust and suffering," as Rockwell's character's described it, TERFs thought White included the scene to "expose" autogynephilia as the root cause of a trans woman's identity.
If Laurie had made a half-hearted, day-drunk attempt at defending her nonbinary child to her MAGA-leaning pal and celebrity friend, TERFs would have likely found ways to misconstrue that scene as well.
Maybe next season, White will include a trans character in his cast who will be able to speak for themselves. But until there is one, I'd rather we don't let the discourse around trans kids be centered around what their parents' rich friends think.
Mey Rude is a staff writer for Out.
