One day, Trump will leave office. T he right-wing minds that control his presidency will have less power, and we’ll start dismantling the anti-trans scaffolding that his administration has built around society. When that day comes, some parts of society will heal faster than others, but the damage that Trump and those behind him have done to trans representation in media will fester for a long time, and it will keep harming trans acceptance in the world.
Much has been done through executive orders, federal policy, and threats to federal funding. Those will likely evaporate not overnight, but over the course of a couple of weeks, even if it takes a while for organizations to follow the winds of change. The anti-trans laws at the state level will be difficult to overcome, but if Democrats can build a strong pro-trans majority in the future, we could see national protections put in place that would overrule some of those state laws.
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While that change will come, the damage that Trump has done to the hearts and minds of our communities will take longer to heal. A major part of doing that will be rebuilding the damage done to representation in media, from blockbuster films to gender-inclusive children’s books.
After a very dark period for trans representation in media, we have seen a great sea change over the last 30 years. When it comes to mainstream content, we only have to go back to the late ’90s to find Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, where the whole plot hinges on a horrific man-in-a-dress “joke” (one example of oh, so many). By the 2010s, The Danish Girl was at least trying to tell a genuine trans story (despite all the problems with that movie), compared to recent years, where trans and non-binary characters crop up incidentally in everything from The OA to John Wick to even Owl House.
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And that representation isn’t a luxury that’s just nice to have; it’s essential to our thriving in society. The media holds up a mirror to society, and it can be very telling who is missing from that reflection. Trans representation helps trans kids to know they’re not alone and comforts trans people of all ages who can see people like them living all sorts of stories.
Crucially, it’s also a space for those unaware or misguided about who trans people are to learn about us in a way that would normally require them to meet a trans person and accept them from the beginning, or to be taught by trans people doing hard emotional labor. This last boon of representation is especially important in the wake of so many years of Trump and the Heritage Foundation attacking us and providing false narratives of the trans experience in full force.
But we’re seeing all the work we did to build positive trans and non-binary representation undone, and Trump still isn’t halfway done with his second term. The representation gap created by this political cynicism will leave a scar across culture that won’t heal and can only be patched over.
Since the 2024 election, in the media world we’ve seen studios like Disney reportedly scrap a trans character from their TV show Win or Lose to replace them with a Christian. GLAAD’s 2026 Where We Are in Film study found that there were zero trans characters in any of the 225 major studio films that were released last year. Lilly Wachowski just reported that she’s struggling to get funding for her next movie because it has a heavily trans cast.
Fewer trans stories are making it to our screens, which means fewer trans roles for actors to be cast in. And when it comes to books, those that make it onto shelves face the ongoing attempts at censorship in libraries and school boards across the country.
That’s part of the hearts-and-minds battle we’re losing right now. The understanding that positive trans representation can breed is being stifled by misunderstandings proliferated by the right’s false narrative. That’s going to be bad for us in the long term.
Some of those lessons might come back naturally. But others are going to take a while to re-teach. We’ll have to work to create art that includes us on the big stage once again, and push studios and executives to do the right thing. For now, they’re following the money, and they fear that the dollar won’t come out for trans narratives. Hopefully the change won’t take another 30 years, but it’s certainly one we won’t see happen overnight.
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