Elon Musk Leads Campaign To Force Netflix To Remove Shows With Trans Characters

Musk's posts have been seen by tens of millions of users, and many conservatives are now attempting to force Netflix into a removal of LGBTQ+ content.

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On Monday, Libs of TikTok—the far-right account notorious for stoking violent threats against LGBTQ+ people—erupted over a kids’ show featuring a transgender character. The target was Dead End: Paranormal Park, and the outrage quickly snowballed as conservative influencers seized on other examples of queer and trans representation in children’s and adult programming. Within days, Twitter’s owner, billionaire Elon Musk, was leading a boycott campaign against the streaming platform, using his perch to punish it for daring to feature LGBTQ+ characters—representation that reflects the families of millions of kids and, for many, offers a rare lifeline of visibility.

The outrage began when Libs of TikTok posted a clip from Dead End: Paranormal Park in which the character Barney Guttman comes out as transgender. “I’m trans, Norma, and everyone at school knows, and everyone at home knows… and being here, it’s like a whole new place. I can just be Barney, and I can choose if and when I tell people,” he says in the episode, describing the relief of finally living without everyone knowing his transgender identity and judging him for it.

Libs of TikTok blasted the moment, posting: “OMG. Dead End Paranormal Park, a show on Netflix, is pushing pro-transgender on CHILDREN.” She soon claimed to have canceled her account and began amplifying calls for Netflix to drop “satanic ideology” and “get rid of all trans shows.” Within a day, her outrage metastasized into a broader campaign against all LGBTQ+ content, with posts from conservative influencers targeting shows featuring Pride flags and demands that Netflix adopt a Don’t Say Gay-style policy across the platform.

Then right-wing billionaire Elon Musk took the campaign mainstream, using his platform to call for a boycott in posts viewed by tens of millions. Virtually every major anti-LGBTQ+ influencer followed his lead, sharing screenshots of canceled subscriptions and urging others to do the same. Musk’s role is hardly incidental: he has become one of the country’s most influential anti-trans campaigners, pouring tens of millions into Trump’s re-election effort, much of it routed to anti-transgender advertisements.

Netflix hasn’t moved to cancel LGBTQ+ programming for kids or adults, but the pressure is mounting. The company’s stock fell 4 to 5 percent Thursday compared to a week earlier, and demands from the right keep expanding. Musk himself boosted posts targeting shows well beyond children’s fare, singling out adult programming with transgender characters or themes, including Sense8, Tales of the City, The Umbrella Academy, Disclosure, and Will & Harper.

In recent years, due to pressure from the far-right, streaming platforms like Disney have curtailed LGBTQ+ programming. In 2022, Disney+ Junior Mode removed some shows with LGBTQ+ characters, such as the wildly popular Owl House. More recently, the platform removed references to a transgender character’s gender identity in the Pixar series Win or Lose.

The renewed targeting of LGBTQ+ animators and storylines is troubling. Given the animation industry’s recent downturn and difficulties in finding work, LGBTQ+ storylines may be even harder to place just by virtue of the economy around animation. With the added pressure of far-right influencers to remove shows for going against their worldview, such shows may have even more difficulty finding placement. This means that there could be less representation for LGBTQ+ families, who make up a significant portion of American life.

The campaign to erase trans and queer content from Netflix is not an isolated skirmish—it is part of a coordinated effort to enforce a far-right, Christian nationalist vision of American life. From Don’t Say Gay laws in Florida to book bans in Texas to the silencing of journalists and TV hosts, the playbook is the same: censor, intimidate, and erase. Now the pressure has turned to the largest streaming platform in the world, with conservatives openly demanding that it scrub trans and queer existence from the screen. Whether Netflix resists or capitulates will signal the future of queer representation in media in a time where such is already deeply in peril.