Conservatives expressed outraged online after leaked video of an episode of “Baymax!”, the new kids’ show streaming on Disney+, features a transgender man who buys tampons at a supermarket.
Christopher Rufo, the conservative academic from the right-leaning think tank the Manhattan Institute, said he had “obtained leaked video” on Tuesday from an upcoming episode of “Baymax!”, which is a six-episode spinoff of the popular hit film “Big Hero 6.”
In the scene, the protagonist, the Marvel Comics superhero nurse robot Baymax, is in the aisle of a supermarket in the fictional town of San Fransokyo browsing women’s hygiene products.
Baymax, who serves as a “personal healthcare companion” for the residents of the city, is trying to help a 12-year-old girl named Sofia who in an earlier episode confided in her superhero friend that she was having her first period, the Houston Chronicle reported.
Sofia told Baymax about her menstrual cycle during an intimate conversation in an all-gender bathroom just before she was supposed to perform at a school talent show.
“I wasn’t prepared for this!” an anxious Sofia tell Baymax.
“And the dispenser’s empty! And I don’t even have a thing! A tampad. A pad-pon. A maxi-pad-pon with wings?”
Eager to help his friend, Baymax heads to the supermarket to go shopping for some period products.
He then asks a woman in the women’s hygiene aisle to recommend a product for a period.
The bewildered woman, who initially wears a shocked look on her face, tells Baymax: “Oh, um, well…these are the tampons I usually use.”
Baymax is then surrounded by several other shoppers who offer their own recommendations.
“I prefer pads. They’re more comfortable for me,” another woman said, handing Baymax a different product.
Then a man wearing a shirt that is emblazoned with the transgender flag offers up his own recommended product.
“I always get the ones with wings,” the transgender man tells Baymax.
Baymax buys several products. In the next scene, he is carrying shopping bags down the school hallway.
The plotline of another episode of “Baymax!” has the superhero bot helping a man named Mbita arrange a date with another man to whom he is attracted.
“Your pulse and heartbeat have quickened,” Baymax tells Mbita after Mbita works up the courage to ask Yukio out to dinner.
“Your pituitary gland is secreting hormones.”
Rufo accused Disney of promoting “the idea that men can have periods to children as young as two years old.”
“It’s all part of Disney’s plan to re-engineer the discourse around kids and sexuality,” Rufo wrote.
The Post has reached out to The Walt Disney Co. seeking comment.
Bryan Slaton, a Republican lawmaker from the Texas state legislature, tweeted: “This is so sick and weird. We have to protect kids from the sick adults who want to sexualize them and let them be kids.”
Others, however, disagreed that children were too young to be exposed to messages about reproductive matters.
“People are reading this and telling me I’m a bad parent because my 15 [year-old] boy isn’t comfortable discussing a woman’s cycle like it’d be a badge of honor for me if he did,” one parent tweeted.
“Sorry? Have you met 15 yros? Mine talks about computers, politics, food, & memes. And paintball. I love it.”
Another Twitter user posted a clip of the bathroom scene involving Baymax and Sofia, musing how she wished the lovable bot was her father.
Earlier this year, a Disney executive vowed that the company would produce more entertainment content that featured characters from underrepresented groups, such as racial minorities and the LGBTQ community.
Karey Burke, president of Disney’s General Entertainment Content, told employees back in March that Disney aims to have at least 50% of its regular characters depict those from “underrepresented groups.”
Disney has been thrust in the middle of the culture war surrounding the hot-button question of educating youngsters about gender and sexuality identity matters.
Earlier this year, the company ignited fierce backlash from conservatives when it publicly opposed a bill passed by Florida’s GOP-dominated state legislature banning the instruction of gender and sexual identity topics before the fourth grade.
The “Don’t Say Gay” law, as it was dubbed by critics, was signed by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who has been talked about as a potential 2024 candidate for the Republican nomination for president.
DeSantis and his GOP allies in Tallahassee retaliated by stripping Disney of its semi-autonomous status over its theme parks in and around Orlando.
In March, Rufo reported in City Journal that Latoya Raveneau, an executive producer at Disney, boasted about her team’s “not-at-all-secret gay agenda” which includes “adding queerness” to programming geared toward children.
Rufo cited another senior executive on the creative side, Allen Martsch, who pledged that Disney would institute a “tracker” system that would ensure there are enough “canonical trans characters, canonical asexual characters, [and] canonic bisexual characters.”
In recent weeks, it was reported that several countries, particularly those from the Muslim world, demanded Disney remove a same-sex kissing scene from the new spinoff film “Lightyear.” The company refused.
[Written in collaboration with other media outlets with information from the following sources]
