Just a quick post to document something that happened at Walt Disney World recently. While the Disney corporation was grabbing headlines with huge announcements at its annual D23 event in California (sort of like ComicCon, but for exclusively Disney intellectual property), some other changes were quietly being made at Magic Kingdom in Florida.
Some background: I work as a visual merchandiser, and one of my duties is maintaining some of the window displays on Main Street USA. Everything at Disney is themed, and the theme for Main Street (located at the entrance; your welcome into the park) is turn-of-the-century (1900, that is) Americana. Our big box store is called The Emporium, and two of the windows looked like this:
‘Fashionable Apparel For Ladies’ and ‘Distinctive Attire For Gents’, read the windows. This script has been on the windows for (I’m guessing) decades. Typically, as you can see, we displayed ladies’ headbands in the former and men’s baseball caps in the latter. Fine.
In April, we were asked to ‘mix up’ the gendered headwear, since people should be able to wear whatever they like. Cool. Whatever. So I changed the displays accordingly:
A couple of baseball caps added to the Ladies’ window, and a fairy princess headband in the Mens’ window. Great. Faaaaabulous. Can we all go on with our lives now?
No.
Last week, as ‘part of Diversity & Inclusion’, someone was sent over to scrape the words ‘Ladies’ and ‘Gents’ from the windows. Now they look like this:
Some questions you might be asking:
What?
Why??
HUH???
What does this have to do with Diversity & Inclusion?
Were there complaints? Did the words ‘Ladies’ and “Gents’ offend someone? If so, how?
Why is the FACT of biological sex being erased in our language, everywhere we look?
Who does it hurt if we remove sex-based words from our language?
How did a very small minority of people obtain so much power so quickly that this kind of bullshit is happening?
As usual with Disney, it’s the hypocrisy that is most galling.
The Disney Princess franchise is currently #7 on the list of highest-grossing media franchises in the world. Isn’t ‘princess’ a gendered word?
Disney is more than happy to give early park admission to an Instagram influencer for a gender reveal post, so for the sake of ‘Likes’ they will acknowledge that babies are born male or female.
Here’s a new mug that Disney has started selling inside the Emporium. Isn’t Disney afraid that this kind of gendered language is going to terrorize their guests?!?
There is a very popular ‘Keys To The Kingdom’ tour through the tunnels under the Magic Kingdom, which I pass by frequently while I’m working. I have heard on numerous occasions the tour guides boast that currently, for the first time ever, the vice presidents of all four Florida Disney parks are women. So clearly, Disney knows what a woman is.
Disney recognizes the difference in sexes when it makes them money or shows their ‘progressiveness’, but kowtows to the social justice warrior mob when it comes to ‘gender identity’, to earn Woke Points.
I am a life-long Disney Parks fan. We used to go every year. I've not returned since February of 2020. The wokeness and politicization has become absolutely ridiculous.
Appreciate your powerful and needed contributions to this debate! Hopefully you remain employed before they come for you. I suspect you know they eventually will