Earlier today, Ron DeSantis, while stumping for Nevada Senate candidate Adam Laxalt in what appears to be a disused Bennigan’s, again made false (and increasingly bizarre) claims about Disney “injecting sexuality into the programming for these very young kids.” “When we were young, you could watch cartoons without having to worry. Now parents have to sit there about, What are they trying to inject in? What kind of ideology are they trying to pursue? And that is wrong,” DeSantis bellowed. This, of course, led Twitter to swiftly remind the Florida governor and champion of the harmful “Don’t Say Gay” bill that Bugs Bunny, a character created in the late 1930s and beloved by children around the world, is canonically trans.
As people like Zak Wood and others have pointed out on Twitter (leading “Bugs Bunny” to trend), Bugs was based, in part, on the Norse god of mischief and they are typically nonbinary or trans. Bugs has a history of dressing in drag/blurring the lines of sexuality. (RuPaul once said that Bugs was his first introduction to drag.) And this actually came to be in the 1980s, when trans and gay rights activists adopted the character as a symbol for their culture.
When activists told Chuck Jones, one of the animators behind the character (and arguably one of the most important animators in the 20th century), he canonically accepted that Bugs was, indeed, trans or nonbinary. (At the time he didn’t have the right terminology, often referring to the character as “transexual,” an outdated and potentially harmful term today. But he was trying!)
Jones wrote about Bugs’ sexuality in his book “Chuck Amok: The Life and Times of an Animated Cartoonist,” which was published back in 1990 and film scholars have been discussing the “gender play” of Bugs ever since. If DeSantis is worried about children being indoctrinated by progressive ideas in their animated programming, he’s very, very late (see below).
Twitter users were fast point out that Bugs had a history of wearing dressing, slapping on some lipstick and batting his eyes. Here are just a handful of those speaking out:
