The Importance of Identifying Yourself | The Journal of Montreal

Disney Channel recently featured a transgender character on the show the crow (Home of the Ravens)

It is said that children’s brains are like sponges. For decades, the wonderful world of Disney has been filling children’s sponges with the liquid of traditional representations.

With the arrival of a transgender character in one of its series, Disney Channel is giving young people who may not have had the opportunity before to find themselves in what the channel has to offer.

“Image makers” like Disney play a big role in young people’s lives. They have a duty to give them access to representations that speak to them.

For different fictions

When you’re young, the series and movies you watch are formative, they help you paint a portrait of the world you live in. These fictions, for example, allow children and teenagers to relate to and draw inspiration from different ways of life.

By including a transgender character in one of its series, Disney is moving forward with better representation of human diversity in its production. Because the world we live in doesn’t just consist of princes and princesses. It is full of people with different life experiences who deserve to be highlighted in the fiction that young people consume.

More transgender characters on our screens will allow some young people to understand that they have a place in our society, that they have the right to shine on their own. It allows young cisgender people, those whose gender identity corresponds to the gender they were assigned at birth, to understand their own realities.

Whether they’re transgender or cisgender, all kids should say: “There’s a guy who looks like me on the show! »