'White Lotus' cut storyline on potential 'trans kid' after Trump election win

Creator of hit television series White Lotus, Mike White, cut a trans story line after President Donald Trump won the 2024 presidential election, actress Carrie Coon told Harpers Bazaar. The scene, Coon said, was cut in post-production. 

The scene revealed backstory to Coon's character, in which she spoke about her child identifying as non-binary. In the interview, Coons was asked "We hear a little about Laurie's life back in New York—that she's struggling with her divorce, her career, her daughter Ellie. Was it a deliberate choice to only reveal so much?"

"There was a bit more context to her home life," Coon said of her character Laurie. "You originally found out that her daughter was actually non-binary, maybe trans, and going by they/them. You see Laurie struggling to explain it to her friends, struggling to use they/them pronouns, struggling with the language, which was all interesting. It was only a short scene, but for me, it did make the question [in episode 3] of whether Kate voted for Trump so much more provocative and personally offensive to Laurie, considering who her child is in the world.

"But the season was written before the election," Coon continued. "And considering the way the Trump administration has weaponized the cultural war against transgender people even more since then, when the time came to cut the episode down, Mike felt that the scene was so small and the topic so big that it wasn’t the right way to engage in that conversation."

The scene in question was one in which Laurie, a corporate lawyer from New York who has gone through a recent divorce, meets up with old friends in Thailand and discusses that her political leanings are independent while her ex had voted for Trump. Her friends are none too keen on this. 

Show Creator White has spoken about his father, an evangelist who came out as gay after his children left for college. In an appearance on Andrew Sullivan's podcast, he spoke about how identity politics is not a good thing for art and artistic creation as well as his love of reality television, on which he has competed.

Since taking office, Trump has made good on his campaign promises to reduce the impact of trans and gender ideology in federal government, law and policies. He has taken a firm stand on Title IX being about protecting women's sports and not about allowing men to compete in women's competitions. His administration has attempted to ban trans military members from service and to prevent male criminals from serving time in women's prisons.

Trump has also reversed former President Joe Biden's executive orders requiring every federal agency to be more "inclusive" of trans. This executive order, signed by Biden on his first day in office in 2021, resulted in the Department of Agriculture withholding school lunch aid from districts that did not allow boys to use girls' bathrooms. It also resulted in universities seeing their federal funding threatened if they did not allow trans-identified males to use women's locker room facilities.