Mulan is a big deal for a lot of trans guys I know, which led to me wondering who the trans girl Disney characters are. You have to squint a bit, but Ariel fits, sure. Elsa, too, I suppose. But beyond that, I dunno!

(Trying to see your adult self in a Disney movie is always a fool's errand, but Ariel was a big deal to me as a kid, and it was almost certainly because of all the shit she had to go through to be herself.)

This all stems, of course, from how our culture values masculinity to the degree that a woman who pursues traditionally masculine pursuits is praised as a character type in kids movies, but we don't REALLY have the mirror image of this.

Canonically, Mulan is a cis straight woman, but you barely have to push to make her story explicitly queer. You have to work a lot harder with Ariel, Elsa, et al.

Disney let me write a trans princess movie. The kids will love it. So will the members of the Southern Baptist Convention.

This, apparently, is the thread where I live tweet Mulan, a movie I am just now seeing for the first time.

If I met Mulan at the support group meeting, I would say, "You look great, dude," and he would get embarrassed but in that way where you can tell how happy he is.

Goldie, a young girl everybody insists is a boy, runs into the woods, where she is rescued by three friendly bears and discovers the importance of found family, etc., etc., etc. At the end, she has to defend them from hunters.

Look, Disney, this writes itself.

Anyway, Eddie Murphy is here as a dragon, and there is a lot of _heavy sigh_ business.

Wasn't expecting this movie to have an evil bird, but I'm into it.

Oh, this is from the era when Disney gave every single character 15 sidekicks to provide more Happy Meal toys.

It's overdone, but Mulan does kinda capture the awkwardness of entering hyper-gendered spaces as a gender nonconforming person.

Donkey from Shrek is more of a rip-off of Mushu than I would have expected, even beyond both being voiced by Eddie Murphy. There are even similar elements to the character designs.

"I'll Make a Man Out of You" slaps. The only thing it lacks is the evil bird.

Oh, the FIRST THING YOU SEE when "I'll Make a Man Out of You" ends IS the evil bird, so the filmmakers knew what they had in this beloved breakout character, the evil bird.

Mulan: "Just because I look like a man doesn't mean I need to smell like one!"

Wait until you get on that T, bud.

Wait now there's a panda? How many toys was this movie supposed to sell?

This sequence with the brush painting style guys singing about the woman they'd like to marry as if they were on a tapestry is pretty neat.

This period of Disney films has more overt acknowledgement of death than basically any other era. Mulan, as a war story, kinda needed to be made them.

This avalanche sequence is technically stunning to this day.

It's canon that the only way to save China is through everybody practicing tiny acts of gender non-conformity to sneak into the palace.

This movie is making me feel way weirder about the fact that Disney makes Mulan a "princess." Aside from all of the potential queer readings of the character, she's not even royalty!!!!!

The overt femininity of the Disney Princesses branding is cool, but it's kinda not part of Mulan's whole deal, even textually. Very odd!

Ongoing reminder that I would love to write an Ozma audio fiction piece with a trans masculine person!! https://twitter.com/emilyvdw/status/1297998687033909248