“The Gatekeeper,” an episode of the animated series Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur prominently featuring a trans character, was originally scheduled to air on the Disney Channel in 2025 but then canceled. The episode, fully completed, was leaked in its entirety online (though it was later removed from Internet Archive and YouTube on ownership grounds), so I, along with many others, was still able to watch it. This is my review of “The Gatekeeper.” Spoilers ahead for an episode that may never officially see the light of day:
Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur is a Disney animated series that centers around Lunella Lafayette, a thirteen-year-old genius from the Lower East Side. After accidentally teleporting a giant red prehistoric dinosaur to the present, she realizes that together, with the dinosaur’s brute strength and her gadget-making and roller-skating abilities, they make the perfect superhero team. So, Lunella dons a supersuit and becomes Moon Girl, a superhero dedicated to fighting crime and protecting her neighborhood. In the episode “The Gatekeeper,” however, Lunella takes a backseat, and instead, the episode focuses on Brooklyn, one of Lunella’s classmates.
Brooklyn is the captain of the Squirrels, her school’s girls’ volleyball team. In this episode, the Squirrels are set to compete in the volleyball regional championships against the Lady Leopards, the defending champs. The Lady Leopards are coached by Coach Greer, a seemingly nice lady who supports the Squirrels, until she overhears that Brooklyn “used to play on the boys’ team,” has a full mental breakdown, and, claiming Brooklyn makes the game “not fair,” proceeds to make it her mission to get Brooklyn disqualified from the game. When the official rules say that Brooklyn can play, Coach Greer resorts to using a mysterious, high-tech key to lock the Squirrels (Lunella, the team’s watergirl, included) in the locker room, which has transformed into a futuristic escape room designed to keep Brooklyn and the Squirrels trapped inside until they follow Coach Greer’s arbitrary rules.
When I first watched “The Gatekeeper,” I thought the episode was going to remain ambiguous and vague as to the true issue it was discussing to avoid any potential backlash. But I soon realized that wasn’t the case.
Brooklyn is trans, and the episode doesn’t skate around that. After a well scored/animated montage, the Squirrels manage to find all 20 of the keys Greer’s rules stated they needed to escape. But when the escape room still doesn’t let them out, Brooklyn realizes that the game was rigged from the beginning. As she puts it, “I’m trans; my very existence breaks Greer’s rules.” As a trans girl, Brooklyn doesn’t fit into Coach Greer’s preconceived beliefs on how “the game,” which represents life, should be played, and because of that, Greer creates obstacles specifically designed to shut Brooklyn out. The whole escape room is designed to make the Squirrels follow Coach Greer’s rules, rather than what’s actually fair. So, as long as Brooklyn remained on the team, the Squirrels would remain trapped in the escape room.
Just as Brooklyn is about to quit to save her team, Lunella comes to a realization of her own: “We’ve been trying to play by the rules, but when the game is rigged, that doesn’t work!” The only way the Squirrels can escape is if they don’t play Coach Greer’s game. Instead, they fight back, break through the escape room, and destroy both the key to and the system controlling the repressive trap locking them inside. Once they’re out, Coach Greer is caught and thrown out of the game, and the episode ends with Brooklyn being able to play alongside her team with nothing holding her back.
This episode serves as an excellent representation of a common experience far too many trans people have to go through: being forced to jump through hoops to justify themselves and their existence to hateful people, because they don’t want to be excluded from something they care about. But in the end, despite trans people’s best efforts, those bigots will never accept them as who they are.
In this episode, Brooklyn goes through that very experience and asks herself, “How many doors do I need to break down before they stop locking me out?” Heartbreakingly, she’s gone through this before, and dealt with people exactly like Coach Greer before too. Brooklyn is a girl, a fact that is constantly reiterated throughout the episode, and she shouldn’t be gatekept from playing a sport she loves by an adult for no reason other than that she is trans. She is confident in her identity and breaks the cycle of appeasement by refusing to play Coach Greer’s game, instead fighting her way past Coach Greer to get to where she wants to be. At the end of the episode, Coach Greer doesn’t acknowledge she was wrong and refuses to accept Brooklyn’s legitimacy as a member of a girls’ volleyball team. But it doesn’t matter to Brooklyn, because she’s no longer fighting for her approval, and she’ll never have to again.
“The Gatekeeper” has a very important message, and it’s told very well. So why was it pulled from the air? Nothing has been confirmed officially by Disney, although a (later deleted) post by Derrick Malik Johnson, a storyboard artist for the episode, implies that the recent election results might have something to do with it. Others speculated that it may be due to the episode centering around trans participation in sports, an (overly) controversial issue in the United States currently, or just the many prominent LGBTQ-supportive visuals, such as a “Trans is Beautiful” sticker on Brooklyn’s water bottle, and the trans and rainbow flag colors appearing in multiple backgrounds that would make this episode hard to censor overseas. Whatever the reasoning may be, it’s clear that the people involved in making this episode genuinely cared about depicting trans representation and trans issues well. With “The Gatekeeper,” they succeeded, and created an amazing episode that Disney should stand by.
There are still ways to find this episode online just by searching, so please watch it!