When Nightshade meets new characters throughout the show, the transformer often includes the preferred pronouns in introductions. At one point, when the long-running character Optimus Prime pauses before referring to Nightshade using a pronoun, another character steps in to tell him, “Nightshade’s pronouns are they/them,” to which Nightshade replies: “He or she just doesn’t fit who I am.”
Transformers are machines that do not have any biological anatomy but have always been gendered as either male or female throughout the franchise’s nearly 40-year-long history.
Mary Rice Hasson, the director of the Person and Identity Project at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, told CNA that parents need to shield their children from this type of material.
“Parents need to face the sad truth that there are no safe, secular cartoons for kids anymore,” Hasson said. “Hollywood has a radical, damaging agenda, and parents need to shield their children from it.”
Hasson added that these themes deceive children about the reality of gender.
“Instead of entertaining children, these cartoons have a very adult and deeply deceptive message: The cartoon presents a ‘nonbinary’ character, who explains this identity as ‘people who aren’t male or female’ — a nonsensical, flat-earth type of idea,” Hasson said. “Every person is either male or female. To suggest otherwise is to lie to children about a fundamental truth.”
