Day: May 29, 2025

The New York-area PBS station WNET has scrubbed its archives of at least three educational TV episodes that discuss transgender identity and drag expression, The Intercept has learned, as Congress and the Trump administration target public broadcasters with attempts to strip their funding.

The station’s educational program “Let’s Learn” became an object of ire for the House Subcommittee on Delivering on Government Efficiency this spring over the 2021 episode “The Hips on the Drag Queen Go Swish,” in which the drag queen and children’s author Lil Miss Hot Mess sings about drag performance to the tune of “The Wheels on the Bus.” The subcommittee’s chair, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., opened the “Anti-American Airwaves” hearing in March by claiming that “PBS News is not just left-leaning, but it actively uses taxpayer funds to push some of the most radical, left positions like featuring a drag queen on the show” and calling Lil Miss Hot Mess a “child predator” and a “monster.”

Far from defending the programming, PBS CEO Paula Kerger distanced the broadcaster from the show. 

“The drag queen was actually not on any of our kids’ shows,” she said, claiming the episode made it to the PBS website by mistake and had already been removed. PBS followed up with a letter that said it had “removed all remaining references to the Episode” online on March 26, 2025.

But it wasn’t just PBS: The New York member station that produces “Let’s Learn” — which had stood by the episode under scrutiny in previous years — then quietly removed the episode across its platforms, according to an Intercept analysis. WNET also erased two other episodes about a children’s book featuring a a transgender protagonist, the analysis shows.

WNET did not respond to requests for comment. A PBS spokesperson reiterated Kerger’s claim that the episode was uploaded by mistake and said its removal was unrelated to the current political climate, but did not respond to questions about why over 250 other “Let’s Learn” episodes are still available for viewing on the official PBS website.

Public broadcasting was an object of U.S. conservative wrath for decades before the Trump administration. But as the current government has intensified its attacks, PBS has engaged in other recent examples of self-censorship. PBS removed a scene in which Art Spiegelman discusses an anti-Trump cartoon from a documentary about the artist, and it pulled a gaming documentary with transgender themes from planned syndication — then relisted it after The Atlantic asked about the deletion. But the erasure of WNET’s programming on drag and transgender culture shows the effects reaching a local level, where the station that produced the episodes elected to take them down — despite previously having defended them.

After premiering in the spring of 2021, “The Hips on the Drag Queen Go Swish” quickly garnered social media outrage and news coverage. Following the first round of backlash, WNET added a disclaimer on its YouTube channel and the “Let’s Learn” website, noting that the series is “not funded or distributed by PBS.” 

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But at the time, WNET defended the episode, telling Fox News that Let’s Learn “strives to incorporate themes that explore diversity and promote inclusivity, which are relevant to education and society. Drag is a performance art that can inspire creative thinking and the questioning of stereotypes.”

The outrage didn’t go away: Two years later, Oklahoma’s Republican Gov. Kevin Stitt explicitly mentioned the episode when he vetoed a bill to extend funding for his state’s PBS station. 

Despite all the attention, WNET continued to make the episode available — until this year. 

An Intercept analysis showed that following the DOGE hearing, WNET quietly removed all mentions of the episode across its platforms. 

The original episode page now displays a generic error message, reading “Oops! The page you are looking for was not found.” “The Hips on the Drag Queen Go Swish” no longer appears in a list of episode titles, and the video is listed as private on the WNET Education YouTube channel. WNET also instructed search engines not to list the episode’s old webpage. 

Aside from removing “The Hips on the Drag Queen Go Swish,” WNET has additionally removed at least two more “Let’s Learn” episodes, The Intercept has found. 

In the November 2020 episode “Max and the Talent Show,” author Kyle Lukoff reads his book of the same name. The story concerns a white transgender boy named Max who helps his Black male friend Steven prepare for a talent show and “find the perfect gown, shoes, cape, and tiara,” according to the School Library Journal. The journal calls the book “an excellent choice as an early reader with an LGBTQIA+ theme.” 

WNET removed that episode and another, called “Brain and Same Both Have Long ‘A.’” That hourlong episode also features “Max and the Talent Show,” which students read in order to “practice sounds with the long ‘a.’” 

Although it has been erased from PBS and WNET platforms, “The Hips on the Drag Queen Go Swish” can still be viewed via the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. 

The post PBS Station Wipes Drag and Trans Content After DOGE Outcry appeared first on The Intercept.