Los Angeles Netflix employees protest mishandling of transphobic comedy special, 2021

On 5 October 2021, the comedian Dave Chappelle, who had been long known for the reactionary and transphobic beliefs he openly presented in his comedy, released his most incendiary and openly queerphobic comedy special yet, The Closer, on the streaming service Netflix. Trans activists, including groups like the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, an American non-governmental media monitoring organization, and the National Black Justice Coalition, a civil rights organization that primarily serves Black queer people, criticized the set. Furthermore, a number of Netflix employees criticized Chappelle’s special for the same reasons of transphobic language. 

Netflix, for its part, was renowned among the tech industry for its culture of feedback, fostering, encouraging, and using employees’ (particularly software engineers’) opinions positively, a culture that made its jobs highly desirable.

On 6 October, Terra Field, a software engineer at Netflix, published a twitter thread identifying herself as a Netflix employee and objecting to Chappelle’s language in The Closer, describing him as attacking “the trans community, and the very validity of transness.” She emphasized that trans people’s objections against transphobic language are not a matter of being offended; the trans community objects to such language because it amplifies the threat of violence towards the community. “What we object to is the harm that content like this does to the trans community (especially trans people of color),” wrote Field, and she ended the thread with a long list of trans people killed in 2021 who were “not offended.”

Field and two other employees were later suspended by Netflix for trying to attend a meeting to which they were not invited, though Netflix ultimately reversed these suspensions by 12 October. In a statement to The Verge, a technology news website, a Netflix spokesperson denied that Field was suspended for any reason related to her tweets.

Netflix’s co-CEO Ted Sarandos inflamed the situation even further when he sent an internal email on 8 October saying the company would not take down Chappelle’s special and that he did not believe it crossed the line of being “designed to incite hate or violence” where there would be a need to take the series of of the streaming platform. At this point, there was significant controversy within Netflix. An employee wrote in the company’s open Q&A document, stating that Netflix repeatedly platformed content harmful to the trans community and asking how it planned to repair the harm it had done to itself and its workers. One employee reportedly resigned in protest.

Sarandos posted another company memo on 11 October, acknowledging the concern over Netflix titles causing or exacerbating real-world harm to marginalized communities, but he maintained his position that The Closer was harmless.

By 12 October, Netflix’s trans and nonbinary employee resource group, Trans*, had planned a company-wide walkout for 20 October, as Zoë Schiffer announced in an article for the Verge. The walkout plan included a document of demands of Netflix:

• Creating a new fund for transgender and nonbinary talent
• Increasing investment in trans and nonbinary content comparable to the company’s total investment in transphobic content
• Investing in multiple trans creators
• Reforming vetting processes for potentially sensitive content, especially by increasing involvement of employee resource groups and/or involving parties from the subject community
• Hiring trans and nonbinary into executive positions
• Allowing employees to remove themselves from promotional content
• Removing references to transphobic titles or talent in the workspace
• Acknowledging Netflix’s responsibility for the harm dealt by transphobic content
• Adding disclaimers that flag hate speech to relevant content
• Increasing promotion of trans-affirming content to viewers
• Suggesting trans-affirming content along or after transphobic content

The social media side of the controversy continued when, on 13 October, the Twitter (now X) account @Most, which is run by Netflix staff and promotes its queer content, posted a short thread apologizing for its period of non-communication. In the thread, the staff running the account expressed the difficulty of the previous few weeks for them and made it clear that they were reading the comments on their posts to better advocate for queer representation. They ended the thread by tweeting “ok you can go back to yelling at us now”.

Tensions within Netflix heightened on 15 October, when the corporation fired B. Pagels-Minor, a Black and nonbinary employee, alleging that they had leaked confidential information about Netflix’s spending that eventually appeared in the business news publication Bloomberg. Specifically, the leak included information about how much Netflix paid for The Closer and its reach metrics among viewers. A spokesperson rationalized the firing by stating that Netflix places a high amount of importance on keeping data internal so as to maintain a culture of transparency within the company. Pagels-Minor denied leaking the data and alleged that Netflix fired them without letting them make their case. It is worth noting that they were one of the co-leaders of Trans* and thus one of the main organizers of the planned walkout. 

On the same day, Hannah Gasby, an Australian comedian, who identifies as a lesbian and is another prominent comedian on Netflix, publicly attacked Sarandos and Chappele on social media. Additionally, Netflix employees asked a number of pointed questions about the company’s response to criticism of The Closer directed at Sarandos during a virtual company meeting. The questions were persistent and emotional. Sarandos still maintained his position that the comedy special contained no hate speech.

As Trans* prepared for the walkout, activist Ashlee Marie Preston organized a rally to kick-off the employees’ action. Posting about the rally on Instagram on 18 October, she stated that this “Stand Up In Solidarity” rally would present Sarandos with a list of demands, and its purpose was to seize the current moment to “shift the social ecology” around ethical entertainment. Many media stars, including Angelica Ross, Jonathan Van Ness, Jameela Jamil, Eureka O’Hara, and Colton Haynes joined Preston in rallying and popularizing support for the employees.

On 20 October, dozens of Netflix employees began their work stoppage, walking out or ceasing work virtually for those working from home. They were met by hundreds of ralliers demonstrating in solidarity with them and the trans community at large, with Preston and others echoing the demands and rebukes of the campaign.

Ultimately, however, despite the walkout, rally, and widespread backlash against the company online, the only victory won by Trans* and Netflix employees was an agreement by the company’s comedy team that they would alert potentially offended parties before releasing controversial specials. 

Otherwise, none of the campaign’s goals were met, and in the aftermath Netflix banned writers, showrunners, and other creatives from soliciting feedback from the company’s employee resource groups, weakening the influence of Trans*. As an anonymous staffer commented: “Today, as a manager, we can’t speak up in content or studio teams, and what Ted [Sarandos] says goes.”...“[O]ur voices are not heard.”