A scene in which Carrie Coon’s White Lotus character talks about her nonbinary child was cut from the hit HBO series.

In a recent interview with Harper’s Bazaar, Coon, who plays Laurie Duffy, one of a trio of gal pals on vacation at the titular resort in the HBO show’s current third season, spoke about series creator Mike White’s decision to remove the scene following Donald Trump’s reelection in November 2024.

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“There was a bit more context to her home life,” Coon said of her character. “You originally found out that her daughter was actually nonbinary, maybe trans and going by they/them [pronouns]. You see Laurie struggling to explain it to her friends, struggling to use they/them pronouns, struggling with the language, which was all interesting.”

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In the version of the season premiere that made it to air on February 16, Coon’s character and her two friends, Kate (Leslie Bibb) and Jaclyn (Michelle Monaghan), do discuss Laurie’s troubled daughter, who does not appear in the show.

“But the season was written before the election,” Coon explained. “And considering the way the Trump administration has weaponized the cultural war against transgender people even more since then, when the time came to cut the episode down, Mike felt that the scene was so small and the topic so big that it wasn’t the right way to engage in that conversation.”

Coon, of course, was referring to the administration’s ongoing attempts to dismantle rights and protections for transgender Americans. In a series of executive orders since taking office on January 20, Trump has declared that the U.S. government will only recognize people’s biological sex, threatened to withhold federal funding from hospitals and clinics that provide gender-affirming care to transgender young people and from schools that allow trans students to participate in women’s and girls’ sports, reinstated a ban on out trans people serving in the military, and declared that incarcerated transgender women must be held in men’s prisons.

Filming for The White Lotus’s Thailand-set third season wrapped in August 2024, well before Trump’s victory in November. But a scene in the March 2 episode does glancingly refer to the election. Over dinner, Laurie, Jaclyn, and Kate’s conversation wanders into politics, and Coon’s and Monaghan’s characters are shocked to discover that Bibb may have voted for Trump.

Coon told Harper’s Bazaar that had the detail about her character’s child being nonbinary not been cut, it would have made the later scene even more resonant.

“It was only a short scene, but for me, it did make the question [in episode 3] of whether Kate voted for Trump so much more provocative and personally offensive to Laurie, considering who her child is in the world,” the actress said.

Notably, White, who is bisexual, did include two scenes in the current season in which characters discuss kathoey using the term’s common English translation, “ladyboys.” However, in Thailand, kathoey are generally considered to be a third sex distinct from transgender women.

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