PBS Station Wipes Drag and Trans Content After DOGE Outcry
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........
© The Intercept
