I haven't slept (shocker I know, the insomniac hasn't slept? madness) so yall are getting a ramble of my sort of queer sort of trans awakening (or the closest to it that little me had before understanding those terms) and surprise, it's not Mulan.
So. Little me. They were a weird kiddo. Parent's never discouraged or encouraged their outfit choices or names or pronouns (until I came out officially) but their school did. (hee hoo culty private school run by a religious group) Poor kid always got told "why can't you be more polite for a girl your age?" "why can't you be more girly?" "that's not appropriate for a girl" etc... by their peers and teachers and such. And while parents didn't discourage or encourage certain outfits, the occasional "you have all these cute dresses, don't you want to wear one?" didn't exactly help.
Little me never really got along well with the girls their age, had maybe one or two close friends who were girls, the rest were boys. Little me thought at the time it was because "girls were boring" and (insert other horrendously misogynistic ways of thinking about girls) when really, little me just related better to the guys for some reason. (Huh, wonder why.)
Anywho, little me's trans realization, or at least the closest they could get to one at the time, was NOT Mulan. I've heard others say it was theirs and while yeah I can see it, little me just went "ah, yeah that makes sense, girls can do that too, she's cool" and didn't really process it beyound that other than "I'm doing that too."
Nah Little Me's trans realization was Treasure Island. All iterations of it. Particularly Treasure Planet.
Little Me read the book, watched the early live action films, adored the Muppets version of the story. Little Me saw Jim Hawkins and immediately latched onto that character, whenever playing pretend or some iteration of "pirates", I was ALWAYS the cabin boy. Running around, doing chores around the ship, helping the cook, transporting gunpowder, listening in on plots of mutiny deciding when or if I should report it to the captain, engaging in sword fights against my pirate mentor and being torn between who to trust. The works.
But Treasure Planet.
Ya boi saw that iteration of Jim Hawkins and something clicked.
That feeling of being different and not understanding why the world didn't like you, wanting some aspect of freedom but not fully knowing why or even what that freedom was you were reaching for, feeling abandoned by the adults in your life who on one hand loved and cared for you but on the other just did not understand you, all while not even understanding yourself, wanting to escape from it all in some grand attempt at proving you were...something...someone...not fully able to grasp what that was but wanting it all the same, finding that sudden rush of joy at being able to express yourself and feel free to make your own path in life, ya know, Jim.
So yeah, Disney's Mulan did not "push some woke, trans agenda" onto my young little brain. But Treasure Planet and all iterations of Treasure Island sure did lol.