Carrie Coon, who portrays one-third of a toxic female friend trio known as the “Blonde Blob” on Season 3 of The White Lotus, said her character Laurie was initially written to have a nonbinary or trans child, but that the scene was eventually cut by creator Mike White following Donald Trump‘s re-election.

Speaking to Harper’s Bazaar, the Emmy nominee discussed Laurie’s difficult life circumstances, including the character’s looming divorce, unfulfilling career and strained relationship with her daughter. The HBO actress mentioned the original storyline, adding that the change was made to trim down the episode, with executive producer/writer White taking into consideration the hate being stoked against trans and nonbinary folks.

“There was a bit more context to her home life,” she began. “You originally found out that her daughter was actually nonbinary, maybe trans and going by they/them. You see Laurie struggling to explain it to her friends, struggling to use they/them pronouns, struggling with the language, which was all interesting. 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 Gilded Age star continued, “But the season was written before the election. 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.”

Indeed, among the many aspects of Trump’s administration is the relentless persecution of trans and nonbinary individuals, indicative by the removal of information about intersex and trans people from government agency sites, notices from the White House titled “Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism And Restoring Biological Truth” and actress Hunter Schafer’s experience receiving a new passport that now misgenders her.