Do we like Sabrina Carpenter?
Our score: 8 out of 10. Years of visible support for queer and trans people, a charity fund and a public stand against an ICE video, with one Coachella stumble she apologised for.
Sabrina Carpenter was born in Pennsylvania in 1999, the youngest of four sisters. She was dancing at two, posting YouTube covers around ten and living in Los Angeles by about thirteen, chasing acting. Disney's Hollywood Records signed her at 12, and she landed the lead in Disney Channel's Girl Meets World in 2014.
The Disney albums didn't set the charts alight, so in January 2021 she moved to Island Records and rebuilt herself as a cheeky, wink-and-a-smirk pop star. It worked: Short n' Sweet and Man's Best Friend both debuted at number one on the Billboard 200, and she has two Grammys for Espresso and Short n' Sweet. Not bad for a former Disney kid.
The messy bit is Coachella. During her April headline set a fan let out a zaghrouta, the celebratory cheer used by many Arabic-speaking women, and clips show her asking “Is that what you're doing?” She reportedly called it weird and compared it to yodelling. Critics on X called it insensitive, and she apologised the next day, saying it was confusion and sarcasm and she “could have handled it better.”
On the harm check she comes out well. At the 2025 VMAs she performed Tears with drag performers while dancers held signs reading “Protect trans rights.” Her fund added the Transgender Law Center as a beneficiary that October, and she told Perfect magazine she doesn't think pop would exist without the queer community. We found nothing from her on vaccines or climate, and no harmful words of her own.
Her public fight with the White House was in December 2025. The administration posted a clip of ICE arrests set to her song Juno, and she called the video “evil and disgusting” and told them not to use her music for their agenda. A White House spokesperson said they wouldn't apologise for deportations, and the post was later deleted without explanation. Where you land depends on how you read the immigration policy, but she objected to her own work being used that way.
The good stuff is concrete. The Sabrina Carpenter Fund, run with the nonprofit Plus1, raised more than $1 million in under a year for groups including Rainbow Railroad, Papyrus and the Jed Foundation. A portion of Short n' Sweet tour ticket sales also goes to it, which is more than a Pride-month post.