Incredibly well written and researched. As a cis woman, certain timbres of drag have left me feeling othered or the butt of the joke despite it pulling from aspects of my identity.
So much of what you describe feels quite divorced from the local drag scenes I've experienced. Those scenes have been dominated by women (trans and cis) and what I would call "gender play" more than gender mockery or "woman face." I absolutely agree that misogynistic and transmisogynistic drag (mainly performed by cis men) exists, and is probably much more prominent in scenes that I haven't experienced. But I think you do a real disservice to an art form that has for a long time been important to queer communities, and has enabled gender experimentation and expression, by lumping it all in with the type that you consider harmful.
“A minstrel show was never an act of hatred.” Minstrel shows were explicitly a tool of social control used to reinforce the idea of race theory. It was very much a cultural exportation of soft power from south to north. These shows were often commissioned by institutions and eventually by the US government itself. The term Jim Crow bears its origins from minstrelsy. Eventually minstrelsy left a lot of its more unsavory aspects behind but not before it had already become wildly popular. To compare Drag Queens, however problematic some may be, to minstrelsy is not only massively unfair to drag, but incredibly racially insensitive, you don’t need to invoke such things to prove a point on your substack… I don’t know anything about you, certainly not your ethnicity but I have trouble imagining a black trans woman making that comparison. Maybe you are black and genuinely feel this way, I would have to deeply disagree with you.
Also I have to say since when are you not allowed to not like drag… there is no issue with not liking drag? I don’t think the drag scene is something so holy or innocent it can’t be critiqued but what’s the point of this critique. How are drag queens in any way responsible for the structural issues we face. I don’t mean to be rude but it sounds like you are upset that drag queens are seen as more socially acceptable, easily palatable than trans women, which is fair but again. How and why would that be the fault of drag queens? I’m sure you’ve read whipping girl and you understand plenty of gay men have to deal with the adverse effects of effemimania. Even though it maybe not be comparable to full blown transmisogyny it’s incredibly taxing nonetheless, do these ppl not deserve some sort of outlet to subvert the identities that the world hates them for. This is obviously not even accounting for trans women who perform drag themselves or drag performers who only realized they were trans sometime into their career. You don’t have to perform some love for drag, just don’t go to shows, your economic critique is empty to me in this same way. Drag is performance it is theatre, I say this to actualize it certainly not to venerate it, the performers should be the ones who are paid end of story. Just like there are plenty of trans drag queens there’s also plenty of trans vaudeville and comedy acts that have nothing to do with drag. They want to perform and so they will, if that is not something you are interested in that is not a moral failing, it just means you’re not a performer, simple as. Now I would definitely posit trans performers make less than their cis peers on average but again, I would really really love if you could explain to me how that’s a problem with drag queens and not just a larger societal problem with transmisogyny.
Thank you. This is a far better articulation of what I was trying to explain to a group of trans friends recently. It turns out I wasn't alone in my opinions. I've talked to quite a few trans women since who had the same experience and felt the same way.
Where I live, the drag scene is a gay man's world. On the few occasions I find myself in those spaces, occasions that are all in June, how I and other trans women are treated is unnerving. The best I can describe it is we are seen as 'drag lite', and definitely not as women. It's more like an LGBD celebration.
Throw in my own complicated past with cross dressing, and drag just gives me the icks.
there's a contingent of people who view transitioning as life or death and that they MUST be the sex not assigned at birth and will actually kill themselves if they can't embody that.
there's a contingent of people who view transitioning/being trans as a fun, exploratory journey of expression and soul searching where you can find your identity at any place along the way.
these are not the same people. and being the former is unfathomably painful and hated by both the enemy and their "own"
Beautifully written, thank you, and very touching. Thank you for giving me the words to describe my previously unexamined discomfort, and for turning me onto Fanon.
There’s something flattening about “scene” here, as though a highly theatrical performance is a synecdoche for its whole social milieu, and as though spectatorship were the template for all social relations. Why would the type of attention paid to performing artists during their performance, and the type paid to other people (in the audience or elsewhere) be at all comparable or commensurable? Why would one expect—much less want—that the type of attention paid to one be transferred to the other? The very nature of performing art is its artificiality and distinction from real persons. One may as well resent the Indy 500 for not attending to one’s transportation needs.
they might not want to listen to trans woman's experiences with her womanhood but they sure love to say what is like to be one. we see this happen too many times with transwomanhood.
As a Korean trans man, this article perfectly aligns with the reasons why I dislike drag. While drag may have originated as a form of deviance and resistance, I believe that in this changed era, it has become an outdated culture that reproduces misogyny.
Just as white people's 'blackface' performances became obsolete and faded away, I believe drag should follow the same path, though it won't be easy.
Question re; the following line bc I saw it brought up elsewhere-
"A community that organizes its entire self-image around the conviction that the threat is always external has flatly refused to read its own death certificates, on which the call so often originates inside the house."
Looking at the HRC report that talks about trans people being more likely to be murdered by people they know, I didn't see any measure that distinguished between the murder being committed by community members vs non-community members. I was wondering whether you had figures specifically relating to that in the other sources, or whether it was just extrapolation? I really appreciated the essay,
I agree with a lot of what you said, but I'm not very sure about the conclusion. Drag is an incredibly distilled and exaggerated performance of gender roles; it uses comedy as commentary on how much gender is a social construct which has always been, to me, one of the core tenets of transgenderism. On top of that, though cis gay men have largely taken the spotlight in recent years, there's a spectrum of people who participate in drag culture, including drag kings who perform masculinity in a similar manner. I feel like what you're experiencing is more due to the fact that many cisgender people, especially men, don't often actually process, due to their own patriarchal upbringing, that they are inherently engaged in gender nonconformity through the mere fact that they are incapable of living a cisheteronormative life. I don't believe that it is drag itself wherein lies the problem, but rather an inability among cisgender people to fully engage with their own concept of gender even within the lens of performance. Maybe it's because I come from a place where our queer community is smaller and more tightknit due to the danger we all mutually face these days, but I haven't had to engage with any such person in my local drag scenes. Moreover, I think now more than ever we need to accept gender noncomformity in all its aspects, because only then can we move forward from TERF talking points like biological essentialism. I don't really see the point of blaming drag, a performance so tied to queer history, for the fault of cisgender men, queer though they may be, who have had their minds poisoned by patriarchy and are unable to let their own relative positions of power over the rest of us go, even when the boot they're licking is crushing its heel into their throat.
I remember one of my colleagues at the work Christmas party asking me why I have tits now, and enthusiastically telling me about how she came to accept her gay son in an effort to relate to me.
I understand it is because we occupy the same position in her mind and the image of trans women as drag queen is how most people prefigure trans women until they meet them.
Incredibly well written and researched. As a cis woman, certain timbres of drag have left me feeling othered or the butt of the joke despite it pulling from aspects of my identity.
Trust me diva as a trans woman I know exactly how that feels
So much of what you describe feels quite divorced from the local drag scenes I've experienced. Those scenes have been dominated by women (trans and cis) and what I would call "gender play" more than gender mockery or "woman face." I absolutely agree that misogynistic and transmisogynistic drag (mainly performed by cis men) exists, and is probably much more prominent in scenes that I haven't experienced. But I think you do a real disservice to an art form that has for a long time been important to queer communities, and has enabled gender experimentation and expression, by lumping it all in with the type that you consider harmful.
I said im not addressing them here
“A minstrel show was never an act of hatred.” Minstrel shows were explicitly a tool of social control used to reinforce the idea of race theory. It was very much a cultural exportation of soft power from south to north. These shows were often commissioned by institutions and eventually by the US government itself. The term Jim Crow bears its origins from minstrelsy. Eventually minstrelsy left a lot of its more unsavory aspects behind but not before it had already become wildly popular. To compare Drag Queens, however problematic some may be, to minstrelsy is not only massively unfair to drag, but incredibly racially insensitive, you don’t need to invoke such things to prove a point on your substack… I don’t know anything about you, certainly not your ethnicity but I have trouble imagining a black trans woman making that comparison. Maybe you are black and genuinely feel this way, I would have to deeply disagree with you.
Also I have to say since when are you not allowed to not like drag… there is no issue with not liking drag? I don’t think the drag scene is something so holy or innocent it can’t be critiqued but what’s the point of this critique. How are drag queens in any way responsible for the structural issues we face. I don’t mean to be rude but it sounds like you are upset that drag queens are seen as more socially acceptable, easily palatable than trans women, which is fair but again. How and why would that be the fault of drag queens? I’m sure you’ve read whipping girl and you understand plenty of gay men have to deal with the adverse effects of effemimania. Even though it maybe not be comparable to full blown transmisogyny it’s incredibly taxing nonetheless, do these ppl not deserve some sort of outlet to subvert the identities that the world hates them for. This is obviously not even accounting for trans women who perform drag themselves or drag performers who only realized they were trans sometime into their career. You don’t have to perform some love for drag, just don’t go to shows, your economic critique is empty to me in this same way. Drag is performance it is theatre, I say this to actualize it certainly not to venerate it, the performers should be the ones who are paid end of story. Just like there are plenty of trans drag queens there’s also plenty of trans vaudeville and comedy acts that have nothing to do with drag. They want to perform and so they will, if that is not something you are interested in that is not a moral failing, it just means you’re not a performer, simple as. Now I would definitely posit trans performers make less than their cis peers on average but again, I would really really love if you could explain to me how that’s a problem with drag queens and not just a larger societal problem with transmisogyny.
Also I do not believe you’re a terf but your argument clearly hinges on leveraging bio essentialism on a sort of nebulous “gay male performer”
please don’t delete this later tara
Thank you. This is a far better articulation of what I was trying to explain to a group of trans friends recently. It turns out I wasn't alone in my opinions. I've talked to quite a few trans women since who had the same experience and felt the same way.
Where I live, the drag scene is a gay man's world. On the few occasions I find myself in those spaces, occasions that are all in June, how I and other trans women are treated is unnerving. The best I can describe it is we are seen as 'drag lite', and definitely not as women. It's more like an LGBD celebration.
Throw in my own complicated past with cross dressing, and drag just gives me the icks.
there's a contingent of people who view transitioning as life or death and that they MUST be the sex not assigned at birth and will actually kill themselves if they can't embody that.
there's a contingent of people who view transitioning/being trans as a fun, exploratory journey of expression and soul searching where you can find your identity at any place along the way.
these are not the same people. and being the former is unfathomably painful and hated by both the enemy and their "own"
how could something be life or death and not also be about joy? can transitioning not be as necessary as air and a blessing?
Beautifully written, thank you, and very touching. Thank you for giving me the words to describe my previously unexamined discomfort, and for turning me onto Fanon.
It really is all so tiresome.
brilliant. thank you for putting this into words.
It's so strange to backdoor a gender essentialist argument through a gender performativity argument, to oppose gender in performance.
I know… that’s so weird
There’s something flattening about “scene” here, as though a highly theatrical performance is a synecdoche for its whole social milieu, and as though spectatorship were the template for all social relations. Why would the type of attention paid to performing artists during their performance, and the type paid to other people (in the audience or elsewhere) be at all comparable or commensurable? Why would one expect—much less want—that the type of attention paid to one be transferred to the other? The very nature of performing art is its artificiality and distinction from real persons. One may as well resent the Indy 500 for not attending to one’s transportation needs.
they might not want to listen to trans woman's experiences with her womanhood but they sure love to say what is like to be one. we see this happen too many times with transwomanhood.
As a Korean trans man, this article perfectly aligns with the reasons why I dislike drag. While drag may have originated as a form of deviance and resistance, I believe that in this changed era, it has become an outdated culture that reproduces misogyny.
Just as white people's 'blackface' performances became obsolete and faded away, I believe drag should follow the same path, though it won't be easy.
It's a good article; I enjoyed reading it.
Question re; the following line bc I saw it brought up elsewhere-
"A community that organizes its entire self-image around the conviction that the threat is always external has flatly refused to read its own death certificates, on which the call so often originates inside the house."
Looking at the HRC report that talks about trans people being more likely to be murdered by people they know, I didn't see any measure that distinguished between the murder being committed by community members vs non-community members. I was wondering whether you had figures specifically relating to that in the other sources, or whether it was just extrapolation? I really appreciated the essay,
I agree with a lot of what you said, but I'm not very sure about the conclusion. Drag is an incredibly distilled and exaggerated performance of gender roles; it uses comedy as commentary on how much gender is a social construct which has always been, to me, one of the core tenets of transgenderism. On top of that, though cis gay men have largely taken the spotlight in recent years, there's a spectrum of people who participate in drag culture, including drag kings who perform masculinity in a similar manner. I feel like what you're experiencing is more due to the fact that many cisgender people, especially men, don't often actually process, due to their own patriarchal upbringing, that they are inherently engaged in gender nonconformity through the mere fact that they are incapable of living a cisheteronormative life. I don't believe that it is drag itself wherein lies the problem, but rather an inability among cisgender people to fully engage with their own concept of gender even within the lens of performance. Maybe it's because I come from a place where our queer community is smaller and more tightknit due to the danger we all mutually face these days, but I haven't had to engage with any such person in my local drag scenes. Moreover, I think now more than ever we need to accept gender noncomformity in all its aspects, because only then can we move forward from TERF talking points like biological essentialism. I don't really see the point of blaming drag, a performance so tied to queer history, for the fault of cisgender men, queer though they may be, who have had their minds poisoned by patriarchy and are unable to let their own relative positions of power over the rest of us go, even when the boot they're licking is crushing its heel into their throat.
I remember one of my colleagues at the work Christmas party asking me why I have tits now, and enthusiastically telling me about how she came to accept her gay son in an effort to relate to me.
I understand it is because we occupy the same position in her mind and the image of trans women as drag queen is how most people prefigure trans women until they meet them.