Okay, so as a trans gay guy, I'm definitely not trying to tell you what to believe, that's not my place. This is just a question. But what is the problem with drag queens? I mean, I've done years of queer studies, and some of the most important players in various the queer rights movements have been queens. So why all the hostility toward them and RPDR now? I mean, I know some queens on there are problematic, and Rupaul certainly has his faults, but why the dislike in general?
It’s more complicated than I feel like really getting into right now, but the short answer is that drag itself, as a historical outlet for people exploring their relationship with gender, is fine and I have nothing against it – we owe a lot to it and it has been critical in making all of our lives possible in the 21st century.
But modern drag culture is a different thing entirely.
In its current state, drag is largely a glamorized, commodified, capitalist exploitation by cis gay men of performing an extremely exaggerated caricature of femininity for entertainment.
There are still people who get into it for the same reasons as the people at its historical roots – Carmen Carerra is a prime example of an out trans woman who started out as a drag queen on RPDR. But as a whole, the culture surrounding it is garbage. Most of the people in it are cis gay men who think because they’re gay that they have a free license to fetishize, capitalize, and stereotype femininity for personal gain because they don’t feel like they can be fairly called “misogynist” for it.
Meanwhile, while in character, they steal a lot of trans language – slurs proudly and incessantly included – while simultaneously exaggerating their personas and pretending that they have any meaningful affiliation with real trans women. Yet out of character, they are often masculine and want to distance themselves from the trans community. Drag culture both pretends to celebrate the trans umbrella and occupy space within it, and constantly starts fights with real trans people over their use of slurs, people like Ru Paul say horrifically problematic shit like “the difference between a drag queen and a trans woman is $25,000 and a good surgeon” and they absolutely flaunt and embrace the single most deadly misconception about trans women – that we are nothing more than men in dresses.
The public embrace of drag queens, even among trans allies, makes modern drag culture a bigger threat to us than TERFs. (Some of them are literally friends with prominent TERF activists, including the absolute devil who is a fake goth and shall not be named.) It actively promotes the number one idea that gets us persecuted, legislated, and killed. And it does so with the support of the queer community at large – even among people who otherwise consider themselves trans allies.
Conchita Wurst is not Eurovision’s 2014 trans superhero. Conchita Wurst is a drag character invented by a cis gay man (Thomas Neuwirth) who rejects any association with trans people out of character, who invented the false persona as literally a man (with full beard) in a dress, and named that character “Pussy Sausage”. That 2014 Eurovision success was socially engineered as rallying anti-LGBT support behind a drag character:
Conservative Russian politician Vitaly Milonov urged Russia’s Eurovision selection committee to boycott the competition as a result of Wurst’s inclusion, describing her performance as “blatant propaganda of homosexuality and spiritual decay” and referring to her as the “pervert from Austria”.[20]Armenia’s entry for the contest, Aram Mp3, stated that Neuwirth’s lifestyle was “not natural” and that he should decide whether he was a man or woman. Neuwirth hit back: “I told him I don’t want to be a woman. I am just a working queen and a very lazy boy at home.” Aram subsequently apologised, stating that his prior comments had been intended as a joke.[4]
Reacting to these sentiments, the New Statesman commented that “a vote for Wurst is another vote against Russian homophobia and transphobia, and a win would send out a strong message of defiance eastwards”,[10] while the International Business Times called on readers to vote for Wurst to upset homophobes.[21] Highlighting statements such as these as evidence, Spiked declared that many Western European commentators and politicos had adopted Wurst as “a symbol of everything that makes Western Europe superior to the East” and that she had thus become part of a culture war against both Russia and “the so-called bigots and backward types” in their own nations.
Consider how different this really is from someone like Miley Cyrus exploiting an aesthetic she stole from black women, promoting it as some kind of “ghetto” or “thug” performance, capitalizing it while it was exploitable for a profit, then dropping it when it wasn’t a benefit to her and assuming none of the socioeconomic or cultural dangers of being tied to those things intrinsically. Conchita Wurst is an example of a cis gay man adopting a fake trans identity and capitalizing it for personal gain. When told his lifestyle wasn’t natural, his response was that he was just a man at home. That’s hardly a defense for the trans community – instead of opposing the idea that we are some horrific disgrace to humanity, he saved his own face by distancing himself from us. I.E. ‘You are unnatural spiritual decay’ ‘No I’m not one of them’. Drag queens largely aren’t interested in defending us; they want to perform femininity and then take it off at the end of the day because actually being associated with trans women is a huge inconvenience for them.
For drag queens, womanhood is an exploitable, caricaturized performance.
For trans women, womanhood is an identity.
Drag culture is essentially gender appropriation. It’s fake, it’s performative, it is a glamorized capitalist exploitation of stereotypes for the benefit of people who drop all association with what they’ve coopted as soon as it could be personally inconvenient for their lives outside of the performance, and it actively promotes harmful stereotypes against the people it was stolen from.
Drag was an essential part of our history. I fully acknowledge that, and the foundations of our community were built on the bravery of people who called themselves drag queens because that was the best term they had at the time.
Modern drag culture is a betrayal of those roots and achieves nothing of value for us anymore. It does significantly more harm than good – especially for real trans women who are hurt by the “man in dress” stereotypes and targeted by RPDR segments where the point is to learn how to clock and out trans women, and by the absolutely epidemic abuse of trans related slurs. All with the approval, endorsement, and celebration of the rest of the community.
Drag itself is not inherently bad.
Modern drag culture, in its current form, absolutely is.
For further reading, here are two great articles on the subject that I’ve had bookmarked since 2014 (sadly the image links are all broken, some of them were really important). I HIGHLY encourage anyone interested to read them, especially before responding to anything I may have explained inadequately here:
https://the-orbit.net/zinniajones/2014/04/the-worst-assimilation-of-all-how-modern-day-drag-hurts-trans-women-and-achieves-little-or-nothing-of-value/
https://the-orbit.net/zinniajones/2014/05/why-cant-bailey-jay-just-have-her-feelings-about-rupaul-on-the-trans-community-and-differences-of-opinion/
There is certainly more to be found on this topic, and from sources that have dedicated more thorough detail to it, if you choose to look for it.
If you’re still confused: drag itself is a way of freely exploring gender, celebrating ourselves and our culture, and breaking out of the roles we’ve been forced into as queer people.
“Drag culture” is a damaging set of beliefs and behaviors that paints transness as a costume and isolates/degrades trans people.
