Such a drag

A man in a dress

There are fewer fears more absurd than the idea that drag queens are out to sexually exploit small children. Drag queens are generally gay men, and are, outside the fraught realm of drag story hour, the sort of gay men more commonly found at nightclubs with other men than anywhere children are present to begin with. (Unlike, say, priests, gymnastics coaches, etc., of any sexual orientation.)

But as I understand it, down in my home country of the United States, Republicans are guillotining anyone who takes a child within 10 miles of a drag queen. The fear being, apparently, that drag acts are sexual, and therefore inappropriate for children. Which, I mean, is Barbie sexual? The most I could think of is innuendo, but this is like imagining a child would be traumatized by watching John Inman as Mr. Humphries. (I watched “Are You Being Served?” as a child, I think went to Wigstock, even, and unfortunately did not grow up to be a theatrically gifted gay man.) There’s the kind of “sexual” that’s inappropriate for children and then the kind of “sexual” that’s verbal and simply the sort of thing that would go over any child’s head, and that doesn’t even really qualify as “sexual.”

Why are these events taking up ever-greater space in the culture wars? Some of it has to be due to the return, post-pandemic, of events themselves to the sort of blue-state (Toronto counts) locales where they’d happen to begin with. But it’s also the thing where attitudes towards children and gender roles are, as I have blogged sorry newslettered, the ultimate status/belonging signifier. Half the parents will tell anyone who listens that their son wears a tutu and buy 500 children’s books about gender fluidity, while the other half’s heads will explode if their son fails to show sufficient enthusiasm for football. Even if your own children are gender-conforming, saying something like ‘we’re going to drag queen story hour this weekend’ announces which team you’re on.

But, drag itself. In the sex-panicked right-wing imaginary, there’s no distinction between the LGBTQ subsets, or (and this is hardly new as bigotries go) between LGBTQ and pedophile. Thus their all-over-the-place concern that drag queens (cis gay men) are out to sexually abuse children while also somehow making these children trans. In the world of actual human beings, drag queens and trans women are generally two different groups of people. And drag queens are men. Men with an affinity for the feminine, but men all the same. Men dressed up as women. Not people assigned male at birth who are now women. Yes, there’s overlap—drag queens who later come out as trans; use of “she” in reference to people who to the uninitiated might read as “he”—but still, two different things in this world. The expression, ‘a man in a dress,’ effectively a slur if used about a trans woman, is, re: a drag queen, simply… description.

And now the banal yet important is-it-offensive question. Is drag effectively minstrelsy? (One sees “womanface” on UK feminist Twitter.) It’s as if there’s a spectrum of offensiveness-to-women of male-presenting people in feminine garb, ranging from overtly macho frat-guy types mincing around as a joke, to pantomime or Monty Python where the men might be straight but not necessarily (John Inman, Graham Chapman…), to cis gay men in drag, and ending in the separate category of non-passing trans women.

Whether you consider drag to be “womanface” basically depends on where you see gay men versus women on a privilege hierarchy. Is drag about gender-nonconforming men getting to experience the girliness they were shamed out of in their youth? Or is it about the flaunting of male privilege, playing at a shallow, comedic version of womanhood only to wash off the paint and get to be regular men again? I’m somewhat agnostic on this. As the small child asks in the meme, why not both? But not necessarily both in equal measure.

That said, I have a theory that a good amount of the angst within (gender-critical, UK, ‘terf’-accused) feminism over trans issues… here is where I’m stuck. Is it that the angst would be better directed at drag? That it conflates transness with drag? I mean specifically this idea that women are being mocked. Because aaaah drag kinda sorta does actually mock women. That is part of it. Not all of it but not none of it.

And yet! And yet! I don’t want to say, leave trans women out of this, you’re actually mad at drag queens because, to circle back, we’ve got the US right all angsty about drag queens, again, for moronic reasons, but it’s nevertheless a situation where it certainly feels bullying and wrong-side-of-history to oppose drag queens… even while drag queens are, in part, mocking women, or to be really, truly boring about things, punching down.