"Drag performance originates from Western cis gay male subculture and is an overt expression of contempt for women in general and trans* women in particular. In both means and motive, it is a close parallel to the blackface and yellowface performances which were once a common element in minstrel shows: members of a privileged group dress up as members of an oppressed group and play out their own bigoted stereotypes about that group for the amusement of people who share that bigotry. Drag performance is a public playground for the rampant sexism and cissexism of the gay male community, gleefully reiterating and reinforcing every sort of prejudice against women.
Like the cis gay male subculture which spawned it, drag culture is especially contemptuous of trans women. This is illustrated by the way prominent drag queens such as RuPaul and Sharon Needles go out of their way to use their positions as popular media figures to spread dangerous misinformation about trans* people, to encourage the use of transmisogynistic slurs such as “t**nny”, and even to attack those who are respectful towards trans people. Drag queens are so rabidly transmisogynistic that they can’t stand it when others aren’t transmisogynistic.
To be crystal clear, this criticism does not extend to cross-dressing as an expression of nonbinary, genderqueer, and/or genderfluid identities or even cross-dressing as a sexual fetish. It is specifically about drag, as in public showbiz performances built around grossly exaggerated, exhibitionistic cross-dressing as an grotesque parody of women and/or trans women.
Drag is not fabulous. Drag is fucking offensive to all women, and especially to trans women."
On the Mellissa Harris-Perry Show (MSNBC) Ms. Perry talked about the LGBT community and had RuPaul on to talk about drag as an LGBT issue when it's not, never has been and never will be. Drag is not transgender. It's drag and nothing else. As she notes, it's not about the person in normal life, but the drag performance, which is often mistaken as representative of transwomen.
It's the same to me for cross-dressers, the straight (heterosexual) men, usually married and often with a family, who play dressup, becoming "women" when it's just men in dresses living out an innocuous hobby or fetish, but often is also mistaken as representative of transwomen.
They're men, like gay men, just men, and not transgender, which is my argument they don't deserve status as transgender for their public presentation as women. I would argue they deserve some rights but not the same to call themselves transgender. They don't need therapy. They don't need medical intervention to transition.
They don't live as women 24/7 for some public acceptance test. They don't want surgery to change their body. They don't face the lifetime risk of being discovered as not being born female. They don't understand the deep, personal frustrations transwomen face their entire life, being in a wrong body and then after transition, being discovered and exposed for that wrong body.
To me, they're just another flavor of drag, just a personal level and not for performance. They want the fun of pretending to be women without actually becoming one. Their stage is ordinary life, not show business, but it's still the same, drag performance, and while this person excludes them, I include them.
I do exclude gender variant or genderqueer people, whatever label you use or not, meaning people who just dress everyday as they are being who they are. They don't profess to pretend to be anyone else, just themselves, and that includes wearing any clothes which they like and expresses their tastes and styles.
This is easily confused, as all flavors over non-binary gender expression and presentation, with drag (also female impersonators or illustionists) and crossdressing. It's not the same as the latter two (drag and CD), it's just being and if it's fashion(able) or even to some outlandish, then it's who they are.
And yes, it covers the spectrum of sexual orientation, because sex and gender aren't separate but intertwined in each of us, which can be more confusing as some gay men are and live as genderqueer people, but that doesn't make them drag performers or crossdressers, only who they are.
And in the end, it's still the same, drag performers and crossdressers aren't transgender, just individual personal expressions of personal or public fantasy, and misogynic to women and transwomen.
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