I really wish I could like it, but I think I have some fundamental problems with drag as a concept. It definitely had its time and place, but we have quickly grown out of it as a community and it’s time to move on.

There is nothing revolutionary about drag anymore, there is no “big father” that is being pushed against that is trying to rigidly enforce gender norms. In my city at least, the drag scene 60% cis women with 20% being gay men and the remaining 10 split between trans women and trans men, and I have yet to see a person of color doing it. Clearly we have strayed so far from the origins of the scene which were created by POC and ballroom culture, and I think the fact that it is no longer subversive, that it can be hosted in these types of venues and have major TV shows, shows its just another form of bread and circus now. Back in the day an elected official wouldn’t be caught dead with a drag queen, and at least that’s an honest dynamic of the power structure and not liberal two-facedness.

As much as it did have a function, I do think the foundations are transphobic to a degree and it’s not something that can be excised, but I can’t articulate that enough to make it an argument.

I remember trying to fix the audio at a drag show I attended, and when I got it working the cis woman MC said “thank the doll everyonnneee”, I am not a doll I am a tranny faggot dyke and you don’t get to speak for me. I find the whole affair to be uncomfortable and I would hate to have to prance around and squeeze myself between tiny bar tables to ask for tips from a bunch of zillenial crackers.

The sexuality of drag as well is wholly without passion, it is all performance with no interiority, or at least I’d hope because a drag performer that gets off on it is a sissy and you know about sissies. At that SAME event there was a theymab drag queen, very large, hairy, no feminization beyond a skimpy outfit, comically masculine proportions, and you could tell it was a sex thing and nobody said anything! Again, it’s a culture of fear around positive prescriptions leading to fetishists and abusers being let in. I don’t think it’s a healthy expression of social desire however you slice it.

There is only one drag queen where I actually liked his material and coincidentally its a childhood friend, he’s a trans man who transitioned much younger than me and to me I get why he does it and it feels authentic, more of a character than a caricature. Still not revolutionary and its a small glimmer in a dark world so to speak but it at least doesn’t feel like minstresly against trans women.

I have less problems with drag time story hour, and the last thing I’d ever want is cis society to bring the hammer down on drag, but it doesn’t mean it doesn’t have its issues and that it’s lost it’s teeth, that it’s more constricting the queer community over setting us free.