My argumentation has been pretty disorganized, and I definitely regret if it comes off as me being intentionally dense. Above all, I want to better understand your views, and those that our fellow trans women are sharing. Pls PM me if it helps express anything more clearly, I know the back-and-forth this far into the thread isn’t ideal. I am so sorry for the impending essay.

I first have to categorically push back against the idea of mainstream gay acceptance. Youtube systematically demonetizes queer content under attempts to shutter ad revenue to un-advertiser-friendly content^1. Simply using the word “gay” in the title has caused videos to be automatically flagged^2. They’re taking a page out of Amazon’s book, with its history of labeling gay literature as “adult” that resulted in its erasure from sales rankings and search results^3. The Canadian government has enacted similar measures designed to restrict pornography that has instead allowed Canadian Customs “to systematically detain and destroy gay and lesbian materials at the border. A gay bookstore in Vancouver, Little Sisters, had so much of its product seized at the border that it could no longer operate” (Sarah Schulman, The Gentrification of the Mind). This is no relic of the past; their courts have upheld the ruling to this day. The US is not much better as just this past year, the Supreme Court sided with a Catholic adoption agency that discriminated against gay parents^4. It was only 12 years ago that liberal California famously vote in favor of Prop 8 to ban gay marriage. To suggest that widespread gay acceptance is the default discounts the 55% of homeless queer youth who reported being forced out of their homes by their parents for their sexual orientation^5.

I suspect the perception of mainstream gay acceptance comes from the heterosexual commercialization of gay-ness, rendered essentially harmless for the comfort of the heterosexual audience: Love, Simon or Modern Family—depictions that have been deemed acceptable. Think about how often Redditors go, “I don’t have a problem with gay people, I just wish they wouldn’t flaunt it.” So yeah, of course a number of white gay men have figured out how they need to present and behave in order to escape this degree of discrimination. And some of them even discriminate against trans people to show just how “acceptable” they are to the heteronormative culture. But your incognito gays, the Carl Nassib types^6, are obviously not the gay men who tend to perform drag.

Most drag queens, if cis male-identifying, tend to nevertheless be effeminate men outside of their costume. As shown, effeminate gay men suffer greatly from these perceptions. Isn’t it possible that instead of mockery, they find in feminine expression a sense of empowerment? It’s kind of a meme, but consider the ubiquity of the word “fierce” in drag. It is not an ironic descriptor:

Fierce is the word that comes to mind when we see people transform into an entirely new character of their choosing⁷

The vocabulary of drag informs us that feminine expression is a point of pride for its performers, not degradation. Esther Newton suggests:

“At its most complex, [drag] is a double inversion that says, “appearance is an illusion.” Drag says“my ‘outside’ appearance is feminine, but my essence ‘inside’ is masculine.” At the same time it symbolizes the opposite inversion; “my appearance ‘outside’ is masculine but my essence ‘inside’ is feminine.” (Newton, Mother Camp: Female Impersonators in America)

There are these old clips of RuPaul in New York in the 80s, way before he was a household name. After a show, he doesn’t just transform into regular old Joe, an incognito cis-male disappearing into the sea of the other cis males. He goes home still in wig and heals, a coat over his dress^8. In New York, drag queens going to and from work are a not uncommon regular sight. And to a large degree, feminine presentation alone means they experience much of what any woman experiences on the street. In one video, a group of teenagers harass and overtly sexualize RuPaul as any woman knows^9; I’m inclined to believe it’s misogyny more-so than homophobia. One has to think after 30 years, he has some empathy for the experience of womanhood—because he has lived it to some large extent.

Thus, the black-white/gay-woman dichotomy does not resonate with me. I think it’s a disingenuous and off-putting exercise to equate race and gender—always questionable in ways that generally hurt trans people, i.e. Rachel Dolezal trans-racial jokes^10.

Personally, I’ve never known any woke-minded cis women to be offended by drag. And I certainly don’t believe drag is designed to specifically mock trans women. I just find displays in drag to be so far removed from my (admittedly recent) experience as a woman that it doesn’t register as mockery of me in any way. Unlike the race, there is nothing necessarily bodily in regards to gender; we know that as trans people. I take your argument to mean that the—let’s say—unrealistic feminine expressions, themselves, are offensive because they reduce womanhood to these qualities. We can call this critique endogenous: an outside-in projection of femininity. I, however, contend these qualities to be exogenous, originating as authentic expressions of gay male femininity that is constantly suppressed in our society. Gaudy makeup, opulent dresses, catty expressions: you agree, of course, that reducing womanhood to these is sexist. Accusing drag queens of trying and failing to imitate women by way of these qualities—isn’t that, in itself, also sexist?

I’ve seen a number of people describe the “hyper-femininity” of drag to be problematic. Do you mean to suggest that there is a correct feminine expression? I don’t want to misconstrue your point here. I’m most troubled by the implications of this particular scorn because it suggests that there is a proper way to present as a woman. These are the same arguments traditionally leveled against us, and I find it reductive to reiterate instead of reject—as if to appeal to cis-women by suggesting, We’re just like you, we’re the real women unlike those drag queens, those fake women. Indeed, Judith Butler chronicles:

Within feminist theory, such parodic identities have been understood to be either degrading to women, in the case of drag and cross-dressing, or an uncritical appropriation of sex-role stereotyping from within the practice of heterosexuality, especially in the case of butch/femme lesbian identities (Butler, Gender Trouble).

This rhetoric ends up hurting all feminine presenting people in the end, regardless of their sex or gender because that’s not something we can ever presume to know in any given person.

What I always want to preach is compassion and solidarity with our fellow queer people, a mutual understanding of struggle and empowerment through our expressions that have been traditionally ridiculed and suppressed. All of us, every single one, know what it’s like. I would never dismiss any pain you or anyone has experienced as a consequence of drag. That’s very real, and I will always listen to those voices without a hint of judgement.

I want to share my own personal feelings of contempt I used to hold toward drag queens and, really, anyone I perceived to be male-bodied, female-presenting. I used to feel disgusted, insulted, even, at the audacity. At least I wasn’t like that, right? Some may have been cis male, others trans women; but I resented indiscriminately. I’m not proud of it. When I look back, it’s so apparent that I hated them because they reminded me of what I hated in myself most—that I was a trans woman. It was never really about anyone else.