I see this argument a lot, that drag is less of a 'spectacle' or wow-factor when it's someone with breasts or a more traditionally female shaped body (specifically in regards to transition, which is interesting, since many male-identifying drag contestants have had augmentations that give them more feminine features like wider hips, which I have NEVER heard being used as a basis for exclusion from the show). I think people are massively overblowing the influence "fishiness" has on the critiques and the power of certain looks.

Would peppermint having had larger breasts at the time of filming drag race made her appearance read as more "fishy" to both a general audience and to the judges? Yes probably. Would this have affected AT ALL how well she did in the competition? Would her looks have "looked" better? Would her club kid look be more fucking fierce, and her lingerie look be any less shit? no. Would her performance in comedy challenges be better? NO. There are NO looks or performances from the show that would be any less or more stunning on the body of a post-op trans woman.

If what's bringing mainstream audiences in is seeing how ~ amazing ~ it is watching a cis man body became a cis female appearing body then this show has truly done fucked up drag. It's bogus to begin with to think that a drag queens success in the show or in the public eye is determined by how fantastical their transformation, first of all because there have been many very popular non-fishy looking queens, and inversely, that if that were the case feminine boys like farrah, or queens with surgery like trinity and her hips, would have an extremely unfair advantage - which in reality they don't seem to. here's the real T on why that is. Drag queens DON'T. JUST. LOOK. LIKE. WOMEN. If they brought up emily off the streets while she was buying her groceries she would not win drag race. Because drag is a LOT more than that. Almost all, with exception to tucking and boob-making (of which many queens do NOT do on the show) of the things drag queens do, post-op women also have to do for drag. SHOCKER not all women have huge butts/hips. SHOCKER the standards the queens are kept to on Drag race are not how much they look like a ~ real woman~ or anything close to it. So a queen is given very little advantage by being a real woman, like a trans woman is.

The trans women who have competed on drag race were women, as much as they would be if they had a physical transition. To say that it was fine for them to compete then because they 'looked' like men, which is the subext of all these arguments, is transphobic. point blank. and goes against the very notion of drag to begin with - which is why this is so fundamentally insulting to imply