Imp Queen and the Perpetually Problematic Erasure of Trans Drag Queens

I have lost the number of times I have met people – and even trans people – who have told me that crossdresser aren’t real transgender people and that drag queens are all gay cis men in – you know – drag.

It is therefore time for a reminder: Crossdressing is an act, not an identity. Drag is indeed a performance, but this performance does not, in itself, say anything about the gender identity of the performer.

Many, if not most, transgender women have explored their gender identity through crossdressing, in the sense that they have put on the clothes of “the opposite gender” relative to the gender they were assigned at birth.

In this article about drag queen Imp Alok points out that:

In order to gain acceptance, trans people have had to differentiate and distance themselves from drag queens, asserting that their/our identities are endurant (rather than ephemeral) and permanent (rather than performative). 

This distancing has come with good reason considering the historic prevalence of transmisogyny within drag spaces, but it also takes the form of casting “drag” and “trans” as mutually exclusive — erasing trans drag queens — and failing to account for the fluidity and variance among trans communities.

This is where trans people find ourselves today: We are burdened with the task of the real in a society drunk on the myth of its own naturalness. In a world where ideology masquerades as biology, we have to convince the doctors and the feminists and the partners and the parents that we are real in order to be recognized, let alone respected. 

Our cis counterparts are not held to this standard of interrogation. We are never allowed to critique whose standards of legitimacy we are appealing to. In order to be real we have to be permanent, to be a subject and not a verb (gender is something we are, not what we do!), to always have known. The stakes of this are high: If our identities aren’t believed, then the discrimination we face isn’t real. We are seen as just making it up.

Let us make sure that at leas trans people continue to invalidate transgender drag artists. Remember also that “transgender” is an umbrella term that covers all kinds of gender variance.