Life Is Not A Drag

Jenny Boylan:

[O]ne thing that got my attention in the Sunday NYT piece [about John Travolta playing Edna Turnblad in Hairspray] was Travolta’s repeated line about how “he didn’t want to play Edna as a drag queen; he wanted to play her as a woman.”

This line of course, in countless variations, is exactly the line spoken by thousands and thousands of MTF transsexuals, who, as they come out, want to be seen as women, not as transsexuals.

I said as much my own self when I came out. I wanted people to know that the woman they saw before them was an authentic soul. I still want that.

But I’ll also admit that lots of transsexual women make a big deal of coming out as women, and not as TS, because they look down on cross-dressers, and people doing drag, as individuals somehow not as exhalted as their own selves. It’s a prejudice I hear all the time– including from a number of very visible trans-women in the public eye right now– that they are all for fighting for their own civil rights as gender variant individuals, but at the same time, drag queens, cross dressers and other fellow travelers make them uncomfortable. The division between transsexuals and cross-dressers, sometimes, echoes the old division between transpeople as a whole and the gay and lesbian movement. That is to say, everyone is afraid that these other characters, these “lesser beings” will somehow “make them look bad.”

And so here comes John Travolta, playing one of the most iconic gay drag characters in film history– and what does he want? He wants to be seen as a woman, not as a drag queen. Cause, like, if you’re a “drag queen,” oh that is so very bad, but if you’re a WOMAN, well hey. You’re Good Old Mister Normal.

This subversion of drag strikes me as so nutty I can hardly write about it: it’s like the entire point of drag is to subvert, to make us challenge our ideas bout gender. Plus, have some fun. So instead, here’s Travolta NOT DOING DRAG, but being an ACTUAL WOMAN because its– “ACTING!”

I don’t consider my own life as a woman an act of drag; but it is an act of transgression, I suppose. And sometimes I do think of Ru Paul, who said, “We’re all born naked; everything else is drag.”

Travolta not doing a drag part as drag means he’s doing it as An Actual Woman which means you can Be an Actual Woman and Still be a Man as long as it’s Acting and Not Be Gay.

No wonder Fox news got all confused with its headline. And they’re usually so cutting edge on GLBT issues.

This confirms something I've suspected for quite a while--that guys dressing up in girlie things is looked down on by not only phobic heteros, but also folks in the TG and gay communities. 

I've seen many veiled comments over the years that I thought revealed some prejudice--mostly by folks claiming to be TG, though also from straight women (never straight men, oddly)--and yet there was nothing ever really explicit that I could point to.  It was just a binary attitude that you need to shit or get off the pot: okay, Victor Victoria, if you're a woman in a man's body (or vicey versey), well, get the surgery and be a woman and stop fucking around with this dress up stuff.

At first blush that might seem weird.  You know, you're in a minority group that is oft ridiculed and discriminated against, so shouldn't you be sensitive to another "similar" group's issues?  But that to me flies in the face of human nature.  We all have prejudices and it's a matter of how we act upon them that counts. 

Sometimes persecuted individuals or groups will take their pain and rather than extrapolate from the experiences and feel empathy for others' plight, they'll draw a lesson that they are somehow uniquely oppressed.  I've seen that in the context of race, religion and sexuality/genderality.  Oh yeah?  My people suffered X, so you should stop whining about how your people suffered Y.

Not to go too deep on this, but it certainly is a reason why I think you have to take individuals one at a time and not classify.  Yes, there are collective issues and concerns that people of a particular grouping may share, but everybody is still different and to judge based on some fairly arbitrary categorization is counterproductive and peewitted when interacting on a human level.

ntodd