Friday, July 31, 2009

Why PFOX is Clueless

Apparently, according to PFOX, a picture of RuPaul wearing a suit implies that he's gone straight, or at the very least, given up drag.

Those of us with a more grounded understanding of reality know that neither is true. RuPaul's online biography is pretty clear - he's a gay man that happens to do drag.

Let me be abundantly clear here - drag itself is performance art. It tells us nothing about the performer's personal gender identity or sexual identity. Above all, it should not be confused with the broad range of identities that are called transgender. A drag performer may be transgender to some degree or another, but it is not a given; and not all transgender people engage in drag.

The fact that RuPaul continues to host a couple of shows on television - presumably in drag - is a good clue that drag is still very much a part of his life.

The unfortunate part of PFOX's apparent assumptions is that they are incorrectly associating drag with someone's gender and/or sexual identity. No doubt, they then infer that because someone is a "former drag queen", that they have "accepted their god-given body" (or whatever rubric is in fashion among the ex-gay industry when it comes to talking about gender variant people). They will, inevitably extrapolate this same logic to the transgender community as a whole, and in doing so will get it horribly wrong - quite possibly at the risk of causing some unfortunate souls some serious harm in the process.

PFOX, along with the rest of the "ex-Gay" industry would like us to all believe that we can "overcome" and "be heterosexual" (sadly missing the point entirely where transsexuals are concerned). They see someone in a suit that they only ever saw in performance costume, and they assume that he's "gone straight". It's a sad statement about how little they truly understand about those that they claim to be trying to help.

2 comments:

Jessica said...

Did PFOX not see But I' m A Cheerleader where he makes fun of the whole ex-gay industry? Obviously not.

evilscientist said...

Makes you wonder what they think of Barry Humphries....

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