Can ya picture it? A “trans-man” (to adopt the enemy’s nomenclature) dressed in a business suit or maybe a plaid shirt or a t shirt with a utility vest , showing up to read a story to pre-schoolers, whose parents brought them there to make sure…I don’t know, maybe that the kids wouldn’t grow up thinking biology is destiny.
Look up pictures of “Elliott” née Ellen Page and “Chaz” née Chastity Bono. They just look like plain ol’ not particularly attractive regular guys. If they were to do a “drag king story hour”, parents would hafta be constantly reminding the kids, hey , this looks like a man but really (?) isn’t! What would they say, like, “Check out the non-bulge in his pants!” ?
Drag queens exaggerate the most flamboyant aspect of female appearance: false eyelashes, big bouffant wigs,heavily made up rouged faces. They wear clothing designed to emphasize female physical characteristics, huge boobs, and hips. And they parody the most…unlikeable? risible?.. aspects of stereotypes for female behavior: flouncing around, sly, “catty” remarks, hysterical outrage. (I can’t understand why women don’t find this “femface” every bit as offensive as blackface.) They are clowns, in the literal meaning of that word.
What would “drag kings” do to correspond to that? Sit with their legs apart? “Mansplain”? (Actually, mansplaining is what the drag queens do, but then, everybody ‘“ ‘splains” to children, so they probably wouldn’t notice.)
Milton Berle said it all when he said, “A man dressed as a woman is funny. A woman dressed as a man, isn’t.”
Yes, but why?
How would you describe “secondary sexual characteristics”, that is, any trait other than genitalia by which we can tell men and women apart? Our hair, our skin texture..the features that make up human beauty. (They’re just a temporary voucher anyway , kids: you wouldn’t know grandma from grandpa after a certain age, if they’re both dressed in a hospital gown.)
Does everybody—not only men, but children, old women, anybody who never did or no longer possesses it—just so adore, and envy, that brief fluorescence of quintessentially feminine beauty, that at some level they all enjoy mocking it?
That’s the historical situation but not the new norm.
To some extent the trans phenomenon for men was an attention-seeking narcissistic phenomenon but not nearly so for women.
But the explosion in it has likely entirely come from attention-seekers and people manipulated into it and not fully on board.
The surge in female-to-male (FTM) seems to include many purple haired tattooed and pierced types who want to up their attention-seeking game by adding a straggly mustache rather than trying to look like Tom Brady (or at least Tom Cruise given their likely height).
Yeah, but the facial hair on these pharma-dependent wannabe males isn’t particularly “masculine”, just like the purple hair isn’t. It’s more…..transgressive, subversive. Frida Kahlo sported a moustache a long time ago. I think what I was trying to say is, while masculinity, or “toxic masculinity” has come in for a lot of vitriol lately, it’s somehow more difficult to mock to the point of parody. Oh, I dk—we need Camille Paglia to weigh in on this. It’s an issue kinda hiding in the fabric, the very seams of our culture, which makes it difficult to see it clearly.
This is one of those potentially interesting issues which most of us never have cause to think about.
Cross-dressing has a long history in the arts. Reputedly in Shakespeare’s day it was common for female roles to be played by young males. And of course a standard element of comedy in those days was a female character pretending to be a male. But that is a long way from today’s Drag King transgendered female claiming she is pseudo-male.
In music hall days, males dressed up as females was a standard comedy routine. Within living memory, England had performers like Danny LaRue – but part of the comedy was that the audience knew the performer was a male pretending to be female, with the performance generally being over-the-top. As far as I am aware, there was no similar genre of females pretending to be male, except as might be required in an occasional sketch.
Today’s female transgendered into a pseudo-male is a newish phenomenon. After all, if it were done right & convincingly, no-one need know what chromosomes that apparently male person had. It seems the Drag King idea would be a deliberate effort to show the audience that this individual is a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Strange – why would any individual endure the pain of becoming transgendered unless the plan is to go all the way and become indistinguishable from the genuine article? In which case, there would be no Drag Kings.
If sex is really the blank slate that our betters insist, where are these ‘men’ insisting and lining up to compete in male sports??
‘Zac’ly! And yet, they DO want to serve in the military!
Isn’t that just what we want in our fighting force: biological females who have voluntarily undergone surgical mayhem?