Ball-less and Flawless

I think that the US transfemme desire to disown drag/ballroom is a symptom of both white culture’s destruction of ancestral ties and the importance of cultural continuity, and of the predominantly white ignorance of it as a gentrified Black art form similar to how whites treat other Black art. They want a destruction of it because they see the effects and results of the gentrified version and assume that’s all there is/was.

In particular it’s frustrating because while some drag queens are cis, a lot are trans women, non-binary, or otherwise transmisogynized and drag/ballroom and the tipping culture associated with it existed in part because the transmisogynized are so fucking unemployable and it provided/s a method beyond mutual aid for the redistribution of money, through the labor of performance.

In relation to trans women, I view drag queens as a pathway to transness similar to crossdressers, femboys, (unfortunately) sissies, and similar - where although the perception of them currently may cause harm to the perception of trans women at large due to the ways they compromise with predominantly white cishetero society to allow transfemmes to explore their gender, they are, in fact, still functionally people within the spectrum of transfemininity even if they haven’t fully accepted their gender expansiveness for themselves. Harm they cause to the perception of transfemmes does not lessen them from that societal assignment, any less than we can say Caitlyn Jenner, Blair White, or Kelly Cadigan are less trans women because of the harm they’ve done to the perception of trans women. They are all, in effect, varying levels of transmisogynized whether they realize it or not.

When I was in DC I knew a lot of drag kings/queens and literally 95% of them are trans and either came to drag/ballroom as a way to explore their gender through art and/or make money bc poor, or started it and it was a gateway to unlocking their gender. Not counting the cis performers elevated by stuff like RuPaul, who is explicitly transphobic, I think I can count on my hands how many cis performers I’ve met. Hell, even with RuPaul shit a number of drag artists who have been on his shows later come out as trans (such as Bosco, who I literally grew up with), in part because they suppressed their transness publicly to maintain their career until they reached a point the blowback of coming out wound impact them less. Pulling a F1NNSTER to keep cash flowing for survival, if you will.

Iunno like. The earliest Balls we have records of were literally 1880-90s, predominantly Black (the oldest drag/ballroom performer we have records of was a Black trans woman from DC), and was one of the only safe places for trans people to exist as themselves. So I find the idea of writing it off due to a much more recent gentrification and commercialization of it as ignorant as how people often treat other demonizes or commercialized Black art.

“I just don’t like the spectacle it makes of transness and harm it causes-“

Baby all Blackness is spectacle to crackers and An Amount of modern drag is white people doing minstrelsy of all Black women - not in the sense of gender at all but in the sense of race.

Like. A lot of Black culture in the US specifically is Big and Loud *because* of the repression of it we’ve faced and the force towards respectability politics, which has echoed to queer culture because queer culture in the US is made vast majority from Black culture. Our existence is a spectacle so why not make a show out of why they hate us and try to erase us so that they can’t get rid of even more.

Hating “the spectacle” of an actual performance art form is solidly rooted in white supremacy and white cultural notions of propriety/respectability. Many aspects of “spectacle” seen in drag are directly taken from Ballroom or adapted from it/vogueing.

In summary: traditions are meant to change with situational, cultural, and environmental need but still be sustained as part of a culture. Gentrification is a poison to this that makes it harder for those the culture belongs to to practice it as it should. White ancestral shame is a poison that makes them think they should nuke everything historic/cultural that makes them uncomfortable regardless of whether it’s theirs or whether it’s something they stole and gentrified. Also yeag like,,, it’s a job/gig income predominantly for societal “undesirables” to make money when they’re under/unemployed due to marginalization. And it’s also been gentrified to *gestures at RuPaul, et al.*

No matter what you think about drag or ballroom, poor predominantly racialized trans folks still gon be doing it because it is part of our culture no matter what tv shows and big names and people who have only seen those do to it, and it’s always going to be seen as one of the “disreputable” pathways to transness that makes other trans people look down on them because of the complicated ties to transmisogyny, because until someone publicly says the words “Im also a trans woman”, WE also view them as a personification of what we fear the world sees us as—a man in a dress—rather than an egg finding their way to gender in a way we deem unacceptable because it doesn’t align with how we think it “should” be done.

And I think that’s on us honestly, not on them. If we say it can take as long or as quickly and as easily or messily for someone to sort out their gender as needed, this also has to be extended to the transmisogynized we view as “disreputable” regardless of if/when they reach a conclusion we deem acceptable or whether they die in the shell, never able to remove their masks fully.

Like, as an example, I *hate* sissies because of the racism endemic to sissy culture, but I still recognize they’re transmisogynized regardless of the harm they do or the disgust I feel towards them.

I also had someone comment on it as a facet of US cultural imperialism, of which I do want to note - drag/ballroom based on Black origins was spreading outside the US back in the 1800s/early 1900s too, there’s photos from other countries of balls explicitly influenced by Black Balls mainly started by Black folks in said countries, an example being early 1900s photos from France of both transmasculine and transfeminine Black people. While modern gentrified drag is 100% exported as part of US cultural imperialism, its original spreads outside of the US were via Black diaspora in-culture. I honestly couldn’t tell you definitively where it stuck and where it didn’t from that original wave, but it’s important to know it existed that way.

Girl do you have any idea how many white transfemmes got their starts as trans women through sissy kink and some *still* claim it even after years of hormones and multiple surgeries, not just for SW reasons either. Shit, a couple of the most prominent white dolls in DC still actively identify as sissies.

Is it uncomfy as hell to know this along with the horrific racism levels innate to sissy shit? Yup! Do a significant amount of trans women still start out as sissies? Sure do!

I need yall to sit and understand im talking about the *material realities* of how the transmisogynized are treated by society, not whether it makes us comfortable or happy to fucking know it. Your personal disgust or uncomfortability with being even peripherally associated with them because of them coming across their gender in a “disreputable” way does not change whether they are transmisogynized or not.

“They can take it off while we can’t! They’re all just men!” Ok so are boymoders not transmisogynized? Are those fully in the closet not transmisogynized? Are the very societal forces that drive them to access any hint of transfemininity they can through any method they can—whether it’s playing a girl in a video game, drag, sissification, crossdressing, or becoming a femboy—not intrinsic proof of their transmisigynization BECAUSE they feel they cannot directly access that transfemininity? Because I thought we had arrived at the conclusion that transmisogynization occurs even before someone comes fully and openly out as some type of transfemme, before they say the words “I am a trans woman”, when or *if* they ever publicly do.

We spend AGES looking at people, dead or alive, and going “oh, that’s a transfemme who hasn’t gotten/didn’t get to come out as one” - We are extremely hypocritical in how we allow or disallow transmisogynized people access to transfemininity based on how we feel they reflect on us as a community. Shit, Kurt Kobain was “just” a crossdresser—and a lot of the girls HATE interacting with crossies personally—but half of the dolls on this site (rightly) claim her as a transfemme who didn’t get to come out before she died. She’s provided that access because she makes us “look good”, “despite” being a crossdresser. In this way, we treat respectability as the bar by which we determine whether we let the “disreputable” transmisogynized be recognized for what they are or not.

Do they experience the full effects of transmisogynization full time? Of course not. But transmisogynization is a spectrum, as we’ve discussed in whether eggs/closeted girls are transmisogynized prior to coming out. The “disreputable” transmisogynized often (though not always) exist in life situations where they cannot safely access transfemininity through other methods or full time, so they do not suffer the same levels of constant transmisogyny as trans women do, but to pretend they aren’t transmisogynized at all flies directly in the face of our own theories and is supported solely by politics of disgust.

trans women with dysphoria should not have to deal with unwanted advances regarding our genitalia that make us shudder to our very core, followed by having to speak up and ask not to be talked about like that, with every goddamn person we flirt with

@orbis3 on v.mo