some thoughts about trans and drag associations
saw that tumblr post again going in on someone for being uncomfortable with kink/drag (which personally annoys me since it's the exact kind of obnoxious self-righteousness of terminally online people but w/e)
I don't really know why drag is associated so heavily with being trans when it's not something I've personally seen a lot of overlap in interests for. from my experiences being around a lot of gay dudes in my life, drag is usually a sort of pageantry made by and for cis guys
it's an art form primarily about being an outrageous symbol of divergent female expression, but it is not the same as simply wanting to be a woman. I guess you could discount this perspective since I generally just don't like drag to begin with, but I'll give a more substantive reason why I'm not always comfortable with the correlation there
a big part of drag is the intentional absurdity of being visibly a male who is masquerading as a woman. this is not universally the case, there are trans people who do drag and aren't going for that juxtaposition. it's still a major part of it from my point of view, though
not every trans person wants to be noticed as being trans. me personally, I'm staying as male-facing until I hit some point where it becomes too hard to hide the changes. I don't really want anyone outside of my immediate friends or few online followers to know about it, not out of any sense of shame but because I don't like getting noticed or remarked on
drag is about being noticed to some extent. again, it's a form of pageantry to many who do it, and the point is often to look like a contrast of physical and expressed gender
and a big part of conservative culture wars against trans people is impressing on normal people the scary image of a man in a dress. so, the intentional imagery of drag is overlaid onto transness as a whole, when they're not 1-to-1 the same thing
I know that it's pointless to remodel queer identity away from stereotypes, and that not every trans person is going to pass as much as they'd like to or care to. but sometimes you're the type of person who just wants to live their life as their queer identity and not worry about being called out on the street about it
basically, I don't like having the mental image of people like me to be based on cis guys doing theatrics. whenever I hear about drag storytime getting protested I'm like, as much as that definitely sucks to see, I don't see that as a trans-specific issue because that's not the way every trans person is presenting themselves in public
(not related to this whole point, but another thing that's annoyed me about drag culture is experiences seeing cis women be derided for participating in it by straight and gay dudes who think that liking drag makes them immune to having sexist beliefs)