Over the past decade, transphobia, homophobia and misogyny have grown across the U.S., with 75 anti-LGBTQ bills becoming law in 2023 alone. With the results of this week’s elections, heightened transphobia during the next four years is inevitable. Though many may try to ignore them, these laws are something everyone will have a stake in, whether they believe it affects them or not.
Conservative rhetoric has demonized trans people, calling them “pedophiles,” “groomers” and “unsafe for children,” much like the language used against cis gay people in the ’90s and 2000s. One of the goals of this campaign of fear is to ban them from public spaces, deny them health care and other rights, and generally marginalize them from American society. Apart from these injustices, transphobic policies go further to harm others as well, conflating drag performers with transgender individuals.
States with both conservative legislatures and large drag communities, such as Texas and Florida, are facing the brunt of it. I spoke with three drag entertainers from these states to discuss the effect these policies have not only on their local queer community but also on everyone.
Jazell Barbie Royale is lauded as one of the greatest drag entertainers in our time, winning prestigious LGBTQIA+ pageants, Miss Continental and Miss International Queen, and appearing on Season 2 of RuPaul’s ”Queen of the Universe.” In response to the anti-drag narrative, she said, “If you’ve ever went to a kid’s birthday party and saw a clown, that’s drag.”
Jazell began performing in drag in her teens, which is also when she transitioned, and her impressive résumé awarded her a citywide proclamation naming April 11 Jazell Barbie Royale Day in Orlando, Florida. But despite this acclaim and success within her state, the anti-LGBTQIA rhetoric forced Jazell to leave her home and move to Texas. With Orlando clubs, such as Parliament House and Pulse, closing, alongside the state’s increasingly stringent laws, there were fewer opportunities for Jazell. Her livelihood was threatened.
“Florida was my home for 34 years,” Jazell says. “It was scary having to uproot my entire life and having to walk away from a community that I grew up in front of and that grew in front of me.” So many people approached her and told her that she was the first queen that they ever saw and that hers was the first drag show that they ever saw.
“So much of what I put on the stage is written in so many people’s life stories. I had to walk away from that and come to a new space, where I had to kind of basically start all over again. It was life-changing; it was scary,” Jazell tells me. “I was very disappointed in my city. I was disappointed in the state of Florida, period.”
Venus Envy, a Florida-based AFAB (assigned female at birth) drag queen, has lost opportunities in Florida due to anti-LGBTQ legislation, such as HB 1557, known as the “Don’t Say Gay” bill,” and HB 1423/SB 1438, the anti-drag show bill, and has experienced an uptick in hate online. The policing of LGBTQIA+ people in Florida has become so severe that she is unable to disclose her full name or day job to HuffPost. “Even before all of this anti-drag legislation, there was a time that I almost lost my job because of my drag,” Venus says.
However, there are people on the front lines, alongside Jazell and Venus, fighting against these laws and challenging oppressive expectations of gender and womanhood.
Brigitte Bandit, also an AFAB drag queen, successfully blocked Texas’ drag ban in September 2023 by testifying at and rallying outside the state’s Capitol alongside the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas and other LGBTQ+ advocacy groups. She understands firsthand the damage these laws do to not only drag queens but also to all trans people — and anyone who doesn’t follow society’s norms.
Outside of her activism, Brigitte also is an accomplished drag entertainer and Dolly Parton impersonator — but none of her work stirred more attention than Brigitte’s drag story times, where she read children’s books to her community. These story times in drag came under threat with Texas’ Senate Bill 12, which would criminalize what it calls “sexually oriented performances” in public.
The ambiguity of the bill’s language led to the ban being ruled unconstitutional. U.S. District Judge David Hittner wrote in his ruling, “It is not unreasonable to read SB 12 and conclude that activities such as cheerleading, dancing, live theater, and other common public occurrences could possibly become a civil or criminal violation.”
Brigitte has been following the evolution of the bill’s language and how it has been altered to stand up in courtrooms. She explains that the Texas drag ban was initially defined as a man dressed as a woman or a woman dressed as a man. And that’s why her testimony went viral.
“But then they try to break down exactly what drag is, and so they redefine it as sexually explicit,” she says. “That shows to me how these things are interconnected with misogyny, transphobia — because you think anybody trying to look feminine is trying to sexualize themselves, and that’s just not right. Drag is so much more than that, and drag is not inherently sexual. They see drag as inherently sexual because of the way that they sexualize women.”
These broad definitions can affect anyone — and that’s the intention. The drag bans, in theory, could prevent women from being able to experiment with makeup, their wardrobes or the use of prosthetics. Brigitte elaborates by discussing her Dolly Parton impersonation, in which she wears a breastplate. “Dolly Parton is not inherently sexual, but she also has big boobs. Boobs aren’t inherently sexual, but they’re defining prosthetic breasts as inherently sexual, right?”
These misconceptions have already affected Brigitte, who now frequently comes under fire on social media. And earlier this year, conservative Republican Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene called Brigitte “a man being a woman, despite Brigitte being assigned female at birth and identifying as nonbinary. With government officials being allowed to derogate citizens in this way, all those who do not meet societal expectations of how women should act or dress may be subject to discrimination.
Still, with conservatives taking center stage on LGBTQIA+ repression, it’s important to acknowledge that not all critics of drag come from the far right. For some feminists on social media, drag is seen as something inherently misogynistic. “RuPaul’s Drag Race” episodes, queens and local drag performances have been criticized for making fun of women, with these takes frequently going viral across social platforms. Brigitte, Venus and Jazell offer unique perspectives that challenge this framing.
“I get this idea thrown at me a lot, that drag is misogynistic or a parody of women, which I have to push back [on],” Brigitte says. “It shows a very limited perspective of even the way that women can express themselves and what you expect from women. I think that calling drag misogynistic is misogynistic, because there’s so many ways to look and be like a woman, and drag explores all of that.”
“Drag is a living and breathing definition, so it’s constantly evolving and constantly changing and constantly growing. And I do not feel like it takes away from women whatsoever,” Jazell says. “It is a way for those that do identify as either cross dressers, drag queens, trans women, trans men; it is a way for us to just express ourselves, just like any other artist that gets up on stage and performs at an award ceremony or at a concert.”
Legislative bans and social media critiques extend further than drag story hours and gay clubs, and they’ve been amplified by last week’s election. The hysteria of transphobia has led to consequences that are affecting people outside of the community.
“I feel like I understand transphobia because I experienced transphobia as a drag queen,” Brigitte explains. “I also understand misogyny as somebody who grew up as a femme, female person. It feels the same, and I can understand that connection. It’s about policing women. It’s about policing expression.”
On experiencing homophobia or transphobia herself, Venus shared a similar sentiment, “I am a cisgender woman, so clearly, these laws in the way that they’re defining drag, it’s not necessarily targeting individuals of a specific gender. It’s targeting any individual who is perceived as a threat to the cis-centric, heterocentric normalcy.”
This year, Olympic gold medalist Imane Khelif faced calls to be removed from her boxing competition from notable figures including J.K. Rowling and Elon Musk based on unfounded claims that she was a man. Lindsay Walter, an advocate for people with alopecia who has been critical of the trans community, was accosted at an airport for being perceived as a man due to her baldness. In September, after a right-wing website claimed San Jose State has a transgender woman on its volleyball team, other teams refused to play them, despite there being no trans women on the team. All three of these women experienced transphobia for not fitting the narrow view of what a woman is and should be.
On the rhetoric extending beyond the LGBTQIA+ community, Jazell says, “There’s many people that have been killed just because of lies, simply because of lies. Emmett Till was killed because of a lie that a [woman] told on him. So lies are dangerous.”
Despite the growing transphobia and anti-LGBTQIA+ legislation, all three entertainers are continuing to fight for everyone’s rights through their art form and activism. On the interconnected nature of struggles, Jazell says, “The trans agenda pushes the Black agenda. It pushes women’s agendas... It pushes equality. We’ve heard many people say this: ‘Until all of us are free, none of us are free.’”
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story mischaracterized Brigitte Bandit’s gender.