Casting the net wide

 Personally, I think everyone's a little bit transgender. 

I hear statistics estimating the number of people who are trans - somewhere between 0.5% and 1.5% - but since most trans people are in the closet and invisible, who has any real idea? Do drag entertainers count? Most would say no. For some, being transgender is a state-of-being experienced by few, and 'mere crossdressers' are not part of this supposed elite. There are some supremacist trans people with the narrowest definition that only transitioners are true trans people.

So the definition of transgender is flexible according to tastes and I've never found that anything worthwhile came of trying to put well-defined boundaries on the phenomenon. Some of us experience and respond to our trans nature daily, others maybe only in one intense burst in a lifetime. 

Given the desire of many to experience what it might be like to be or, at least, to look like the other sex, if only at a fancy dress party or such acknowledged event, I reckon, as I said, that there's a bit of trans in everyone. The insistence of hardline macho types that they have no gay or trans in them at all doesn't seem to be borne out by evidence if you look over the course of their whole life. Personally, I doubt the desire to be a female impersonator, drag queen, panto dame, carnival attendee, crossdresser of any kind on occasion was some weird random thought like, "Hey, why not dress as a can of beans today?" We pretty much all want to know what it's like to be a different person. That world of fantasy or curiosity is there throughout our lives, even if putting on a frock is just a one-off. Some of us got a big lifelong dose of conviction that our gender isn't connected to our physique, others merely occasionally. But there are clearly a lot of others who dip their toe into changing gender. A quick glance at something like Stana's amazing blog, Femulate, or Aunty June's Flickr pages, packed with womanless weddings, school proms, trans parties, male actors in female roles, etc. etc., should convince anyone that a lot of people are curious and keen about switching gender. The insistence by some that male and female are fixed states is simply not borne out by evidence.

So in Pride Month particularly, I wanted to say how much I support drag queens and kings, and any other crossdresser. Your motives for dressing may be very different from mine, and your style too, but I feel we have more in common than many suppose.

To that end, I found this interesting article in the online Smithsonian magazine published the other day about the earliest modern-style drag performer, a former plantation slave turned drag artist, Willam Dorsey Swann: article

(And if you want more, here's their article from two months ago about the oldest performing drag queen: article)

I also found the discussion on the origins of the word "drag" interesting. I always thought drag was simply an acronym D.R.A.G. = "dressed as a girl" (as opposed to D.R.A.B. = "dressed as a boy"), but it seems not, although, as ever with these things, there's no firm conclusion.

So, dear drag friends, keep being fabulous.

Here's another garish bloom from the riviera that didn't fit into my rainbow flag of flowers last week as a tribute to the bight flamboyance of drag performance. People seemed to like the photos in the last post but this one is, in fact, my favourite.

 

A dip in the archives

Five years ago I went to Berlin and had fun as a tourist in the city centre. It was a good day.

Sue x