Munro: Left Attacks ‘RuPaul’s Drag Race’ for Excluding Transgender Contestants

transgender
Christopher Smith/Invision/AP
Neil Munro

Radical gay activist RuPaul was forced to beat a quick retreat when he tried to exclude men who sincerely want to become women from his TV show about men who ridicule masculinity by dressing up as extravagantly glamorous women.

The quick retreat is another victory for the wealthy advocates of the transgender ideology. They argue that the federal government should not tolerate any biological, legal or civic distinctions — such as genitalia, single-sex bathrooms, civic groups or TV shows — that would prevent people from flipping from one legal sex to the other legal sex, or to some androgynous legal status in between male or female.

The loser in this fight is a gay activist whose radical anti-heterosexuality show is now being converted into a women’s beauty contest — admittedly a contest where some of the contestants are men who sincerely are trying to become women.

RuPaul produces a cable-TV contest show called “RuPaul’s Drag Race,” in which men compete to portray themselves as hyper-glamorized stereotypes of women. The show’s purpose is politics by cultural warfare — to ridicule heterosexuality, to mock Americans’ ideals of equal, different and complementary masculine men and feminine women.

Those evolved heterosexual ideals are vital tools for parents trying to raise boys and girls in a turbulent society, and also for young men and women trying to achieve the most they can in a biologically heterosexual, male-and-female society. But the ideals are scorned by wealthy or single progressives who wish to clear-cut society’ rules to maximize their own profit and status.

The political battle started when a British newspaper reported March 3 that RuPaul would exclude “transgender” contestants who take female hormones and undergo surgery to look like attractive, heterosexual women. This hormonal, surgical and sincere effort by men to display an idealized image of women would contradict the satirical, anti-masculine, anti-heterosexual nature of the TV contest, he told the Guardian interviewer:

Probably not. You can identify as a woman and say you’re transitioning, but [the contest] changes once you start changing your body [with surgery and hormones]. It takes on a different thing; it changes the whole concept of what we’re doing. We’ve had some [male contestants] who’ve had some injections in the face and maybe a little bit in the butt here and there, but they haven’t transitioned.

RuPaul explained the distinction in the interview:

Drag loses its sense of danger and its sense of irony once it’s not men doing it, because at its core it’s a social statement and a big f-you to male-dominated culture … for [non-transgender] men to do [the drag show], it’s really punk rock, because it’s a real rejection of masculinity.

For RuPaul, the non-transgender men who masquerade as extreme stereotypes of female appearance in his contest are undermining, ridiculing and attacking the ideal of masculinity.

But men who use female hormones and cosmetic surgery to embrace a feminine appearance — and who often wish to pair off with heterosexual men — are actually reinforcing the political power of heterosexuality and of the two-sex “binary” society of either men or women.

In fact, some transgender people go through huge expense and extreme medical risk — even surgically modifying their genitalia — to just appear as if they have switched from one end of the heterosexual spectrum to the other end.

RuPaul explained the difference between drag shows and transgenderism in a March 6 interview with Vulture.com:

 they’re complete opposites. We mock identity. [But transgender people] take [their other-sex] identity very seriously. So it’s the complete opposite ends of the scale. To a layperson, it seems very similar, but it’s really not.

The anti-heterosexuality show is supported by progressives, including the Democrats’ House leader, Nancy Pelosi.

Immediately after the Guardian interview, RuPaul repeated his decision to bar men-who-want-to-be-women:

But the transgender movement has won strong allies in the gay movement, in Hollywood, the media and in the Democratic Party.

So RuPaul bent to the pressure, sending out tweets announcing his surrender:

He next suggested he would not screen contestants to exclude men who take hormones and undergo surgery:

Many gay and lesbian individuals and groups are leery of the transgender movement. Notably, the D.C.-based Human Rights Campaign group largely ignored the dispute.

But RuPaul’s quick surrender was deemed insufficient by many advocates for the transgender ideology:

The Atlantic headlined its coverage of the story as “It’s Time for Drag Race to Move Past the Binary: RuPaul took heat for saying trans women couldn’t compete on his show—when the truth is that’s exactly what the art of drag needs,” adding:

Incorporating performers who go beyond simply flipping the gender binary wouldn’t only be nice and inclusive. It wouldn’t only encourage more breaks from the standard Drag Race female parody that is arguably often sexist and less arguably becoming a bit samey. It would be great TV, and an execution of Drag Race’s favorite maneuver: Witing-Out what’s written down, and replacing it with something new and daring.

 

Here are some examples of drag contestants ridiculing heterosexuality in RuPaul’s show.

 

The transgender ideology is deeply unpopular, especially among women and parents.

In practice, the transgender ideology requires women to silently accept men who claim to have a female “gender identity” in women’s bathrooms, showers, and sports clubs. It also requires parents to stand aside when their children decide to begin a lifetime of risky and self-sterilizing medical treatments to help them pretend they are members of the opposite sex.

But multiple polls also show that most Americans wish to help and comfort people who think they are a member of the opposite sex, even as they also reject the transgender ideology’s claim that a person’s legal sex is determined by their feeling of “gender identity,” not by their biology.

Despite the huge expense, conflict, and damage to young people, the gender ideology is rapidly gaining power, aided by huge donations from wealthy individuals and medical companies. In Ohio, for example, in February, a judge forced parents of a teenage girl to give up custody so she can begin a lifetime of drug treatments and surgery that will allow her to appear as a male. Also, officials in New York and various universities have threatened to penalize people who do not refer to men as if they are women, and several judges have declared that Pentagon officials must accept recruits who want to change their sex.

Activists who support the transgender ideology claim that 0.35 percent of Americans are transgender. But a study of the 2010 Census reported that only 1-in-2,300 adult Americans had changed their name from one sex to the other.

The progressive push to bend Americans’ attitudes and their male-and-female civic society around the idea of “gender” has already attacked and cracked many of the popular social rules which help Americans manage the cooperation and competition among and between complementary, different and equal men and women.

These pro-gender claims have an impact on different-sex bathrooms, shelters for battered women, sports leagues for girls, hiking groups for boys, K-12 curricula, university speech codes, religious freedoms, free speech, the social status of women, parents’ rights in childrearing, practices to help teenagers, women’s expectations of beauty, culture and civic society, scientific research, prison safety, civic ceremonies, school rules, men’s sense of masculinity, law enforcement, and children’s sexual privacy.

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