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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 24, 2022

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A question: Is dressing in drag (that is, a man dressing like a woman potentially with makeup and so on) an inherently sexual act? I ask because it seems to me differing beliefs about the answer to this question are at the root of differences in belief about the propriety of events like Drag Queen Story Hour and perhaps related to trans issues more generally.

For my part, I think the answer is "No". This isn't to say that nobody ever dresses in drag for the purpose of engaging in a sexual fantasy, certainly some people do. Similarly I do not intend to claim drag events are always appropriate for children, I've been to ones that certainly would not be. There does not seem to me anything inherently sexual about someone in drag reading an age appropriate book to children though.

So I guess I'm interested in hearing from people who would answer the opposite way to my posed question and why they think so. Some ancillary questions: If it were a cis woman dressed similarly would it be equally inappropriate? Or is the fact that it's a man dressed that way central to the impropriety? Is there an implied inference that the only reason a man would dress in drag is for a sexual purpose? That seems like a failure of imagination to me.

Look at this and tell me it's not doing sexual shit with children. Why do you constantly gaslight people to cover for this? Is it just misplaced party loyalty? Or something else?

Edit: anyone who covers for this is evil, and if the rules enable it the rules are evil too. "Continually on the attack" against evil is the greatest compliment you could ever give me.

I agree this is inappropriate but no drag shows I've been to have featured anyone's exposed breasts.

You've been told, warned, and banned repeatedly for doing this. People are not "gaslighting" or "party loyalists" because they believe different things than you believe.

You seem to have appointed yourself as the Motte's political officer whose job it is to follow around and police everyone in the enemy tribe and remind us that all your opponents are evil liars, lest we have the wool pulled over our eyes. This is not acceptable. We just banned a couple of sneerclubbers (or people writing very much like sneerclubbers) who came in here with maximally conflict theory takes on the enemy tribe, and you don't get to do it either.

You don't have to be a mistake theorist. You can conflict theory your conflict theory heart away. Lots of people here are gleeful, unabashed conflict theorists. But you still have to follow the rules, and you seem unable to accommodate yourself to them.

Banned for a week. Stop doing this, because future bans will be longer, not shorter.

So it depends are we talking about crossdressing (transvestism - associated with sexual paraphilia and/or gender dysphoria; transvestism - ritual or culturally accepted for specific occasions); drag as in female impersonators; or drag as in gay-associated and sexualised, e.g. Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence?

Because there's a ton of overlap in some ways and quite distinct differences in the other. You have the whole music hall phenomenon of female impersonators (and male impersonators on the distaff side) who weren't necessarily gay, e.g. Dan Leno whose repertoire included characters like gossipy busybody housewives and pantomime dames, not to mention the theatrical tradition of en travesti.

You have ritual/festival crossdressing, e.g. Hallowe'en traditions of men dressing as women and women dressing as men while going out to sing and dance when making the rounds of the neighbours (this eventually morphed into the American Hallowe'en trick-or-treat and kids dressing up in spooky costumes).

You had the history of homosexuality and places like molly houses where gay men would dress up as women and adopt feminine identities.

And now you have modern drag, which takes strands of all these and ties them together, with drag being associated with gay men as performers, and the risqué/burlesque/performance element of blue comedy which lends very sexualised overtones, even if the acts are being cleaned up and made more respectable to appear on things like RuPaul's show and now "family-friendly drag events".

So men in costumes reading stories to kids can't be separated from sexual fantasy, especially as the entire rationale for these drag story hours in libraries and schools is to introduce small children to the idea of various and variant sexual identities.

And every time you get a report of "child sex offender participating in drag story hours" then it just makes the waters even muddier.

Never mind adult men in drag - what about seven year old girls being mentored by 'drag mothers' and doing performances at the age of eleven where they have cash apps that adult men can pay them through? Here's the least inflammatory and most "what are they protesting about, it's harmless" account of the story, you can find more outraged ones elsewhere online.

If a seven year old girl is dressed in exaggerated adult female costuming, at what point are we, exactly?

I had assumed that it was not inherently sexual to crossdress, but one day I asked my wife who is an avid fan of 'RuPaul's Drag Race' what percentage of the contestants were straight. The answer was... zero. Since then, there have been a handful of hetero transwomen, as far as I know all former gay men.

Does this make crossdressing sexual? Not directly. I can't think of any reason why a man wearing a dress is an innately sexual act when a woman wearing slacks is not. Maybe crossdressing is culturally contingent on (some) gay subculture membership, like effecting a lisp. But 100%, even of a sample size in the low three digits, seems to point in that direction.

I don't think I'd say sexual exactly, it's definitely adjacent somewhat though. I still feel some general weirdness on the boundaries of "gay culture" and what I believe to be the legitimately family friend lgbt stuff. You see this same weirdness come up in debates around like kink at pride. I've been so several pride parades and 95% of what happened at them was squarely of the family friendly variety that doesn't have the weirdness I feel about drag but then there is the kink stuff and my sense that this is a thing for adults starts ringing.

People have definitely put on some leather or a dog collar for non-sexual reasons before but that's not really the standard used when I'm watched a leather bound man walk a smaller man in a leather dog outfit. This is a window into those people's sex life.

It's not inherently sexual, but is strongly sex-adjacent. There's nothing inherently sexual about nudity, either, but I think you'd agree you'd probably be pretty suspicious about adults who are really strongly in favor of being naked around children (nonsexually, they promise).

There's no law of the universe making it sexual. It being sexual is an observation about how and why it's done in modern American society. There's probably some extreme edge case that isn't sexual (maybe Norman Bates in Psycho), but when it comes up in politics, it's never about such cases, and there often seems to be an element of "Ha, ha, you can't prove it's sexual".

There's the comedy element of cross-dressing, and it's hard to know if that is to be considered drag or not. Think of Monty Python sketches or pantomime dames, where (for the dames anyway) while there is bawdy humour and double entendres involved, those are supposed to go over the kids' heads and be for the adults in the audience.

There were female impersonators, some of whom vehemently denied they were gay, such as Danny La Rue.

And then drag as it is today.

Certainly something like Trey Parker and Matt Stone wearing dresses to the Oscars is not remotely sexual. Similarly, many college fraternity houses host events where obviously-straight men dress in women’s clothing as a gag. Your question also made me think of the film Sorority Boys and the TV show Bosom Buddies, as well as a number of the films @FiveHourMarathon named already. In every one of these scenarios, the act is not transgressive of hegemonic gender norms at all; in fact, I would say that each of these instances of cross-dressing actually explicitly reinforces traditional gender roles/presentation by presenting the image of a man in women’s clothes as inherently absurd, gross, and comical. The entire joke is “isn’t it weird seeing these dudes dress like women, look how ugly they are, how hilarious to imagine that anyone could actually fall for this transparently unconvincing charade”.

I would contrast these instances of cross-dressing with drag. Drag, as a tradition, has always been aggressively sexual, involving not only bawdy jokes but also a funhouse-mirror, highly-stereotyped presentation of female sexuality. The recent attempt to whitewash drag as a harmless family-friendly form of clowning is transparently cynical. As an analogy, if I invited Mia Khalifa to come read a book to a group of kids, it would be inappropriate and inherently sexual even if she spent the entire event dressed conservatively and never mentioned her career. This is because I could have invited literally any person on Earth to come do this, but I specifically chose her. I went out of my way to put a porn actress in front of kids, instead of, I don’t know, a firefighter or a trash collector or, hell, any type of performer whose milieu is genuinely family-friendly, like a juggler.

The kids are going to be curious about what the odd-looking person reading a book to them does for a living. They’re going to have questions about why this tall and broad-shouldered individual is caked with makeup and wearing women’s nightwear. They’re going to be tempted to learn more, simply as a result of the healthy natural curiosity of children. The choice to invite a drag queen specifically is engineered to produce this result and to increase children’s curiosity toward, and openness toward, alternative gender presentation which is heavily sexualized.

This is a really excellent post. One of my favorite things is 'someone articulating something you've long felt but haven't had the correct words to communicate that insight', and this is exactly that. Reported as a quality contribution as well, thank you.

I think this is part of what "grooming" discourse is getting at- it's almost literally gay recruitment, it's just that no one wants to use that word anymore. And drag queen story hour advocates should defend why they want more children to grow up to become alphabet soup of some description in so many words. Which, to their credit, they do, and I don't know why "groomer" advocates don't cite them.

I mean, James Lindsay is a prominent example of a “groomer” advocate who has, on many occasions, gone into painstaking detail about the academic origins of Drag Queen Story Hour, its connections to Queer Theory and radical Cultural Marxism more generally, and what it’s designed to do on a sociopolitical level.

To the extent that most “groomer” advocates aren’t doing this, it’s because they’re writing for/speaking to an audience that frankly isn’t smart enough or intellectually agile enough to really deal with the complexities of this stuff on a deep level. No amount of citing Judith Butler is going to animate the passions and political consciousness of normie burger-cons.

A question: Is dressing in drag (that is, a man dressing like a woman potentially with makeup and so on) an inherently sexual act?

Is blackface inherently racial? Is blackface inherently racist?

"Wearing women's clothing" isn't drag if you're wearing a woman's... sweater, say, or overalls. A guy in a pink parka isn't "in drag." I'm not a big fan of "no true Scotsman" arguments, I don't think I know enough about drag to say there's a bright line here or there. But I can't think of anything I'd call drag, that wasn't at least sexual to the extent of "involving what would likely be regarded as 'sexy clothing' on a woman." I don't think it's plausibly a drag show if you're wearing baggy blue jeans and a loose t-shirt from the ladies' section at Walmart.

But I can't think of anything I'd call drag, that wasn't at least sexual to the extent of "involving what would likely be regarded as 'sexy clothing' on a woman." I don't think it's plausibly a drag show if you're wearing baggy blue jeans and a loose t-shirt from the ladies' section at Walmart.

Eddie Izzard's an outlier, but exists. Most of that small class of that sort of drag queen that's more exaggerated comedy, though they're sometimes criticized from the other direction (eg, Martina's kinda a harridan).

Eddie Izzard is an interesting case to me, personally, because the first show I saw him in, I didn't notice anything about his clothes. Someone later said something about his skirt and I was like--wait, what? I did notice his eyeliner but guys in show business were doing a lot of weird eye stuff in those days. I have often referred to him as a cross-dresser, but would not spontaneously think of him if someone asked me if I'd ever seen a "drag show." Automatic mental categorization is weird.

Anyway see my comment above re: makeup. As I said--I don't feel like I know enough about any of this to be drawing bright lines around what does and doesn't count. Nevertheless, when someone tells me drag is not inherently sexual, I feel like I am being invited to participate in kayfabe.

Dina Martina seems to do a sort of housewife drag that isn't trying to be sexy. There's also a long tradition of impersonating female celebrities, some of whom dress sexily and some of whom do not. Judy Garland impersonation tends not to be overtly sexual, for example. Admittedly, this Garland impersonator says that "My wig designer and friends of mine have said I’m not a drag queen because drag tends to go over the top." There's some truth, there -- drag doesn't always have to be sexy but it's often comically exaggerated in one way or another, with sex and sexiness as frequent aspects of such comedy.

I can't speak for America, but in the UK the canonical example of family-friendly cross-dressing is panto. The ground rules of panto include that the hero is played by an attractive young woman in skin-tight trousers (usually leather) and the "dame" (the principal comic relief character - this is very definitely clowning) is played by a man in a dress with footballs sewn into the bodice. Panto is explicitly considered child-friendly.

The culture of people who self define as "Drag Queens" is very different, and it appears to be a part of broader LGBT culture.

Dame Edna Everage is closer to "housewife drag" but is clearly drawing on the tradition of pantomime dames.

Then you had the likes of Lily Savage, who blurred the line between his drag act performance, and the performances he did on television. Some of the act was indeed too strong for TV which ended up as outtakes, but mostly audiences considered such an act funny, vulgar, but not beyond the pale.

The thing that draws my notice in the housewife and Judy Garland examples is the makeup. The earliest arguments I'm aware of that makeup is inherently sexual are from feminists critiquing objectification; for example:

The final category of the disciplinary practices, Bartky holds, are those that are directed towards the display of a woman’s body as an ‘ornamented surface’: women must take care of their skin and make it soft, smooth, hairless and wrinkle-free, they must apply make-up to disguise their skin’s imperfections. Our culture demands the ‘infantilisation’ of women’s bodies and faces.

More recently we see makeup tracked as inherently sexual by Jordan Peterson, who is arguably a 2nd or 3rd wave feminist (via his work coaching women for career advancement) but would likely be disclaimed by most feminists today.

That's a pretty broad culture war spectrum agreement on the idea that makeup, at least in the classic foundation-lipstick-blush-eyeshadow configuration, is inherently sexual. It's not strongly sexual, and I think many, maybe most people do not consciously think of it that way, most of the time. But I think that's one of those ways people kid themselves about our inescapable nature as sexually-reproduced members of a sexually-reproducing species. Noticing that makeup is inherently sexual breaks the kayfabe, but that doesn't mean it's a mistake--to the contrary, what generally breaks the kayfabe is the truth.

Now, I do think @Gillitrut's phrasing is a little ambiguous; I'm not claiming that every man who participates in drag is doing so for personal sexual gratification. But the phrase "inherently sexual act" strikes me as inescapably inclusive of either doing or parodying things that are historically about sexual attraction and value. The objectification of women is not accidentally sexual. (I think this also accounts for much of the discomfort people express at seeing makeup on young girls, e.g. in beauty pageants.)

The best objection I can think of, right now, to my view is that men doing drag could claim to be somehow defusing the objectification of women, by making makeup and sexy dresses just another thing humans do with no sexual connotations whatever. But this would strike me as on par with holding minstrel shows for the purpose of fighting racism. I occasionally hear people claim they are trying to "break down the gender binary" by doing gender-nonconforming things, but sex and sexuality have such a (so far) inescapable biological grounding that it would be very hard to persuade me that this is even an achievable result (modulo transhuman levels of body-mod tech), much less a likely one.

Saying that Makeup is done by women to add to their sexual value, so therefore anyone wearing makeup is engaging in sexual activity, and we should keep that away from children, leads in pretty weird directions by analogy. Makeup is inherently sexual in the same way that most behaviors that aren't related to food-shelter-safety needs are inherently sexual. Most things can be argued as "about sex" and part of our "inescapable nature as sexually-reproduced members of a sexually-reproducing species" by evo psych or RedPill or freudian types. Or as Dave Chapelle put it: "If a man could fuck in a carboard box, he wouldn't buy a house." Is there any aspect of improving one's appearance or lot in life that isn't about sexual value by some definition?

Men engage in athletic competition to show off their fitness and get laid. Therefore, athletes shouldn't talk to kids. And for God's sake, don't let a bodybuilder get within 500ft of a school, that's as sexual as it gets. In fact, they shouldn't really be allowed to watch movies with guys who lift weights in them, Marvel bodies are homoerotically sexualized and should be banned. (To be fair, I'd take that last one if I never had to hear about them again)

Fashion is about sex, clothing is tailored to give women hourglass figures and men's suits are tailored to give them broad shoulders and narrow waists; better keep fashion designers and tailors away from kids. In fact don't even let anyone wearing a well-tailored suit talk to kids, that guy is really working on his sexual value.

Guys join bands to get laid, don't let kids listen to anything other than devotional music. And never, ever let them dance or see anyone dance, that's all about showing off one's skill as a potential sexual partner.

Once you start down this path you just end up with John Lithgow in Footloose as your YesChad meme. Which, to be fair, in my state right now I feel like if you asked Doug Mastriano if kids should be allowed to listen to Rock music it's 50/50 he'd say no it's the devil's music.

Going by OP's definition of drag (a man wearing women's clothing), drag is not inherently sexual. What makes sexualized drag queens performing for children bad isn't that they are doing drag, it's that they are overly-sexualized.

The OP's question wasn't about what should or shouldn't be kept away from children, but whether drag is inherently sexual. That's the only question I was answering, so following that up with a discussion of what is or isn't appropriate for children seems like an orthogonal and perhaps just uncharitable response. Nothing you've said here is responsive to any of the arguments I raised for the particular claim that drag seems to indeed be as inherently sexual as blackface is inherently racial.

Saying that Makeup is done by women to add to their sexual value, so therefore anyone wearing makeup is engaging in sexual activity, and we should keep that away from children, leads in pretty weird directions by analogy.

If I am in favor of keeping children in the shallow end of the swimming pool, I must by analogy oppose tall drinking glasses, I suppose. Some slopes are indeed slippery, but you seem to have engaged the genuinely fallacious version, here. "If we stop kids going to drag shows, what's next!? Banning dances and bringing back Victorian fashions?"

Funny, when I read your reply, I thought to myself "Gee, did I misread OP and insert my own preexisting knowledge of culture war bullshit into it? That was rude of me!" Then I reread OP:

I ask because it seems to me differing beliefs about the answer to this question are at the root of differences in belief about the propriety of events like Drag Queen Story Hour and perhaps related to trans issues more generally.

Similarly I do not intend to claim drag events are always appropriate for children, I've been to ones that certainly would not be. There does not seem to me anything inherently sexual about someone in drag reading an age appropriate book to children though.

The whole discussion in the OP is about whether Drag is sexual, and whether that sexuality makes it inappropriate for children. OP further cites questions of the drag queens themselves engaging in "Sexual fantasy" as a potentially inappropriate element for children. So no, that question is not "orthogonal" to the one raised in OP, the entire question in OP is not whether drag is sexual in a banal sense (a point I addressed in my own reply to OP), but whether it is sexual in a sense that is inappropriate for children.

Your little syllogism of "JP/Feminists say Makeup is sexual >> Drag Queens wear makeup >> Drag queens are sexual >> sexual things are inappropriate for children >> Drag queens are inappropriate for children" doesn't work because the meaning of "sexual" shifts midway through. Feminists/JP define makeup as sexual in the banal sense in which athletics, dancing, etc are sexual; then you shift that definition to "too prurient for children" midway without showing your work. So my slippery slope is on point here, just as athletics aren't inappropriate for children despite having sexual elements to them, makeup isn't inappropriate because it has sexual elements to it. Your own article proving "makeup is inherently sexual" contains the passage:

[T]he fact that men’s magazines today, like women’s, are full of articles and advice on how men should look: how to be more muscular, what clothes to wear, what creams and other cosmetics to use, etc. Men feel the need to make their looks conform to the prevailing ideals of masculinity. Bordo believes that it is consumer capitalism that drives men to be increasingly concerned with their appearance: “Why should [the cosmetics, diet, exercise, and surgery industries] restrict themselves to female markets, if they can convince men that their looks need constant improvement too?,” she asks (Bordo 1999, 220).

Trying to draw some kind of weird logical circle for why inappropriate stuff is inappropriate leads to over-classification and lack of clarity. Sexualized drag shows are inappropriate for children due to content, not because you can point to some banal element of drag as inherently sexual. @hoffmeister25 is on point here, it is inappropriate if the people involved are doing or being inappropriate things; trying to draw the line at an arbitrary point like "Man in a dress" or "Makeup" creates an illogical boundary, making compliance more difficult and the purveyors of the rule look foolish.

I occasionally look at "events in my local area" type lists, and there are a surprising number of drag events included in those lists. Clearly they have an audience. And every single one of them that I have ever seen was flagged as "adults only 18+". Sure, you can dress in drag and just do normal stuff, but it doesn’t seem wrong to note that drag is usually heavily sexualized in the specific way Americans think of as inappropriate for children.

If people were putting on Strip Club Story Hour, where the clubs served Capri Sun and virgin daiquiris in the afternoons while reasonably dressed strippers read books to kids, we would probably think this was pretty fucked up and suspicious, even if the kids are too ignorant to figure out the context. If there were multiple videos of kids being encouraged to tip the strippers with dollar bills tucked into their pants, doubly so. And if creepy strip club managers used to opportunity to try to convince little girls to come get a job as soon as they turned 18, I don’t think anyone would be surprised.

Wouldn't this be perceived as "Nice"? But as, something similar did occur and backlash was sufficiently strong to end it, maybe not.

The whole discussion in the OP is about whether Drag is sexual, and whether that sexuality makes it inappropriate for children.

This is not how I understood the question, or how I approached it. I took the question on its face:

Is dressing in drag (that is, a man dressing like a woman potentially with makeup and so on) an inherently sexual act?

OP goes on to suggest that this is at the real center of debates about "Drag Queen Story Hour" and so forth, so presumably if we can reach agreement on this question, then we could reach agreement on the latter question. This may or may not be so, but my impression of this framing is that it is a way of trying to get clear about a less-obviously-charged question before worrying about the details of a more obviously charged question. Maybe I'm the one who misunderstood the OP, but I read your leaping straight to "and is this appropriate for children" as missing the point of the discussion.

Your little syllogism of "JP/Feminists say Makeup is sexual >> Drag Queens wear makeup >> Drag queens are sexual >> sexual things are inappropriate for children >> Drag queens are inappropriate for children"

I have never said "therefore drag queens are inappropriate for children" in this thread. I have explained why it seems clear to me that "drag" is inherently sexual, and you have said nothing to demonstrate otherwise, so if you want to have an argument with someone who is saying the things you're saying I'm saying, you're going to need to find someone else to argue with.

you shift that definition to "too prurient for children"

Again--which of my responses to Gillitrut or Gemma are you getting this from?

I feel like you're just spoiling for a fight. I was responding to Gillitrut in an analytic way, describing what comes to my mind when I hear "drag," and also pointing out that I am hesitant to do even this since of course there are many kinds of drag, and edge cases, and etc. I think my analysis is good in part because it also captures the discomfort people often feel in other situations unrelated to drag queens. Others have been quite civil in pointing to counterexamples, and I think in general the question "is drag inherently sexual" is an interesting one for reasons that have nothing at all to do with children. It's not that far from other arguments people have about e.g. whether breasts are "inherently sexual." Personally, I think lots of stuff is inherently sexual, to greater and lesser degrees, and I think that if we were Puritanical or Victorian about those things, I wouldn't personally like it but I would understand the argument.

Sexualized drag shows are inappropriate for children due to content, not because you can point to some banal element of drag as inherently sexual.

Sure, fine, whatever, you don't think drag is inherently sexual, I get it. I disagree, for all the reasons I've cited, none of which you've provided any plausible pushback against, because you're too busy focusing on shit I didn't say.

Judy Garland is a gay icon, which suggests it's pretty likely that Judy Garland impersonation is supposed to be sexual.

Something I learned on the Reddit Motte was that much of drag as a culture is a form of clowning. Yes, as in circus clowns and Vaudeville clowns, but also the Italian tradition, harlequins, and jesters. Apparently it’s about colorful and outlandish drag queens teaching women how to “perform” their femininity. It’s basically the inverse of transsexuality-as-passing, which is to be treated as Srs Bsns.

I immediately saw parallels with pro wrestling and the space opera: they’re loaded with tropes, colorful characters, outlandish stereotypes, meant to teach legible moral lessons and inform men how to perform masculinity and nerds their nerdiness, respectively. (I also started seeing clowning in all genre media at that point, but I’ll stick to pro wrestling and space opera.)

What turned people off of Star Trek Discovery was a clown show with no clowning: it was trying to be Srs Bsns in a space which was designed for clowning. The Orville stepped into the gap, and now so has Strange New Worlds. Stargate: Universe made similar missteps ten years before, but evolved into compelling and operatic expansions of its Stargate predecessors, just in time to be cancelled. Star Trek Picard season 3 looks as it will be a triumphant return to clowning, judging by the trailer. Star Wars 7 and 9 were just clowning, with 8 a crying clown winking at the audience.

My point is that drag is apparently inherently about sex/gender but probably not supposed to be sexy unless the tropes and the funny/dramatic/funny mood roller coaster dictate it.

Does this apply to anything with antinatalist consequences? How slight can it be? Should we not be encouraging women to work? Does this apply towards changing the status quo "in reverse" to undo feminism? Is this a mis analogy because feminist activists weren't necessarily expecting the antinatalist consequences?

My understanding was that drag was originally raunchy entertainment based on parodying stripteases, no? And that sometimes it's still like this- essentially inappropriate humor, but not intended as stimulating- and sometimes it's more or less a striptease with the twist that the dancer is revealed to be male.

In either case, both "raunchy adult humor" and "striptease with an opposite gender reveal" are basically inappropriate for kids. And in most cases the drag queens aren't wearing exactly normal female clothing, either.

Some dude in a normal dress and a wig is essentially a punchline, and it bears little resemblance to the clips of drag shows I've seen. A stripper in her work costume should put on, well, normal clothes before she reads to a crowd of children. "Kilt" enthusiasts wear skirts that in many cases bear little resemblance to traditional kilts out and about for reasons that I'm at least 70% sure are nonsexual. I do not really understand these guys, but I have no particular suspicion of why they would want to wear their skirts/kilts in front of children in the way I do drag queens.

The great comedy films of drag: The Birdcage, Mrs. Doubtfire, To Wong Foo, Thanks For Everything! Julie Neymar, White Chicks, Juwanna Man. All of those make a great joke of men dressing as women, but not one portrays their protagonists getting off on dressing in drag. Rather the comedy comes from classic "Women be like" or "men be like" jokes, plus the inevitable OW My Balls, and one or more romantic interests who do not realize the true identity of the man in the dress. Wong Foo and White Chicks in particular revel in putting very masculine actors (Terry Crews, Wesley Snipes, Patrick Swayze) in dresses, the gag is largely in reference to seeing those guys in drag; I'm especially partial to Wong Foo, it's essentially a scene for scene remake of Roadhouse but Swayze is a drag queen saving the town instead of a laconic bouncer saving the town.

IIRC every protagonist finds romance in the film. Sometimes the gag is a straight man falling for a man in a dress (The Birdcage, Wong Foo); other times it is using the cover of drag for a man to talk to a woman intimately on a non-sexual basis to find love (Juwanna Man, Mrs. Doubtfire); the perfect hetero implications of heterosexual love and homosociality.

So no, I'd say the simple act does not seem to be sexually coded in the sense of "Any man wearing a dress is doing it because wearing a dress gets him off." But the crossing of gender boundaries naturally implicates sexual and romantic interludes, so I guess to say it is totally non-sexual is also a little silly.

As its Halloween weekend, I'll also throw in a personal anecdote: once in college, my gf (now wife) and I dressed for Halloween parties as each other. My costume was such a hit, she forced us to leave the party early because I was getting too much action, too many other girls trying to get up my skirt, or give me a hilarious girl-on-girl lapdance. So that was sexual, but not at all in an "I get off on feminization" kind of way.

I will also point to Eddie Izzard as (eventually gender-stuff) drag that is generally not about sex, even where the comedy bits are.