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Prelude: The Nashville school shooting is definitely peak toxoplasma, a day later: people cheering everyone who entered that school with a gun, both the shooter and the police. Aidan/Audrey’s acts are a near-perfect scissor statement.
The statement on the shooting by the Trans Resistance Network is particularly toxically tribal. It hearkens back to the days of trying to sympathize with the Columbine shooters, where the narrative is shaped solely by early reporting and people were asking “What made them do it?”
Tangent: drag shows. But the use of the word “genocide” in the TRN’s statement made me stop and ponder: the modern term “genocide” includes not only the actual killing of group X, but also the halting of cultural practices as a lead-in to the eventual rounding up and killing.
Here’s an odd little dynamic: halting drag activities in children's spaces is trans genocide for both sides, but in different ways!
For pro-trans activists, halting them is halting a ritual cultural activity, and hints at a wider cultural desire for eventual trans elimination through murders of the outed and the suicides of the closeted. It also removes an avenue for trans youths to discover their true gender and thus leaves them in a spiral of depression heading toward suicide.
For social-contagion theorists, halting the drag activities in children’s spaces is useful for preventing cis children from being memetically contaminated, and thus memetically sterilizing the trans community. Reasoning: since full transition includes sterilization (thus committing traditional genocide upon themselves rather effectively), trans people don’t breed genetically, but memetically.
Drag =/= transgender. Not even close.
If this was true, then you’d have legions of trans people aligning themselves with everybody else who is pointing out that drag shows for children is completely inappropriate.
But of course you don’t see that. Again with the revealed preference (I hate that I use this term twice, but IIWII). Trans people see drag performers and see themselves, which is why they can’t oppose them.
The question is not whether trans people support the right of people to perform drag shows, for children or not for children. That was not what OP said. Rather, OP equated drag performers with transgender persons, and that is empirically false.
@07mk (in the other reply to this post, and the thread following) indeed approximately caught my meaning. I’m starting from what I’ve seen on reddit, from leftists who take the time and effort to comment there. I’ve seen them saying that laws stopping “drag queen story hour”, the exemplar drag activity in children's spaces, would constitute genocide against trans people.
Now, I am pretty clear on the separation between trans and drag. The former is about living one’s felt identity and societal role. The latter is about performing/playing about identity/role, which makes it a form of clowning, like pro wrestling kayfabe, pulp SF, cosplay, fursuiting, and even religious ceremonies and televangelist preaching. (Osteen, looking at you.) I am familiar with this split from seeing it in my years in the furry fandom and two adjacent fandoms. I was even in theater growing up, and the similar-but-different onstage/backstage split behavior dynamic is always on my mind as a customer service rep at work and as an A/V tech at church.
Leftwards reddit has given me the impression they believe that children experiencing drag activities in public, and especially in children’s spaces, gives children awareness of gender realities they’ve been sheltered from by repressive churches, conservative schools, and uptight parents. I will take them at their word. I then connect that idea with their description of halting such activities as genocide.
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I don't think that's what OP did. I think the relevant parts of the OP are (correct me if I missed something):
I bolded the parts that I think are particularly relevant. The claim seems to be that "drag activities in children's spaces" is a form of "ritual cultural activity" for trans people. This could be taken to mean that "trans people have a ritual cultural activity of doing drag in children's spaces," but I don't think this necessarily means that. Rather, it could be taken to mean that having drag performers performing in children's spaces is a type of cultural activity for trans people. This is, in itself, suspect, and the most charitable way I could interpret it is that it's claiming that trans people value such subversion of traditional gender stereotypes for helping to enlighten potential trans kids of their innate trans-ness. Which I still find very suspect, to say the least. But it doesn't require an equality between drag performers and trans people.
I think it implicitly equates them, because drag performances are indeed a type of cultural activity for drag performers or perhaps for some gay men. So by saying that they are a type of cultural activity for trans people, isn't OP conflating them?
I don't think the OP was saying that drag performances in general are a type of cultural activity for trans people; taken literally, the statement seems to be that drag performances for kids are a type of cultural activity for pro-trans activists (which, notably, is a different set of people from trans people, something I myself missed in my previous comment). Drag performances for kids (or, to use the OP's exact terms, drag activities in children's spaces) is a sufficiently specific and niche thing even among drag performances in general that it wouldn't even occur to most people to characterize it as a type of cultural activity for drag performers. I think the interpretation that the claim is "having drag activities in children's spaces is a type of cultural activity for pro-trans activists" makes at least as much sense as the interpretation that the claim is "performing drag activities in children's spaces is a type of cultural activity for trans people."
Which is itself a pretty suspect claim. Maybe it is a form of cultural activity for the activists who encourage and organize these performances - I haven't asked - but I feel like it's more of a "fuck you" to what they see as the conservative establishment and its oppressive gender norms. Which, to be fair, might be a form of cultural activity in itself, but then that gets into a more philosophical/definitional question of what is a "cultural activity" anyway?
I see your point, but it seems to me that OP's reference to genocide doesn't make sense under that interpretation.
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Which one is the one cross dressing for sexual gratification?
Neither, as it happens.
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