Tuesday, June 18, 2024

So you’ve been entertained by drag all your life, why is it a problem now? Part I

Awhile back a Facebook friend reposted a GIF explaining how we have been entertained by people cross dressing aka transvestitism aka drag all our lives. So why is there such a public uproar now in certain predominantly Republican leaning states like Tennessee that theoretically bans such cross-dressing performances now and are persecuting those who represent the T in LGBTQ+.

To be clear, laws like the ones in Tennessee only forbid “Adult cabaret performance in the presence of minors”.   Nashville, Knoxville, or Memphis TN could host the next RuPaul Drag Race contest if RuPaul & staff make sure everyone who attends/participates in the contest is above the age of 21.  Still, why if someone wanted to have a drag queen reading hour for children at a local library would Republicans consider this to be a problem?

I know as I child I was entertained by certain cross-dressing performers.  ABC often aired the old Bugs Bunny Loony Toons cartoons and Bugs frequently crossed dressed.  As I was researching this blog post I found out Bugs cross-dressed a total of 40 times in the cartoons.[i]    And yes, I was entertained by this.   I watched the TV show that gave Tom Hanks his big break “Bosom Buddies” when it 1st aired on ABC.[i]  The show featured Hanks & co-star Peter Scolari dressing in drag to be able to live in a cheap women’s only apartment building, which I guess was still a thing in the early 1980’s.  I was disappointed when it was cancelled.   I also watched Monty Python skits where Eric Idle, John Cleese, Terry Gilliam, Terry Jones, Graham Chapman, and Michael Palin kept up the Royal Shakespeare Company’s tradition of men playing women’s roles despite the fact Royal Shakespearian actresses have been bringing women’s roles to life since 1660.[ii] And yes, I laughed.   One of my favorite bands growing up was Culture Club which of course featured famous transvestite Boy George.  I didn’t care that Boy George look more like a girl than a boy.   The songs were catchy good, and I enjoyed listening to them. Lately I’ve been watching Randy Rainbow’s YouTube channel and he frequently cross-dresses in his political parody videos.  I especially love the “Grumpy Trumpy Felon from Jamacia in Queens”[ii] with his homage parody of the Andrew sisters.  I could watch that video a dozen times or more.  So yes, I like it when Mr. Rainbow goes drag. 

 But what has changed?   Why suddenly is there a panic that somehow if a child encounters a man dressed as a woman or a woman dressed like a man it will lead to a damaging and exaggerated claim of that child being molested in the future?  

Because this is the 2020’s and the world has changed and remained the same at the same time.

I’m a Gen X er and like a lot of Gen Xers growing up I watched some of the groundbreaking PBS children shows like “Mister Rogers Neighborhood.”  I loved Mr. Rogers and his songs that explained the feelings I may be feeling.  However, because I was only four years old, I naturally didn’t have the verbiage/understanding to express those feelings in a positive way. Mr. Rogers took his role of children’s educator seriously and often consulted early childhood experts to make sure each one of his young viewers did indeed feel special and loved.    I’m still a fan of Mr. Rogers and naturally gravitate towards more mature ways to partake of Mr. Rogers' wisdom such as watching a documentary exploring the origins and significance of “Mister Rogers Neighborhood” on Netflix[iii].      

There was one moment in that Netflix Mr. Rogers’ documentary that caught my attention because I remember watching that particular Mr. Rogers’ episode as a child.   According to the documentary “Won’t you be my Neighbor” Rogers wanted to retire his famous Neighborhood of Make Believe and explore other more mature topics on television.    So, he introduced his young viewers to the concept of a re-run.    He walked his TV neighbors to a shed with hundreds of videotapes of his previous shows and explained essentially, he wasn’t making any more episodes, but don’t worry, there were plenty of TV shows that will air for a long time to come.     Then Fred Rodgers tried to produce a PBS show for grownups that was doing OK but not really a success.    While Fred Rogers was trying to appeal to TV viewers old enough to vote, the first superhero, super-action-adventure summer blockbuster film came out which of course was “Superman” whose comic book origins naturally had an element attractive to children. “Superman” was a major success due in no small part to the acting talents of Christopher Reeve.  Mr. Reeve had some training as a pilot and was able to contort his body on the wires in such an aerodynamic way you could believe a man can fly.     Because children have a hard time distinguishing between reality and make-believe at a young age, children thought all they had to do was tie something around their neck that acted like Superman’s cape, jump from a height and they could fly as well, leading to tragic accidents.   Per this Mr. Rogers Netflix documentary, and perhaps because Fred Rogers didn’t quite catch on with the adults as he had hoped, Mr. Rogers felt compelled to make more episodes of his kid’s TV show to make sure kids knew they couldn’t fly and that the movie Superman was make-believe, not real.          

OK, so what does Mister Rogers coming back to tell kids Superman is make-believe have to do with a rising tide of transgender phobia?

Because here’s also another fact I’ve experienced as a Gen X er.  

I had dinner at McDonalds today.   The McDonalds I got my chicken nuggets, fries and milkshake is near a grocery store I should have stopped at to get myself something a lot healthier and probably cheaper than extruded fried chicken parts, fried potatoes and an artificially flavored milkshake that may not contain any actual milk.    Why did I choose the unhealthier option?  Because back also in the 1970’s McDonalds started to target the children’s demographic aka the demographic I was a part of with Ronald McDonald & his plagiarized H. R. Pufnstuf[iv] costume creatures like Grimace, the Hamburglar, Mayor McCheese et al on TV.  The McDonalds’ children’s ad campaign culminated with those cartoony oversized puppets & trademarked red, white & gold colored clown appearing all over the child friendly Happy Meal box with cookies and a toy prize to play with in 1979.    It probably didn’t help that my mother is not a good cook and I’m pretty sure McDonalds is adding some type of addictive additive in the French fry oil that allows it to act like cocaine on my brain which of course was obviously still developing as a child back in the late 1970’s  & early 1980’s.     McDonalds in other words “Groomed” me to be a loyal McD  customer and now I’m prone to want it as an adult knowing full well the McDonalds French fries are just as bad for me as cigarettes and yet I can’t stop eating them!

OK, so kids are gullible.  What has this to do with someone in drag reading Mother Goose rhymes to them?

Well, it’s because kids are immature that sometimes an adult has to step in and force kids into decisions kids don’t like/won’t accept yet parents know it’s best for the kids like forcing them to eat soggy broccoli or cold peas over fast food French fries.   Idealistically, parents would want their children to consume the broccoli on their own but that probably won’t happen until their children are in their 40’s and have to reduce their cholesterol before their next checkup.   

So now that I’ve meandered completely off topic let me get back on topic.   Part of the problem may be that it’s becoming increasingly easier for someone (child or adult) to realize God may have made a mistake (except does God make mistakes?) when it comes to their birth gender and they can transition into the opposite gender if they wish.  This phenomenon was highlighted by Matt Walsh / Daily Wire’s “What is a Woman” documentary.  I went with a bootleg copy of the documentary because as much as I am a classical liberal and am broadminded enough to not take up my own side in an argument, I’m not willing to fork over $9-14 bucks a month for the privilege of entertaining an opinion/argument I may disagree with.   Matt Walsh struck me as a conservative version of documentarian Michael Moore with “What is a Woman” at times wandering into absurdist’ territory (seriously, humans believing they are a completely different species is part of LBGTQ+ now?).    However, the one thing that may have rung true in that “What is a Woman”  documentary is the notion the sudden rise in transgenderism may be a sign it’s a social contagion. [v]    This is where I rely on the reporting of someone else like the journalists who write for The Atlantic magazine.  Their July/August 2018 issue had as its cover-story how to deal with transgender youths.   Transgenderism, of course has become a buzzword and was/is gaining a lot of popularity with notable Olympic Gold Medal winning athlete/reality TV star Bruce Jenner transitioning into Caitlyn Jenner and other transgender reality TV shows such as TLC “I Am Jazz” gaining popularity in the late 2010’s. Heck there were 9.7 million TicTok reasons[iii]  why Anheuser-Busch was willing to give a couple hundred cases of Bud Light to transgender icon Dylan Mulvaney [iv]. So naturally more and more people are thinking about changing their gender or wondering if they are the right gender to begin with.  This gender identity question poses a problem for children that the Atlantic featured as an interview/YouTube video.  The Atlantic magazine spoke with a woman, who thought she was a transgender man only to realize mid-transition she was in fact a cisgender woman[vi].   She was lucky enough that she wasn’t far along enough in the treatments to allow her to return to her birth gender when the treatments stopped.  However, the article went on to explain that not everyone who undergoes transgender treatment/surgeries is able to reverse course if they change their minds later on.   Additionally, a 2023 article from The Atlantic magazine also stated that some doctors in the European Union are also reconsidering transitioning operations/treatments for children because the science is still vague/unproven. [vii]   Furthermore, while most European countries are still providing transitional care to those who young people who wish it, they are growing concerned at the rates that the need for transgender reassignment drugs/surgeries is growing.   

So yes, maybe Matt Walsh & some his Daily Wire colleagues are right to express concerns about pressuring a child to change their gender because of this social phenomenon where it’s ok or even cool to change your gender especially if the child isn’t showing the classic signs of gender dysmorphia disorder.   They just have this vague feeling they’re not right and feelings can be wrong.

 

I’m reminded of a story my grandmother frequently told to me growing up.   My maternal grandmother back in the 1920’s was known as a tomboy.   With my grandmother having five brothers it may have been understood why she preferred to do boy stuff and play with boys rather than do girly stuff.  One day my great grandfather sat my grandmother down and told her she could no longer play with the boys because she was a girl. My great grandfather naturally worried the boys would play too rough with her and not realize it.   If transgenderism was a thing in the 1920’s the way it is in the 2020’s someone would have told my grandmother she wasn’t a girl, she was a boy, pressured my great grandfather to put her on puberty blockers & testosterone and I wouldn’t exist because my mother couldn’t exit because some surgeon would have removed my grandmother’s ovaries, uterus, and mammary glands when my grandmother was still a child and didn’t know who or what she was.

Speaking of puberty blockers and other hormone treatments there are side effects of the hormone treatments like any other treatments.   Some of the side effects I’ve read for testosterone include higher blood pressure, an increased chance in blood cancer or heart attack or stroke due to higher lipids in the blood as well as liver disease.   Estrogen has similar side effects and can cause deep vein thrombosis as well.   Biological males wishing to transition to females may also take Progesterone and that may increase a chance for breast cancer for them.[i]   If parents put their transgender children on puberty blockers like GnRH it can affect their overall bone density and may make them the poster child for a Life Alert commercial around age 35.[ii]   You add in the general risks of undergoing general anesthesia to remove perfectly healthy sex organs and part of me can’t help but to wonder even if a child has a genuine case of gender dysmorphia disorder is the cure worse than the disease?   Think about it this way, if someone is suffering from anorexia, a similar body perception disease, no doctor in their right mind is going to recommend gastric-bypass surgery & prescribe weight loss pills to them just because the anorexic’s  brain is telling them their body is as grossly obese and ugly as mine.  The doctor would be sued for millions of medical malpractice dollars by the family of their anorexic patient after the anorexic dropped dead of starvation.  Why is gender dysmorphic disorder, a similar brain perception verses biological scientific literal body of truth, different in that respect?

Besides, there’s another reason why it may not be OK to be entertained by drag shows anymore.


[i] https://transline.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/229373208-What-are-commonly-used-medications-for-transition-

[ii] https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/gender-dysphoria/in-depth/pubertal-blockers/art-20459075


[i] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cross-dressing_characters_in_animated_series

[ii] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ues8ycOxXKM

[iii] Netflix, “Won’t you be my neighbor” Copyright 2018

[iv] https://generalist.academy/2021/07/02/mcdonalds-vs-h-r-pufnstuf/

[v] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_contagion

[vi] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V6V0p3_bd6w

[vii] https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2023/04/gender-affirming-care-debate-europe-dutch-protocol/673890/

 


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