I am a nonbinary young person in Tennessee: My clothing is not drag
In recent weeks LGBTQ Americans have been rocked by a slew of oppositional bills such as bans on gender-affirming care for minors, bathroom regulations, and perhaps most arbitrarily, bans on drag performances.
In Tennessee, a newly passed law, currently challenged in court, characterizes drag as an “adult cabaret performance” and restricts its expression in public, in the presence of children, or within 1,000 feet of schools, public parks, or places of worship.
New anti-drag bills are rarely standalone pieces of legislation, and often accompany other attacks on transgender and gender nonconforming communities in the United States. However, anti-drag bills are uniquely flawed in that they fail to characterize the difference between performing and simply living as an LGBTQ+ American.
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I am a nonbinary young person. I am AMAB, which means that my gender assigned at birth was male. Despite this, during my formative years in high school and college I came to realize that my gender identity did not align with the markings on my birth certificate. I often felt “caught between” the two ends of the gender identity spectrum, and struggled to find ways to externally express my lived experience in a way that felt authentic to my internal gender identity.
There's a difference between performance and existence
Like many other nonbinary people, this means that my wardrobe includes a huge variety of clothing. On any given night I may wear a suit, a skirt, or a full length dress. For me, and many other gender nonconforming people, clothing is a rare outlet in which we have total control over our gender expression.
For much of our lives we do not get to choose how the world perceives us, but by dressing in a particular manner we are able to dictate how the world around us understands our gender.
Where bills like the recent one passed in Tennessee fall short is that they fail to distinguish between gender nonconforming existence and performance.
Often, assigned-male-at-birth trans and nonbinary people are asked if they are doing drag when they don a dress or skirt, and assigned-female-at-birth trans and nonbinary people are asked the same when wearing a suit or other men’s dress wear.
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Mischaracterization of drag does a disservice
It is critical to realize that for these people, wearing clothes that reflect their gender identity is not “doing drag” but rather is simply an everyday act of wearing clothing that feels comfortable to them. Because of the way that drag has permeated into the American zeitgeist, politicians and others with cultural power have begun to label any nonconformity with their expected gender norms as “doing drag.”
It is not that gender nonconforming people are incapable of doing drag, but rather that for trans and nonbinary individuals, participating in drag is an act that has to be done with intentionality. Mischaracterizations of drag do a disservice to genuine expressions of gender identity, and also minimize the creativity, effort, and talent that honest drag performances require.
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If GOP politicians want to ban drag, that is one agenda. However, if they want to use drag as an inroad to regulate the expression of all gender nonconforming Americans, that is a goal that is much more insidious. As long as anti-drag bills continue to be unclear in their distinction of performance and reality, all gender nonconforming Americans are at constant risk.
Drag is an artform that can be creative, groundbreaking, and even revolutionary for queer people. However, what it is not, and can never be, is a false equivalent to the lived experiences of trans, nonbinary, and gender nonconforming people throughout the United States.
CS Shushok is a writer and poet from the American South. Currently, they study at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee.
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This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: I'm nonbinary. GOP anti-drag laws are war on freedom of expression
