Why trans people aren’t big fans of RuPaul right now

This month, Logo TV’s reality competition show RuPaul’s Drag Race was accused of being transphobic and perpetuating anti-trans language.

That isn’t exactly what you expect from a show that airs on an LGBT-themed network and is hosted by an openly gay drag queen who uses male and female pronouns interchangeably. But ever since the show aired a controversial episode that used the word “she-male” late last month, there have been heated conversations between the show’s crew, transgender advocates, and the entire LGBT community about whether the episode went too far, whether the show should apologize, and if this represented a bigger problem with how gay, lesbian, and bisexual men and women treat their transgender brothers and sisters.

Here’s a brief guide to catch you up on the controversy, what’s been done, and where the conversation goes from here.

RuPaul is arguably the most famous drag queen in the world. RuPaul was born RuPaul Andre Charles on November 17, 1960 — she was a fixture in the club scene in the 1980s, scored a music smash with “Supermodel” in 1992, hosted her own television show, became a model for MAC cosmetics in 1995, and wrote an autobiography. In 2009 she launched her show, RuPaul’s Drag Race, which has become one of the most well-loved and entertaining reality competitions on the planet.

And you also have to factor in that it’s a show that features gay contestants, LGBT-friendly judges, and competitions where drag queens with names like Pandora Boxx and Rebecca Glasscock lip-sync for their lives. That’s a rarity in television today, and an anomaly when you consider that, according to GLAAD, LGBT characters only make up 4.4 percent of “all scripted series regular characters on the five broadcast networks” (NBC, CBS, ABC, FOX, and the CW).

Yes, Drag Race is almost certainly the most popular LGBT-focused show on television. And with that, it has become (not unlike other shows) a cultural touchstone for many people. “Because of our show, gay pop culture is pop culture in the mainstream. Everybody knows all of the terminology. It’s really interesting for us to bring a lot of the old ideas and gay culture forward to pop culture mainstream,” RuPaul told The Guardian in an interview this past February.

Shows like Drag Race have the power to shape wide swathes of our culture, even without network TV-level ratings, but they also have the power to educate, break stereotypes, and raise awareness among viewers who might not have a drag queen best friend, or even a gay friend to bounce ideas and questions off of. And that’s part of the reason why the show, and Ru, were called out by some transgender-rights advocates regarding its use of the terms “she-male” and “she-mail.”

The history of how “drag” came to be a term to refer to women or men who wore clothing of the opposite gender isn’t entirely clear. Some say drag is a shortening of the term “dressed as a girl”, or that it came from theater-speak for men who, while wearing women’s costumes, had skirts that used to drag on the floor. There’s even a theory that the word came from Yiddish.

Regardless of its beginnings, “drag queen” today primarily refers to men who dress up as women for entertainment purposes. If you walk into a gay bar there might be a show featuring a popular drag queen, or a bingo night hosted by one.

Transgender refers to people whose gender identity and gender expression differs from the sex they were born with. Moreover, “most transgender people seek to bring their bodies more into alignment with their gender identity.” GLAAD explains. Gender identity is someone’s personal sense of being a man or a woman (or neither), and is deeply and drastically different than a man who may dress up as a woman to host an entertaining bingo night and make a few dollars.

Cross-dressing refers to the act (occasional) of putting on clothes that are usually for the other sex. Sometimes you hear about cross-dressing being used as part of a sexual fetish. But GLAAD explains that the term “should NOT be used to describe someone who has transitioned to live full-time as the other sex or who intends to do so in the future.”

So in short: Transgender shouldn’t be interchanged with drag queen. Transgender people should not be called cross-dressers. When drag queens put on women’s clothes they’re doing a form of cross-dressing. But you don’t necessarily have to be a gay man or woman to partake in cross-dressing or be a drag queen/king. (If you need more research, GLAAD has the best guide out there.)

The other issue is the show’s much longer-running use of the phrase: “Girrrrl, you got she-mail”:

Yup. “Shemale is an incredibly offensive term, and this whole business about if you can tell whether a woman is biological or not is getting kind of old,” Carmen Carrera, a former Drag Race contestant wrote in statement on Facebook. Carrera is a transgender person, and has transitioned from male to female after the competition. “Drag Race should be a little smarter about the terms they use and comprehend the fight for respect trans people are facing every minute of today,” she added. Carrera wasn’t the only person who spoke up about the segment, and mainstream sites like Slate weighed in on Drag Race’s misstep.

There are people who believe railing against the show’s use of “she-male” to refer to drag queens and censoring its continued usage of “she-mail” is something that we should think twice about. Part of that is drag’s history in pushing the envelope in dealing with sensitive political and social issues. “Respectability politics will always be in conflict with drag, an art form with countercultural subversion at its heart,” trans activist Andrea James wrote for Boing Boing. “The right to offend people is a cornerstone of the LGBT movement, and I will always defend anyone who offends our community’s finger-wagging schoolmarms. Every movement and community needs jesters,” James added.

James argues that in order to bridge empathy and understanding, you need to break down walls and ideas of the way people are supposed to act. And by censoring drag queens who are doing this, you might think you’re helping but you might also be inhibiting a solution. An argument could be made that drag queens laughing off the term she-male takes away its venom, not unlike the way women have tried to reclaim the word “bitch” and gay men, the word “faggot.”

There was even some push-back from a former contestant Sonique who, like Carrera, transitioned after the show:

Figuring out which side is more right than the other, or if there’s one right answer to this controversy can be confusing. But producers decided to remove “She-mail” from the show and remove the “Female or She-male” segment from the show. They stated:

We wanted to thank the community for sharing their concerns around a recent segment and the use of the term ‘she-mail’ on Drag Race. Logo has pulled the episode from all of our platforms and that challenge will not appear again. Furthermore, we are removing the ‘You’ve got she-mail’ intro from new episodes of the series.We did not intend to cause any offense, but in retrospect we realize that it was insensitive. We sincerely apologize.

Instead of “Girrrrrrl, you’ve got she-mail”, this is what last night’s intro looked like:

Shoot.

To this day, there is no evidence that RuPaul is a Paul scion.