“SHE’S REALLY A MAN!?”

What does it really mean to be feminine? What does it mean to “serve fish,” or be “giving man in a dress,” and what do those phrases say about masculinity? Further, how can these concepts, that are inherently hetero-centric and can seem to oppose the freedom of the expression they represent, severely complicate queer art that was meant to be subversive?  

To not only honor our transgender siblings and our own personal identities, but to truly stress the vitality of these conversations on community wide injustice, Ixi Azuli and I sat down with some of Pittsburgh’s greatest trans-identifying drag entertainers to facilitate a discussion on the discrepancies and collectiveness in our experiences for Transgender Day of Visibility, March 31st.  

I transitioned at 21, and, funnily enough, a month after I had started drag. When I made my debut, I had no true intention and no idea what I wanted. I was, still though, forming an understanding of myself; a lifetime of alienation coming to a head, adorned in a heavy black wig, a tattered nightgown, white face paint, and wrapped in bloodied gauze. This iteration of Dezz was something of a woman, or maybe more so, the death of what womanhood was for me. To truly exist as a young girl was ill fitting at best, but in that presentation, what I had been searching for was performance.  

My likeness was already a character, whether I had the language for it or not, and this characterization of the self, not just the persona, is ever present in the reality of transness. My cofacilitator, Ixi Azuli, had started her transition, similarly, fighting an internal battle as of to what or who she should or could be, and therefore, presenting “like an alien” in the beginning of her drag. She describes it as “stemm[ing] from dysphoria, as a trans person, feeling othered and feeling wrong in your body, really internalizing that based off of how the world perceives you, and then putting that out into your artwork.” Though through her continual inner discovery and physical transition as a woman, her work began to center itself around the understanding of, “I just wanted to be pretty.” But this beauty is not meant to be taken at face value. This essence comes with a story; it comes with lived experience. Art is, or at the very least should be, inherently personal. Creation roots out of experience, and existing while trans is incredibly complex, in a way that represents that of a garden, blossoming in its intertwined formation of a masterpiece. 

Gwendolyn P. Kollins IS a masterpiece. She is her art, with an expertise in distortion that builds herself into “her own kind of creature” that is just as much self-reflective as it is beautifully haunting. “It’s just me and my makeup…Gwen is an extension of myself.” While identifying as trans feminine has been a more recent development, she’s identified as non-binary for most of her life. “I live to push the boundaries of gender and what people consider a norm.” Although the current administration has made access to hormones increasingly more difficult, they still want to start estrogen. The mission of her art is directly tied into this currently evolving identity; it is to express their gender through a means of fear. “My drag…I feel like I am extremely stereotypically masculine appearing, so in trying to make myself look as scary, or altered…as possible, I can take that away. I can be myself.” 

The inner self and the outside perception are hand in hand with transness. Being raised socially as a “girl” often comes with “phases,” and it’s even more apparent while forming an understanding of your own transness. For Land Shark, before learning the proper language for himself as an individual, there were many thoughts and many iterations. “When I learned that transness was a thing, it was very binary. So am I a girl, or am I a trans man? …Neither felt correct.” Gender felt confusing for Land Shark, representing itself overtime through an “attachment” to “the tomboy phase,” as well as hyper femininity, and an increasing pressure to choose while not “feeling comfortable being all of [them] at once.” Out of drag, they identify as non-binary and use they/them pronouns, but the character of Land Shark as a drag king, using he/him, is still emblematic of the gender spectrum.  They started HRT last summer to further present with the level of androgyny that they crave in their day to life. “Land Shark,” though, “is a boy who has always been a boy…but [is] comfortable wearing whatever he wants and looking however he wants.” From behind, Land Shark can be anything, but he is always his own.

Authenticity is as flexible as the concept of gender itself. Drag King, Micah Sanova, is further proof, especially when considering the perception of sexuality as it intersects with the body itself. “I pretty much exclusively identify as queer…more exclusively, gender fluid [and a] trans man. I always make the joke that I pass as a stud really well, because everybody assumes I'm a lesbian…[but it’s] not a bad assumption, and I don't blame people for that. I've pretty much described myself as butch my whole life.” Masculinity in transness has become a lifestyle, Micah represents the kindness in it; to work hard, to protect, to “pick yourself up by the boot straps.” Past this grit, though, as a king, “Micah is a pretty boy… charming and suave. I can still be a man, but my way.” 

Throughout your life, you will be finding your way. Kaydence McQueen currently identifies as trans feminine, but the concept of gender had always been a theme, being introduced to feminine presentation through social media, and gradually adapting herself throughout her schooling with her fashion. “It was just little steps like that until I moved to New York and really got into the club scene…you’re seeing every type of person that there is on the planet,” and through witnessing authentic expression, she was then able to “explore her femininity” in drag. “As soon as I started…people kind of clocked me for being trans…not that what anybody else has to say determines transness, but having other people be able to see it in me was definitely really validating.” This discernment allowed Kaydence to pursue her transition, now three months on estrogen.  Being seen, when it can feel impossible to truly see yourself, is everything.  

Sometimes you don’t even hear yourself. I had told a friend, who had seen all of my phases, that I was a man, but what was I to do about it? I knew it enough to say it, but not enough to act on it. I spent therapy sessions being asked at each opening, “Do you still want to be a boy?” I did. “Are you ready to do something about that?” Of course, but did I need to? I was content doing my makeup to take a photo; I thought posting online was still being seen In some way. Plus, who would believe me? My femininity, and all of the influences from what I loved to consume, would have to disappear. I’d have lost myself, I thought. Could I still be pretty?

How you see yourself is a difficult balance to what is truly seen, and approaching the changes can be even harder. Though not a necessary step, hormone replacements are often deemed as “life saving,” but have become increasingly more difficult to obtain both in terms of affordability and access. While HRT is a commonly received form of care when building the foundation of your identity, the conversation itself seems to feed off of discomfort. “I would get invasive questions early on,” Ixi states, “Do you want the surgeries?” For a while, she didn’t. “Well, no. I’m just a ‘big dick girl.’ I don’t have a problem with that…but it’s very interesting now that I have gone past a threshold in my own transition where I’ve noticed so many pressures of what it means to be a woman in society…that translates to shame within my own body.” While Ixi acknowledges these features are not “inherently wrong,” it can still be so desirable to edit them that it becomes detrimental. “Surgery” is an intimidating word. The fear is to transition or not to transition. “It’s the pressure to feel a sense of breath, a sense of completeness.” Bottom surgery comes with terminology that is violent in nature, “…castrating, I don’t like that word…it’s not very pleasant for us to be feeling like…we have to go through with these very difficult processes within our body…[But] is it really worth it? Or is that because that’s what society says a woman should be?”

Everything always seems to circle back to “perception.” Micah Sanova shares being misgendered often, a major point of interest in respect to AFAB transness, but the issue itself is neither black or white. “Passing isn’t the most important thing in the world, because you don’t need to pass to prove your transness, however, people’s perception of you one thousand percent matters.” Micah’s drag removes the stereotype of persona. “My masculinity comes in different forms…I don’t like people having an assumption or any idea of what I’m supposed to look like…Micah is the intersection I have between that.” Gwendolyn Kollins toys with this concept often too, addressing “the tucking controversy,” much alike Micah in his debate between binding, taping, and the bare chest. This view of her body, feminine and yet untucked, is her “letting you clock me…but I am still me.” The visual of the body is a message, a “fuck you” to the assumption under performance, in both tucking and staying untucked. 

The ability to channel both the feminine and masculine is inherent to the trans experience at large, but when that ability is shown to further audiences, it can become digestible to extent it turns to parody. The stereotype of a drag queen is “a man in a dress,” but this rhetoric carries effects within all spectrums of transness. This descriptor, became, for me, a second 180 in its intended ideology. To be a man in a dress was what I had been searching for. The answer was not the man himself, but the way he was, the way he navigated his body in the world. It felt natural to fit the bill of a man dressed as a girl, because it what was what I had already felt like, playing with eyeliner in my room as a teenager, without any of the language. The language flattered myself, and it was meant to. Gwendolyn, in response, said “[Dezz’s] experience is very different…because your goal is to look like a man in a dress, and you do. That is not shameful…but whenever that is placed upon me, or placed upon other people, that’s whenever it becomes harmful.” The harm comes not from the choice itself, but the lack of ability to choose. To be a “man in a dress” can be taken either with personal comedic intention, or it can be a means of disrespect. Everyone in this circle has had an experience where they were not taken seriously due to their transness at face value. The thread, both within the phrasing as well as the detriment, lies in misogyny. It is not that man himself to laugh at, but it is the dress.  

Ixi, in creating this discussion, was aiming for perception “on how people view you both in and out of drag.” Transness creates a dichotomy regardless of your persona’s alignment, me feeling a barrier to comfortability while out of drag presenting masculine, and Ixi experiencing the opposite. Femininity, either intentional or assumed, is an open door to harm, but a shield when used as a means of performance. “Outside of the community of drag spaces…being a woman, or female presenting, kind of revokes that ability to feel safe and secure.” Though within the drag scene, “I feel like I wasn’t being respected until I presented myself as a man in a dress.”  

This conversation seems to run itself in circles, feeling reminiscent of gender essentialism, but what I refer to as “genital essentialism.” There’s a believe that our bodies in their physical form must be specifically representative, and while drag is meant to blur that image, the paradox is that it still seems to become enforced. Kaydence, having heavily engaged with queer media, relates to the early iterations of RuPaul’s Drag Race, “[it] was all about, like, it’s a man! Can you not believe it?” To indulge in this media hysteria, she told herself that was okay. It was okay to play into taboo, because it had made the art more approachable.  

Yet even now, where is the space for art from bodies that exists so far outside of that box? We hear the “book more kings” speech regularly, but who is really doing that work beyond speaking it? Masculine and “thing” drag, especially when the artist is AFAB, deepen the paradox of representation even further. Is the conversation just overcompensation? As Land Shark says, “Why can’t It just be drag? We are all playing with gender…we’re all playing with, what it is, maybe, to even be human. Why is that way that [drag] is judged so dependent on the box people see it in?”  

Overcompensation is a whole beast of its own, often presenting in infantilizing language used for trans masculinity and continuing the, allegedly unconscious, belief that an AFAB body must still carry femininity in softness and in tone. The terminology used towards you may be correct on paper, but the intent behind it is often more thoughtless than its origin. My experience as a drag queen and a transsexual man has been greeted with overwhelmingly masculine language. Instead of digesting my art as feminine, my identity is on the plate. There’s a refusal to acknowledge my womanhood as a work of art to “spare my feelings,” but the reality is simple. There would be nothing to be “corrected” if I were a cis man. Micah, while blending the gender presentation of their king persona, shares my experience. “People love to do that to me, where they’re like, ‘Oh, you’re so sexy. You’re such a man!’ Yes, we all know it’s well meaning, however, if I’m up there in a piece of lingerie and a suit, I’m obviously trying to make a point…I don’t want you to see me as your stereotypical man.”  

There is a craving for outside audience to experience subversiveness to gender, but rarely the ability to truly accept it. Both in drag and in transness, when are we able to stop performing? The statements can carry through the number, but our existences beg further questioning. For Ixi and the community of trans performers as it currently stands, we feel “we have to make our identities more palatable” to fit into certain spaces. Shows, like brunches feel more like societal barriers. The art is kept from the audience, even though it has proven itself to be pleasurable. Gwendolyn’s art is frequently admired, “So many people have so much to say…about how different, crazy, cool, weird…” but the spaces haven’t existed for her, without her. “I feel like I have to PG-ify…If you don’t give people like that the opportunity to expand into those spaces, you will never see that we can do that.”  

Ultimately, we all see each other. For Ixi Azuli and I, sparking this conversation was not meant to highlight the pain in existence, but to acknowledge both it and the differences within it. 

Pain and pleasure, identity and gender, art and production; we are innately intersected, representative of not only ourselves, but all of our transgender brothers, sisters, and siblings.