Plastique Tiara is a miracle worker. She can take campy, comedy queens — overdrawn eyes, and all — and turn them into the fishiest visages of feminine charm. Look what she did with Bianca del Rio, a self-professed ‘clown in a gown’. She even turned monster glam extraordinaire Crystal Methyd into an Instagram tradwife on her way to Church. But when she posted a makeover of retired British diver Tom Daley, the TERFy side of Elon Musk’s X picked it up, labelling it ‘womanface’.
For the record, Daley wore a mint green dress he knitted with his own hands. Forget womanface, that’s grandma behaviour. And like all grandmas, I think it’s endearing.
I was surprised to find that the charge is not new. There are research articles as old as 2000, criticising drag for ridiculing women the way ‘blackface’ or ‘yellowface’ mocked Black and Asian people. The terms refer to White actors putting on face paint and performing exaggerated, racially charged gestures to a specific kind of background music.
The argument may sound logical to a smooth brain: if a dominant group impersonating a socially weaker one along the axis of race is bad, the same has to be true for gender, right? After all, what is drag if not men pretending to be women?
Also read: Dear queer community, biphobia is not cool. Stop rolling your eyes at bisexuals
What’s drag?
Drag in 2026 is synonymous with RuPaul’s Drag Race, the poster child of American homonationalism. In an effort to sell the show, drag queen RuPaul took specific aspects of the art form, zeroing in on men transforming themselves into beautiful ‘glamazons’. But even in 2009 America, the form was infinitely more diverse. Ballroom culture, drag kings, and alt aesthetics such as Club Kids had no place in the competition.
The irony is that the ‘man-to-woman’ transformation is precisely why the show broke out of the LGBTQ+ niche into the mainstream. Every straight friend or cousin I’ve forcefully shown a Drag Race lip sync to, struggled to believe that they were watching a man under the rhinestones and glitter. The show certainly evolved over time, dropping derogatory words and accommodating diversity as culture norms demanded. It features more trans, nonbinary, and gender non-conforming performers today than ever before.
The format, however, has not changed. The contest is for drag queens alone, and its participants perform femininity in myriad ways. Does that mean Drag Race runs on ‘womanface’?
A bisexual ex-colleague I introduced to the show was initially perturbed by it, though thoroughly entertained. On display was not the womanhood she lived — and battled against. For her, femininity was an exhausting daily negotiation with beauty standards, makeup hacks, and fashion. The queens on Drag Race were as alien to her as the men on TV kicking around a ball from one net to the other. As she kept watching the show, however — hooked to it as only an elite-tier queer can be — she realised that she would also like to try out drag.
The art form, she said, would allow her to access the impossible ideal of femininity. And there’s the rub.
Being ‘woman enough’
Gender is annoying. And it’s incessant. It informs every gesture, clothing choice, even something as mundane as workplace banter, and the hurdle for women is impossibly higher than the one for men. More than a few friends have confided in me their insecurities around not being ‘woman enough’. As someone who has worn nail polish and felt gender as a physical weight on my nail beds, I can sympathise.
So when drag queens glue massive lashes to their eyelids, stack wigs on their head, and paint lips twice their normal size, they’re not merely cosplaying womanhood. They’re satirising the trappings of femininity. Name one performance by Jinkx Monsoon that degrades women, and I’ll tell you the number of ways in which you lack media literacy. Can you watch BeBe Zahara Benet’s number as Diana Ross and tell me she is attacking the icon?
An incident on the Marathi comedy show Chala Hawa Yeu Dya can point to the core of the problem. When a Bollywood guest star tried to mock-kiss Bhau Kadam, who was dressed as a woman in the skit — à la Ali Asgar’s Dadi character on Comedy Nights with Kapil — Kadam responded jovially but firmly, “We don’t do that here.” In an interview, another actor on the show, Kushal Badrike, discussed the need to preserve a woman’s dignity when he dons a sari. Actors on the Marathi show refused to do anything in their skits that a woman comic herself wouldn’t.
The complaint against drag queens is tied to this idea of dignity in performance. When drag queen Jimbo performs in an outrageous breastplate, women on X see the laughs as complicit in the artist’s supposed misogyny. What they fail to see is that drag is the biggest cannon aimed at respectability. The jokes are outrageous, and even the most absurdly comic performances have something to say about the world we live in.
(No, I don’t include Plane Jane’s ‘Burger Finger’ number here. It was exactly the kind of derivative and boring — dare I say, plain — storytelling that drag is a counterweight to.)
The best of drag queens poke fun at gender, not at women. There is a reason women are among the show’s biggest audiences. So no, dear TERFs, drag is not womanface. It’s much more interesting.
Views are personal.
(Edited by Aamaan Alam Khan)