Drag queens are a way to ridicule females while staying on the right side of the tracks
Just when you thought “See it. Say it. Sort it.” couldn’t get more grating, Thameslink handed it over to a fat drag queen in pink knickers. In a video now doing the rounds online, former RuPaul’s Drag Race contestant Pixie Polite belts out “See it. Slay it. Sort it.” with the manic cheer of a 1980s kids’ TV presenter. The stunt, we’re told, is about celebrating “love, diversity, and togetherness” and helping people “stay safe” when travelling by train.
I am one of those curmudgeons who believes all public safety announcements should be scrapped. If someone’s too busy scrolling to mind the gap, that’s natural selection doing its job. If they can’t figure out that a wet platform might be slippery, perhaps the outside world just isn’t for them. And judging by the collective muttering that ripples through the carriage every time the train manager parrots, “If you see something suspicious…”, this isn’t a fringe opinion. Commissioning a bloke in a wig to sing the message to a europop beat doesn’t make it any more urgent, or any less insufferable.
But lazy public relations firms — and, naturally, the BBC — remain endlessly titillated by these RuPaul rejects. This is because drag performances are not only a shorthand for the ‘correct’ opinions — pro-trans, pro-“sex work,” pro-Palestine, they serve as a goad to wrong thinkers. What better way to give begrudging licence fee payers and trapped commuters the middle finger than by waving a pair of plastic tits in their face?
Sooner or later, drag will totter off in its heels and be replaced
But strip away the sequins and sass, and what’s left is a dreary male fantasy of womanhood. Drag isn’t rebellion or art — it’s a form of pornography pre-chewed for public consumption and spat out into the mainstream under the guise of entertainment.
It’s insulting to women, yes — but it’s also deeply insulting to gay men. Aggressively promoted everywhere from school libraries to prime-time television, drag is positioned as an antidote to harmful stereotypes — an acrylic fingernail jabbed into the eye of heteronormativity. Yet in practice, it flattens gay identity into a set of hypersexual, high-camp clichés. Instead of presenting gay men as fully human — simply men who love men — drag repackages them as props in a tawdry performance. It reduces what it is to be a gay man to one narrow, screeching caricature. Those promoting drag in the media and the men lining their pockets on stage, show zero concern.
Naturally, the fact that the performers are gay men has made many reluctant to criticise it. But make no mistake — the thrill comes not from the sparkle, but from the misogyny. Drag is the last socially acceptable form of hate because sexism is the least fashionable of the “isms.” In a society that rightly clamps down on other forms of bigotry no civilised person would dream of using the N-word — and rightly so. Yet slurs like “bitch,” “slut,” and “whore” are routinely spat from the lipstick-smeared mouths of drag performers, to raucous applause. RuPaul’s rating system of “Charisma, Uniqueness, Nerve and Talent” speaks for itself.
Even in the Thameslink video, comparatively wholesome Pixie Polite tells passengers, “Don’t be a cow.” It’s not the worst insult in the misogynist arsenal, but let’s be honest — it’s only ever used about women. This casual sexism is a wink, a sneer — a performance of superiority and a shared joke at the expense of prudes.
And so, drag serves as a pressure valve: state-sanctioned subversion. A way to ridicule females and indulge in gleeful humiliation — all while staying on the right side of the tracks. Of course, it challenges nothing. For now, it remains popular — because despite all the noise about “toxic masculinity,” misogyny never really goes away. Too many men use it to bond and too many women use it to show men they’re “not like the other girls.”
Sooner or later, drag will totter off in its heels and be replaced. Because as with pornography, what once stimulated will soon become boring and fans will move on. Perhaps it will simply be pushed off the stage by a backlash, either by people who just want “the trains to run on time” or the equally fascist Jezoballah fans. Maybe a totally new phenomenon will replace it. Either way, let’s hope whatever comes next draws a necessary line: one that separates gay, lesbian, and bisexual people simply trying to live our lives from the creeps and opportunists hitching a ride on the drag gravy train.
