Drag vs trans: why drag and being trans are not the same thing

Drag is a performance: people dress up and play with gender, usually for an audience. Being trans is an identity: it means someone's gender is not the one they were assigned at birth, and that does not switch off when the show ends. A person can be a drag performer, trans, both or neither, and most trans people have never done drag. The two have been confused for a long time, for reasons that are partly historical, and the confusion still has consequences.

What is drag?

Drag is a form of entertainment in which people dress up and perform, usually in an exaggerated way: lip-syncing, singing, dancing, comedy, sometimes political satire. A drag queen performs a heightened femininity, and a drag king a heightened masculinity. Many performers build a persona with its own name, look and sometimes pronouns, and many step out of it after the show.

The word's origin is uncertain. It started as British theatre slang in the 19th century, and its first recorded use for actors in women's clothing dates from 1870. The practice itself is much older. Women's roles in Shakespeare's theatre were played by boys and young men, because women were not allowed on the public stage. In Japanese kabuki, male actors called onnagata have played women's roles since women were banned from performing in 1629. British pantomime still casts a man as the dame and, traditionally, a young woman as the principal boy.

These were theatre conventions, many of them born of rules that kept women off the stage. Drag today keeps the same core: a costume, a character and a show, with much of the fun coming from everyone being in on it.

What does being trans mean?

Transgender, or trans, describes someone whose gender is not the one they were assigned at birth. It is not a costume or a character, and there is no audience: it is who someone is at work, at the shops and asleep. It does not depend on clothes, hormones, surgery or passing.

So when a trans person asks to be called by a new name and pronouns, that is not a stage persona. Advocates for Trans Equality, a US trans rights organisation, puts the difference simply: drag performers are artists who can step out of a role, while a trans person's name and pronouns are part of their identity. It adds that calling a trans person's everyday presentation drag is hurtful, because it suggests their identity is a show they are putting on.

The useful distinction is between gender expression, meaning the outward look and manner, and gender identity. Drag plays with expression, loudly and on purpose. Being trans is about identity, and a trans person's everyday expression can be as plain or as flamboyant as anyone else's. Non-binary people belong in the same picture, and whether non-binary counts as trans has its own answer.

Are drag queens trans women?

Usually not, sometimes yes, and never by definition. Historically, most drag queens have been gay men, and the media guide of GLAAD, the US LGBTQ media organisation, says many still are gay cisgender men. But drag shows have always included trans women and other gender-diverse people. GLAAD notes that some trans performers began their careers seen as gay men, and were drawn to drag because it was one of the few places where their femininity was accepted and even celebrated. After realising they were trans women, many kept performing, for the income and for the friends and community they had found there. Before the word transgender came into common use, some of these women called themselves female impersonators or showgirls.

It works the other way too. Most trans women have never performed in drag, and GLAAD notes that they are frustrated when their lives as women are confused with a stage show. GLAAD's guide is plain about it: trans women are women, and unless they are on stage performing in a drag show, they are not drag queens.

The best-known drag show on television has had its own argument about this. In March 2018 RuPaul, the host of RuPaul's Drag Race, told The Guardian that he would "probably not" accept a contestant who had transitioned. Former contestants pushed back. Sasha Velour, the reigning champion at the time, replied on Twitter: "My drag was born in a community full of trans women, trans men, and gender non-conforming folks doing drag." RuPaul apologised two days after the interview was published. Trans performers have been part of the show since its early seasons, several of them coming out during or after their time on it. Peppermint was the first to enter the competition openly trans, in 2017, Gottmik the first openly trans man, in 2021, and in 2023 Sasha Colby became the first trans contestant to win a season of the US series.

How did drag and trans get mixed up?

Partly because, for most of modern history, the words did not exist to tell them apart. When the German doctor Magnus Hirschfeld wrote about gender in 1910, his category took in both people who dressed or performed in drag and people whose gender differed from the one they had been assigned at birth, as the US Holocaust Memorial Museum explains.

In the United States, the first person known to have called himself the queen of drag was William Dorsey Swann, born enslaved in Maryland, who organised drag balls in Washington in the 1880s and 1890s. By the middle of the 20th century, drag queen could mean a stage performer or someone who wore women's clothes in the street, which was then illegal in New York, and professional female impersonators worked to separate their act from queer life altogether. Meanwhile the same bars, balls and police raids brought gay men, drag queens and trans women together, as at the Compton's Cafeteria riot in 1966 and in the ballroom scene of Paris Is Burning. Our portrait of Marsha P. Johnson explains why she is remembered both as a drag queen and as a trans woman.

Some of it is plain carelessness. GLAAD notes that people still conflate drag queens with all trans women, who are often wrongly described as men in dresses. And it can end up in law. In 2023 Tennessee passed a law restricting "adult cabaret" performances on public property or where children could see them, and its definition included "male or female impersonators", a phrase it did not define. LGBTQ advocates warned that it could be misused against trans people. An adviser to one of the law's sponsors said it had nothing to do with how anyone dresses or identifies, and the state branch of the American Civil Liberties Union said it did not make it illegal to be trans in public. Either way, the vague wording left trans people unsure where they stood.

Drag kings, non-binary performers and everyone else

Drag has never belonged only to queens. Women performed as men on stage long before anyone said drag king, a term first found in print in 1972. Vesta Tilley was one of the best-known male impersonators of the English music hall, with a career that ran from 1869 to 1920. In 1920s Harlem the blues singer Gladys Bentley, a Black lesbian performer, played the clubs in a tailcoat and top hat. From 1955 to 1969 Stormé DeLarverie toured the United States and Canada as master of ceremonies of the Jewel Box Revue, the only male impersonator in a troupe of female impersonators. She is often linked to the Stonewall uprising, although the record is unclear about whether she was even there that night.

Being butch and being a drag king are different things, although for some performers, DeLarverie among them, masculinity on stage and off went together.

Drag kings are less common and less visible than queens, but they have a long history of their own, and like queens they can be any gender: many are women, and trans men and non-binary people perform too. Modern drag king shows often feature personas that mix masculine and feminine traits, or fit neither. GLAAD adds that trans women, cis women, trans men and non-binary people all perform as drag queens as well, which is one reason many performers now prefer the broader term drag artist.

Non-binary and genderqueer performers show how a person and a persona can differ. Bimini Bon-Boulash, runner-up on the second series of RuPaul's Drag Race UK, is non-binary and uses they/them out of drag and she/her in drag.

Which words should you use?

• Drag queen, drag king, drag artist, drag performer. These describe what someone does on stage. In drag describes the costume and the persona, not the person underneath.
• The drag name and drag pronouns for the persona. Many performers use one name and set of pronouns in drag and another out of it, the way an actor does not answer to a character's name after the show. If you are not sure, use the stage name, or ask.
• Never call a trans person's everyday life drag. A trans woman's clothes, name and pronouns are not a costume, and asking whether she does drag is not a polite way of asking whether she is trans.
• Cross-dresser is a different thing again. GLAAD uses it for people, usually men, who sometimes wear clothes associated with another gender, not as a performance and without wanting to transition. It does not describe drag performers, and it never describes trans women.
• Older labels carry history. Female impersonator is an older stage term, and some trans women used it about themselves before transgender was in common use. Faux queen, once used for women who perform as queens, is criticised for implying that their drag is fake.
• Leave slurs where they are. Some words that circulate in parts of drag culture are slurs when aimed at trans people. A performer using a word about themselves is not an invitation to use it about anyone else.

Doing drag, dating someone who does, or neither

Drag can be part of a trans person's life in many ways: a job, a hobby, a community, or, as GLAAD describes, a place where some trans women found their femininity accepted before they understood they were trans. It can also be no part of it at all. Neither tells you anything about someone's gender that they have not told you themselves.

If you perform, a dating profile can say so, and it helps to say how you like to be referred to in and out of drag; what to put on a dating profile has more on that. If a match performs, ask about it the way you would ask about any art: what the persona is like, where they play, how they got into it. Do not treat it as a clue, and do not ask them to prove anything.

If what draws you is playing with your look every day rather than on a stage, our guide to androgynous style is a better starting point. T4TSpace is a dating app by and for trans and non-binary people, and every account is checked by a person; whether drag goes on your profile is entirely up to you.