Misogyny in Drag

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the performance of masculinity. Not masculinity itself, but the way certain people, mostly men, mostly powerful, mostly insecure, feel the need to stage it, to broadcast it, to weaponize it. The combat fatigues worn to Pentagon briefings. The tough talk about enemies and weakness and what it means to be a man. There’s a quality to all of it that I keep coming back to: it requires an audience. And it requires someone to be weaker than you.

Right now, that someone is a girl in a Scout uniform. Or a trans kid. Or, not so long ago, me.

Years ago, when I was on the board of GenderPAC, the Executive Director Riki Wilchins told me something I didn’t believe at the time. Riki said that homophobia was just misogyny in costume. That the discomfort people felt about gay men wasn’t really about gay men. It was about gender and what happens when someone refuses to stay within its lines.

I was around 30, and I had just lost my case in the United States Supreme Court, 5-4. I remember thinking it was an interesting theory, but I didn’t really understand it.

Now, I believe it.

Look at what Pete Hegseth and the Department of Defense are actually doing, not what they’re saying. They are pressuring Scouting America to remove 200,000 girls from the program. They want the name changed back to the Boy Scouts of America. They are using the weight of the federal government to push a private youth organization back behind a line that the organization itself chose to cross, because it was the right thing to do.

That is a performance. And what it’s performing is a very specific idea of manhood, one that only works if women and trans people and gay men stay out of the frame. We refuse to stay out of the frame. And that, I think, is what has always been intolerable to people like this.

I spent 36 years in this fight. Courtrooms, depositions, appeals, and a Supreme Court loss I still think about. I didn’t do any of that to perform something. I did it because I was an Eagle Scout who got thrown out for being gay, and I believed that was wrong, and I wasn’t willing to let it stand. That’s a different thing than staging a cage match to show the world how tough you are.

They renamed it the Department of War. Make of that what you will. They’ve been running this pressure campaign in secret. When I filed a FOIA request for their communications with Scouting America, they blew past the statutory deadline. They are not hiding this because they’re proud of it.

On June 25, I filed a federal lawsuit against the Department of Defense to obtain those records. I’ve been here before. I know how slowly this moves and what it costs. I’m doing it anyway, because Riki was right. This was always about who gets to be a man, and who gets to decide.

I’ve been arguing about that for 36 years, and I’m not close to done.

Follow the fight at JamesRDale.com or here