In today’s, “What in the world are they thinking?” we have the Drag Queens Reading Hour in Mobile coming up. Organizers with Rainbow Mobile, a LGBTQ rights group, is hosting the event. Though their original invitation encourages parents with children as young as three years old to come and hear a drag queen read at story time, there are parents asking if they can bring children even younger than three.
I don’t care what your stance on alternative lifestyles is, this is absurd. The Centers for Disease Control hosts a website on developmental milestones. At the age of 4 children often still can’t tell real from make-believe. How does introducing them to a drag queen do anything but confuse them about what to expect in society?
In a society where drag queens’ main purpose historically has been to promote a type of personality within the homosexual community (see below study for more on that.) By the age of 5 children are just starting to understand gender, for the purposes of staying on topic I won’t go into my position on the national transgender movement among young kids, except to say I don’t believe science backs up the emotional and developmental ability of young children or early teens to choose their gender identity.
- Drag queens, or female impersonators, differ from transsexuals and individuals with transvestic fetishisms1 in that they are gay individuals who don female clothing with the explicit goal of performing in front of audiences (Schacht, 2000).
- Drag queens don their costumes primarily to perform at gay bars, nightclubs, and organized competitions (Berkowitz et al., 2007; Schacht, 2002). Their apparel is not intended to depict ordinary female attires like that of transgender women but portray purposefully outlandish, often vulgar, and exaggerated stereotypes of womanhood (Harris, 1995; Tewksbury, 1994).