Lawmakers’ agendas would ordinarily be too stodgy a subject to interest drag performers. So it was an ominous sign last December when Eureka O’Hara opened her “Big Mawma” music video with a clip of a news report about Republicans from her home state of Tennessee fixating on “deceptive claims about young transgender children having gender-affirming surgeries.”
“Well, it’s the truth,” O’Hara reasons over Zoom about her decision to use that current event reference as a 13-second intro. The rest of the clip depicts transgender coming-out narratives — partially inspired by her public acknowledgement of her own trans womanhood the same day as the video drop — and the allyship of plus-sized, cis women over her track’s militantly anthemic electro-pop.
Over the first three months of 2023, the Republican supermajority in the Tennessee Legislature has fashioned the alarmist narrative about trans youth that served as a grim backdrop for O’Hara’s on-screen defiance of transphobia into a raft of restrictive legislation. Those lawmakers have been pushing through a sweeping collection of bills that crack down not only drag shows, but may imperil the performing careers of singers and instrumentalists who don’t do drag at all, but happen to be nonbinary, transgender or gender-nonconforming, while also eroding the rights of trans youth, adults and their families in crucial education and health care matters.
Read more at
https://www.npr.org/2023/03/21/1164220466/tennessee-anti-drag-law-trans-nonbinary-musicians
