Drag was founded by trans women of color in New York City’s ballroom scene.

A recent academic study found that drag was related to improved mental health outcomes for trans women.

Drag helps trans individuals to explore gender fluidity, find community, and experience gender affirmation.

This post was co-authored with Abigail Tessmer.

Protests like Compton’s Cafeteria Riots and the Stonewall Uprising have become meaningful symbols of LGBTQ resistance against police harassment and violence. What is often left out of these stories, however, is the central role that Black and Brown trans women, femmes, and drag queens played in them. They faced the harshest police violence and were among the first to push back. Despite their leadership, many were excluded from mainstream LGBTQ activist groups and rewritten in the history they helped create. The irony is hard to miss: While white cisgender gay and lesbian individuals were gaining civil rights, gender-diverse people of color were stigmatized as “deviant others” in need of carceral interventions.

In response, Black and Brown trans women, femmes, and drag artists created their own spaces throughout the 1980s and 1990s. One of the most influential was the ballroom scene. These were gender-fluid spaces where drag performers formed “houses” of chosen families and competed against one another in a “ballroom” (usually a warehouse or abandoned space). Each ball was themed, requiring different types of dress and performance for categories that highlighted and celebrated femininity and queerness, with the hopes of “snatching” trophies and gaining status.

These ballroom houses—typically led by a trans woman or femme “mother”—were spaces that provided drag performers with what society often denied them: family, housing, support, guidance, and a sense of belonging. They were places where trans and gender-diverse people could survive, thrive, and celebrate one another.

By the early 2000s,........

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