Laws that seek to ban drag performances are cropping up in state legislatures across the United States, and their effects could go beyond just entertaining shows. There are at least 32 bills currently in the state legislatures seeking to ban drag shows, with some specifying that exposure to the LGBTQ+ community is child abuse, with most banning minors and drag performers from public spaces. These bills have been introduced in at least 14 states, including Arizona, Arkansas, Idaho, Kansas, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and West Virginia.
The ACLU is tracking 278 anti-LGBTQ+ bills across 33 states, many of which target bathrooms, IDs, books, healthcare, education, and sports. While these bills are part of a nationwide effort to legislate trans people out of existence, banning drag specifically could be a step too far, according to Sybastian Smith, the Director of Organizing for the National Center for Transgender Equality.
“Five of these bills have specified that exposure to the LGBTQ+ community is child abuse, most of these bills ban minors and ban drag performers from public spaces. In fact, about six of these bills have defined drag performers as people who dressed and expressed differently from their ‘biological sex’ or ‘gender identity,’ and we have concerns that this also applies to everyday transgender people,” Smith told LGBTQ Nation.
One of the bills, House Bill 359 in Montana, would ban minors from attending drag shows, ban drag performances from public libraries and schools, and ban minors from entering any business that provides a drag show (labeling any such business a “sexually oriented business”). A drag performance is defined in the bill as “a performance in which a performer exhibits a gender identity that is different than the performer’s gender assigned at birth using clothing, makeup, or other physical markers and sings, lip syncs, dances, or otherwise performs for entertainment to appeal to a prurient interest.” According to Zooey Zephyr, the first and only transgender woman in the Montana House of Representatives, this wording could apply broadly not only to drag performers but to any transgender person in certain situations.
In addition, Tennessee’s House Bill 9 and North Dakota’s House Bill 1333 ban drag from being performed on any public property, which would mean drag would not be permitted at Pride events. It could also theoretically mean that a transgender person dressing in clothing matching their gender identity but not their sex assigned at birth could be arrested if they did anything constituting a performance, such as lip-syncing to a song they were listening to.
