RuPaul’s Drag Race UK is leaving the BBC. Depending on which corner of the internet you inhabit, this is either another devastating retreat from LGBTQ representation or long-overdue evidence that the culture has finally tired of subsidizing men’s caricatures of women. I am not entirely convinced by either explanation.
For one thing, the BBC has not announced some sudden feminist awakening. The broadcaster says it is making difficult programming decisions amid significant financial pressures, and Drag Race UK is not actually disappearing. After its current eighth series finishes on BBC Three and iPlayer, the franchise will move from the publicly funded broadcaster to the subscription service owned by the private company that produces the franchise. A new Drag Race UK All Stars is already scheduled to premiere there in autumn 2027.
But almost immediately after the announcement, I began seeing two familiar clips circulated as evidence of why the show deserved to go. Neither clip aired on the BBC…both came from the American All Stars series.
One was Jimbo’s infamous Fame Games talent exhibition on RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars 8: an enormous-breasted caricature producing whipped cream from prosthetic nipples as part of an increasingly sexualized food gag. The other was Gottmik’s All Stars 9 runway, which turned a double mastectomy into high-fashion spectacle—surgical instruments, glittering red scars and fake breasts representing what had been removed carried in a clear bag. Gottmik described the latter as deeply personal art celebrating the surgery that changed her life. Fashion and LGBTQ media largely celebrated it accordingly.
I’m fairly certain I watched them both when they originally aired…because, for a long time, I was a Drag Race fan. That feels important to say before going any further. I did not arrive at this show as a radical feminist searching for misogyny. I watched periodically in my early twenties and more regularly in my late twenties and early thirties because I enjoyed it. I liked the costumes, ridiculousness and theatricality. I liked watching people take everything associated with glamour and femininity and turn the volume all the way up. Drag was camp…artificial by design. Nobody actually thought women walked around with three-foot wigs, waists cinched to cartoon proportions and enough rhinestones to become a traffic hazard.
The exaggeration was the joke and imitation was the highest form of flattery…at least that is how I experienced it. Of course, affection and misogyny are not mutually exclusive. A caricature need not be motivated by hatred to reproduce something degrading, and perhaps there were things I simply wasn’t seeing then. Over time, though, I sensed a change.
By the last several regular seasons I attempted to watch, I rarely made it very far. I would watch two or three episodes and lose interest because something about the humor felt more hateful than I remembered. I continued watching All Stars longer, perhaps because familiar queens connected me to the version of the franchise I had enjoyed.
I remember watching Jimbo and Gottmik and thinking some version of the same thing: Are women supposed to find this endearing? The question has become harder for me to dismiss because I am still not completely convinced that all drag is misogynistic.
That probably separates me from many radical feminists. I understand the argument. Drag relies heavily on exaggerated female stereotypes and there is something worth interrogating about men being applauded for performing traits for which actual women have historically been belittled. But parodying the conventions associated with a sex is not necessarily the same thing as despising that sex. Camp can mock gender roles precisely because everyone recognizes their absurdity. At its best, I think that is what I once found enjoyable about Drag Race.
The problem is that somewhere along the way, I began recognizing something beyond the exaggeration of femininity: the degradation of women. Radical feminism certainly gave me a vocabulary for noticing misogyny I once absorbed without examining closely. Getting older probably changed my tolerance, too. Jokes I laughed at in my teens and twenties land differently as a woman approaching forty, especially as a mother raising a daughter. Perhaps I simply learned to clock what had always been there. But I am not completely convinced of that explanation because I remember the camp without this much contempt.
There was always raunch, breastplates, exaggerated bodies, sexual jokes, and jest. RuPaul certainly did not build an empire on tasteful restraint…yet increasingly, female anatomy itself seems to function as the grotesque object: breasts as absurd props, vaginas as punchlines, pregnancy as caricature, menstruation as grotesque spectacle, and female embodiment generally as something simultaneously fetishized and mocked. Perhaps what feels different is not simply greater sexualization, but that the sexualization has acquired somewhat of a moral armor. What might once have been defended as an intentionally vulgar joke can now be presented as an expression of identity, liberation, or bravery.
Then there is the strange ideological inversion represented by Gottmik. I wrote earlier this year in Girls Are Not Allowed to Be Girls Anymore about a cultural pattern I keep noticing: femininity becomes more politically respectable the further it travels from women. A woman reveling in traditionally feminine aesthetics can still be dismissed as shallow, vain, unserious or trapped by patriarchal expectations. Put virtually the same performance on someone identifying as male, however, and femininity can suddenly become rebellious, boundary-breaking and brave.
Gottmik represents that contradiction almost too perfectly. Here is a female person who identifies as a man, underwent a double mastectomy, and then arrived to the Drag Race stage to perform an exceptionally elaborate version of femininity. On All Stars 9, the removal of the breasts themselves became part of the glamorous performance. The scars were decorated and fake breasts representing what had been removed became accessories…the result was celebrated as high art and transgender liberation.
I do not doubt that Gottmik sincerely experiences it that way. But viewers are allowed to consider what cultural messages exist beyond her intentions. I cannot stop thinking about the girls watching a culture in which female breasts can be surgically removed and their removal celebrated on a stage devoted to femininity, while femininity itself becomes more daring and culturally valuable precisely because it is being performed by someone who has rejected being a woman.
Keep the makeup. Keep the stilettos. Keep the corsets, wigs, and glamour. Lose the woman.
Femininity is not disappearing, what has become unfashionable is the idea that femininity might simply belong to a woman without requiring explanation. Which brings me back to drag itself. If campy imitation necessarily requires contempt for the sex being imitated, I would expect to encounter the same feeling watching drag kings. Generally, I do not.
Contemporary drag-king performances retain much of the same absurdity: exaggerated masculinity, painted facial hair, swagger, costumes, theatrical sexuality and deliberately overdone male mannerisms. Yet when I watch women parody men, I rarely come away with the sense that male bodies themselves are disgusting, that masculinity is being borrowed because women perform it better than men do, or that men as a class are the joke.
The camp survives without the cruelty.
That makes me wonder whether something besides drag is changing. Young men today are coming of age in a media environment where pornography, red-pill influencers, manosphere content and algorithmically rewarded hostility toward women are readily available. Gay men are not somehow raised outside of male culture merely because they are gay. Sexual orientation does not vaccinate anyone against sexism.
And Drag Race now exists within another cultural shift: the presence of performers who do not understand drag primarily as temporary gender play, but who identify themselves as women, men or something else according to gender identity. The older joke depended, at least partly, upon the audience knowing what was happening: a man was theatrically imitating femininity. The distance between performer and performance created the camp. But what happens when acknowledging that distance becomes offensive?
If a male performer must literally be understood as a woman, then criticizing his performance of womanhood is no longer criticism of a caricature; it risks becoming criticism of his identity. And when female performers identifying as men can return to femininity as something subversive, the relationship between drag and sex becomes stranger still.
At that point, I am not sure we are playing with gender roles anymore. Sometimes it looks more like we have reconstructed them and changed who is allowed to receive applause.
Which is why I find the reaction to Drag Race UK leaving the BBC more interesting than the relocation itself. The fact that American Drag Race clips are being circulated as evidence for a British programming decision says considerably more about the unresolved cultural argument surrounding drag than it does about the BBC’s stated rationale. But I also cannot join those mourning its departure. Partly because I no longer enjoy Drag Race and partly because, even setting my feminist objections aside, I am unconvinced that this sort of programming belongs on publicly funded television in the first place.
Equity, the UK performing-arts and entertainment union, made the opposing case, grouping Drag Race UK with I Kissed a Boy and I Kissed a Girl, the cancellations I wrote about in my last Reality Bites. The union lamented that their loss takes LGBTQ culture away from “mainstream public service broadcasting” and onto a “niche subscription platform.” Its concern about performers losing work is understandable, but the statement also assumes something I am less willing to grant…that providing mainstream exposure to this particular expression of LGBTQ culture is itself an obligation of public-service broadcasting.
The BBC is not “government television” in the sense of being editorially directed by the British government. Its independence is protected by Royal Charter. It is, however, a public-service broadcaster funded through the television licence fee, creating obligations that do not apply in quite the same way to Netflix, Paramount+, WOW Presents Plus or another voluntary subscription service.
Someone who wants Drag Race should be free to watch it and someone who wants to produce it should be free to make it. However, I am not convinced that people who object to highly sexualized performances built around exaggerated representations of women should be required to subsidize it as part of a public broadcasting system. Moving the franchise to a service operated by the company that produces it strikes me as fairly unobjectionable…its audience can follow it there. Drag has hardly been banished from British culture.
I therefore do not greive Drag Race UK’s departure from the BBC, but I also do not mistake a budget decision for a feminist victory.
What I know is that camp does not require contempt and exaggeration does not require degradation. Playing with femininity does not require treating female bodies as grotesque props nor does liberation require celebrating the removal of the body parts that make women recognizably female.
I used to watch Drag Race and see men having fun with femininity. Increasingly, I found myself watching men—and sometimes women who no longer call themselves women—receive applause for versions of femininity in which actual women seemed required either to become the punchline or disappear entirely.
As Drag Race UK leaves the BBC, I am much less interested in bemoaning where the show is going than in asking how something I once enjoyed became something I no longer recognized. Maybe I learned to recognize the contempt or maybe the contempt became harder to hide. I suspect both can be true.