JINKX MONSOON
IN CONVERSATION WITH OUR LADY J.
It’s Monsoon season, bitches. Speaking with writer, pianist and producer Our Lady J, Jinkx Monsoon lays it all bare on non-binary living, battling transphobia, and even spills some T on RuPaul’s recent comments on trans inclusion on Drag Race.
From storming the runway to being a voice for nonbinary visibility across the globe, this Seattle-born superstar isn’t afraid to raise their voice on the journey to full equality. Taking on transphobes, airport staff and RuPaul’s remarks on trans inclusion on Drag Race, it’s officially Monsoon season – and this queen isn’t holding back. OLJ: I’m so excited to be interviewing you. Connie Chung was an idol of mine as a child and I feel like I’m finally stepping into that journalism role.
JM: When asked who I wanted to interview me, you were the only name I said.
OLJ: I love you.
JM: I love you, too.
OLJ: If you don’t mind, let’s go deep.
JM: Yeah!
OLJ: You’re currently touring the world where you’re creating and performing in shows that are not only hilariously entertaining but also raise awareness for our community. My first question is: Do you still have a pulse? And if so, how do you find a balance in this jet-setting lifestyle? JM: My bloody family has been supportive of me because this is what I’ve wanted since I was a tiny child. I also have to give a lot of credit to my chosen family. When I meet up with my friends, we have to pick up where we left off and accept that, even though we haven’t see each other for three months, all our time together is valuable. I think it’s the people in my life that I maintained close relationships with that really make this all possible.
OLJ: How do you think that drag changed your life, specifically as a non-binary youth?
JM: I came out aged 14 and I’d never been your stereotypical boy. I was asked multiple times in my childhood if I identified more as a girl, and pretty much every time I was asked, I said ‘yes’. They’d ask me about transitioning and, at the time, my mum would use language that was almost right. I remember where my mum took me through the steps of transitioning and explained it to me. I was onboard, until she ended the conversation with, “And then one day, we will go see a doctor and he will remove your penis...”
OLJ: Wow.
JM: I didn’t like that idea, and like at seven years old, I was very against the idea of removing my penis. Of course, nowadays, I know countless trans people who have transitioned and lived their lives as the sex they identify as but still have some of the original parts they were born with – that was their choice and where their journey took them. I think there’s a part of me that feels like, if I had known that was an option at an early age, things could have gone differently. I might have transitioned in my teen years, at puberty, and be living my life as a woman right now if I knew you could do that and still have a penis.
OLJ: Oh darling, it’s never too late to come over to this side...
JM: I don’t think I have any regrets around that. I don’t think I made the wrong choices. Drag was the basis and quickest way when I came out and starting to claim my identity. Drag gave me everything I was missing as far as expressing my femininity. I started drag right before aged 15. Every Friday and Saturday night, so it bled into my life day-to-day and gave me the confidence to start claiming my own identity. When the conversation started in our community that there’s cis and there’s trans, trans capitulates a lot of things. It doesn’t just mean people who were born one sex and transition to the other, it also means people who are born one sex and kind of create their own gender identity in the way that’s going to be help them. That’s where I am now. I identify as non-binary, non-conforming, and fluid because I know that I’m never becoming more masculine, but I don’t know exactly where my journey
will take me in claiming my own femininity. I don’t know if this is... I don’t want to think any given point that my journey with my gender discovery is going to be over. At aged 30, I still think I have a lot more transitions ahead of me, I just don’t know what they are yet.
OLJ: Absolutely. I see non-binary as a beautiful space of self-exploration where you don’t have to declare yourself locked into a position that might not be comfortable to you in the future.
JM: Yeah, and the best thing that drag has given me now is it’s become my career, and this is less about drag and more about getting to realise my dreams as a performer, but my life doesn’t require me to fit in to society in the way I once was asked to. When you’re working at the GAP, as a gender nonconforming person, eventually you have to be able to go to work as something that’s not going to freak out your customers who don’t understand or speak the same language as you. I used to be required to wear what I call my ‘boy uniform’ and now that my life doesn’t require me to fit into the mainstream community in the same way, I can dress more expressively in a way that feels right for me and really the only place I had to deal with ignorance is at the airport as there’s still plenty of ignorance there.
OLJ: When are they going to get rid of that male or female box you have to check (at the airport)?
JM: I’ve had so many people try to justify it with the whole “they need to know if you could be stuffing something in your crotch” thing. All I’ve ever heard in regards to that gender scanning system is neutral experiences and bad experiences. I’ve never once had a great experience.
OLJ: Same. I mean, with the freaking x-ray, they can tell the difference between a penis and a gun, hunni. Y’know?
JM: You’d think so. I mean, one is made out of fleshy organs and the other is metal. You’d think they could articulate the system a little bit more.
OLJ: It does seem to be a systemic tool to make gender non-conforming people feel weakened.
JM: Yeah, totally.
OLJ: Do you mind sharing some of the tools you’ve developed to counter a world that openly discriminates against gender nonconforming folks?
JM: I try my best to show how big of a deal it isn’t to me. When I have those encounters at the security line, and I just want to add one thing about the ridiculousness of it first... I get misgendered all the time where they assume I’m a female-bodied person, so I go into the scanner and there’s what they call – and this is the term they’ve deemed appropriate – a ‘groin anomaly’ when they scan me as a woman. There’s a blob of something they can’t identify when matched to a woman’s body so they have to do the hand patting. I’ve had so many embarrassing experiences where, not about the patting or scanner, or person responding to me saying it’s because they scanned me as a woman and I’m a malebodied person. Sometimes they fucking lose their shit in a way that’s ridiculous. I have a friend that’s a trans man who was born female-bodied and has transitioned. He’s passing and non heteronormative person would look at him and assume he was born female, but he goes into the scanner and it’s a red flag that he doesn’t have a penis. I can almost see the justification for someone they assume is female having something in their groin that’s not supposed to be there, but for it to also be a red flag for the absence of a penis – which means there’s nothing there. If guess, if I act like it’s no big deal, and I don’t act ashamed or ‘caught’, when they act inappropriately, I can say that I’m not making a big deal here, but they are. They’re the one holding people up because of their narrow views on gender, and I feel like that’s the biest tool in my life is not acting like what I’m doing is a big deal.
OLJ: The less shame you bring to it, the less shame t hey’ll h ave a bout i t. N ow t hat being said, that’s not going to be the case in every situation, and you can’t control the more egregious levels of discrimination coming towards you...
JM: I think it’s really difficult because, in that situation – continuing to use the airport as an example – the TSA have all the power in that situation, so if I were to cause a scene or throw a fit because I’ve been misgendered and their reaction to me telling them I’m a male-bodied person who outwardly dresses and presents as much more feminine, if I’m the one causing the scene, I have zero power in that situation. There’s plenty of situations like that out there where you can be the one in the right and still have zero power.
OLJ: RuPaul recently confirmed the rumour that Drag Race has a discriminatory policy on transexual contestants competing. Do you think there’s a responsibility for those who have appeared on the show to stand up against this?
JM: I think it’s such a double-edged sword. I think I was more male-presenting when I was on the show, and like I said, having gone on and experienced success since then, has allowed me to pursue my own gender identity much more and claim my own gender. We’ve seen so many contestants who went on and have transitioned since – probably for the exact same reason. In the drag community, ever since I started drag, there’s been trans drag queens in my life. In every club I’ve worked in, in every major drag setting, there’s been trans female drag queens and trans male drag kings. I think to discredit their contribution to the drag community at large is really problematic and I don’t think the show will be able to keep going on year after year if it doesn’t start to embrace more aspects of the drag community. I think it has done that in small ways. I think the fact Peppermint was able to come out as trans on the show, and then stayed in until the very end is a small example of them doing the right thing. If they realise they’ve already had trans contestants on and nothing bad happened, y’know, they’ve already had trans contestants compete and make it however far and it didn’t cause the whole system to unravel or break down – they would realise this rule isn’t actually serving them. People who try to defend the rule are saying that it’s because they’d have some unfair advantage, but like I said, trans drag queens and cisbodied drag queens have worked alongside together. When I talk to a pageant girl about this, she said she competes in pageants all the time with trans drag queens and she wins sometimes, and sometimes the trans drag queen wins. They don’t have any kind of competitive edge over a male-bodied drag queen.
OLJ: It’s about talent, it’s not just about body.
JM: I think those are the justifications for why the rule needs to be updated, but then I always want to say that what we need more than anything right now is more representation that’s created by us, for us, in the queer community. Drag Race being the most successful example of queer television, it’s having all the pressure put on it to do everything all at once and I don’t think any one TV show can take on the entire responsibility of the entire trans community by itself. I think there needs to be a variety of TV shows like Drag Race so it can have its own way of doing things. While I think it should include trans drag queens, it shouldn’t have the pressure of being the voice for our entire community because no one person or entity should have that responsibility.
OLJ: Absolutely. It’s going to take more shows and people creating content to really form an accurate representation of what the drag world is like. Just because you do drag, doesn’t mean you’re a gay, cis man. And just because you’re trans, doesn’t mean you can’t do drag. The two can overlap.
JM: And the way I’ve seen it, they always have. It’s not a new concept, it’s just the way it always has been, but there hasn’t been enough representation for people to know that’s the norm.
OLJ: Besides being visible, what does Pride mean to you?
JM: I’ll never forget my first Gay Pride and how exciting it was for me to go to a big festival that was just for queer people – straight allies welcome, but this is our time. What it’s come to mean to me now is really staking our claim in our community at large. Letting people know that we’re here.
OLJ: Who are your LGBTQ icons, besides me darling?
JM: It’s so funny as when I get asked, my brain immediately goes to cis women. As a drag queen, I’ve drawn so much inspiration from women in pop culture so I hear gay icon and my brain immediately goes to Bette Midler.
OLJ: You’re probably honouring the team of queer people who propped those cis women up. In my experience, for every pop star that I’ve worked with, there have been a team of LGBTQ people feeding them their creativity, and a lot of LGBTQ energy goes into these cis stars because the world has not been open to having an LGBTQ star. Therefore a lot of the time we idolise cis, straight women as queer icons. Maybe someday we will start propping our own people up?
JM: Right?!