As Drag Race U.K. prepares to welcome the franchise’s first cisgender female drag queen, the lady in question, Victoria Scone, is hitting back against people who think she doesn’t belong on the show.
“I know it seems that the negative is so horrific, but I can’t take it personally because they are misogynists,” the Welsh performer told British newspaper The Independent on Wednesday while promoting her run on the international spin-off’s third season.
“If your only reason for not enjoying me when you’ve only seen a 90-second clip of me is that I’m not a real drag queen, I can’t take that personally,” she reiterated. “That’s just because you have a problem with a woman doing drag.”
Scone went on to recall RuPaul’s words about “the tenacity of the human spirit” required to win, but in the past, Ru himself was one of the voices saying cis women can’t be “real” drag queens. In a now-infamous Guardian profile in 2018, Ru opined that drag “loses its sense of danger and its sense of irony once it’s not men doing it.”
Although Ru would later walk back those comments, they typified gay men’s often misogynistic attitudes about drag culture and earned Ru some choice words from trans and cis queens alike.
According to longtime Drag Race judge Michelle Visage, also a cis woman, Scone’s historic appearance on the show is a sign of the art form’s continuing evolution.
“Drag keeps evolving, the show keeps evolving,” she told the U.K.-based website Gay Times when asked about Scone’s precedent, adding, “The more RuPaul’s Drag Race grows, the more drag grows. We get to represent as much as we can and we encourage everyone to audition.”
The British incarnation of the show is in especially dire need of diversity. As previous runner-up Tayce pointed out, only one Black queen, 29-year-old Vanity Milan made the otherwise fairly homogeneous cast of season three — a choice that left Tayce feeling “taken aback” given the number of “incredible poc, trans & afab performers.”
Between Scone’s run for the money, the incredible performance Gottmik just gave on Drag Race season 13, and trans queen Kylie Sonique Love’s historic victory on All Stars 6, it does seem like some doors are opening for more drag performers to give the fiercest reality competition on TV a shot. Now, if only they didn’t have to go bankrupt in the process…
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