Season 14 of RuPaul’s Drag Race is making history in a big way. Not only did the show announce two transgender queens competing but also that the first-ever heterosexual cisgender queen, Maddy Morphosis, will sashay right along side them.
The move follows a series of casting choices to promote inclusivity, diversity and representation on the show.
Previously, contestants like Victoria Scone, Drag Race’s first cisgender female queen, and Kylie Sonique Love, who is the first transgender queen to win an American season of the show (All-Stars season 6) have broken barriers and long held stigmas in the drag community.
“While I am straight, I don't consider myself a straight drag queen. I'm just a drag queen who happens to be straight," Maddy said as she introduced herself during the official "Meet the Queens" live stream event last week.
"My sexuality doesn't define the drag that I do, it doesn't impact that. It's just a facet of who I am outside of drag."
"I think my being on the show can tap into a lot of the guys watching at home — like, cisgender, straight guys — and really just, like, projecting to them that, like, gender is completely arbitrary," she continued. "Just be yourself."
However, this casting was meet with a lot of backlash from fans of the show. While many feel this is a chance to show that drag is an art form for everyone, others felt that including a straight cis males takes up space for more LGBTQ+ faces to be seen on a larger platform.
Maddy took to Instagram this week to put out her own statement regarding her presence in the competition.
"The people I met and the experiences I had helped me understand more about gender and sexuality, what it meant to me, and where I fit in with everything," she wrote. "Drag wasn't even something I considered when I first started going out. It just happened to be in the scene I was in that I fell in love with. But doing drag the past 5 years has given me even more opportunities to further explore my own identity, and also understand more about others."
"The concepts of 'masculine' and 'feminine' are arbitrary and made up. And the rigid line drawn between them just feeds the stigma of men who embrace femininity and perpetuates the cycle of toxic masculinity. If there’s a message that I hope to convey to people, it’s that you don’t have [to] inhabit the box society puts you in just to be comfortable in your own sexuality.”
Thanking her supporters, Maddy said that she hopes the conversation surrounding her casting results in "a lot more talk about representation in the drag scene."
Watch the full season 14 cast RuVeal below:
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