How drag queen Victoria Sin is tackling notions of binary and fixed gender
- Sin is not your typical drag queen. A biological female, Sin uses the pronoun ‘they’ and believes drag is for all
- Sin talks about Ru Paul’s Drag Race, make-up and costumes, performing in clubs and performance art
“My pronoun is they,” reads a line of text at the bottom of every email sent out by Victoria Sin, a female drag artist who seeks to explode notions of gender as a binary designation. If the pronouns cause confusion as you continue to read this, it’s only because society hasn’t given us the correct terminology to define a person outside “he” or “she”.
Perhaps it’s a little pedantic, but Sin is not afraid to tackle big topics and ruffle feathers or the status quo along the way.
Let’s start with the fact that they are a biological female transgressing in a subculture dominated by cisgendered men (meaning men whose gender identity matches their sex at birth); drag may have edged close to becoming mainstream thanks to a show known as RuPaul’s Drag Race , but the programme arguably reinforced stereotypes about drag culture.
“It’s not all bad, and it’s not all good,” says Sin. “I think it’s great that somewhere in a small town in the Bible Belt, somebody’s grandma is seeing drag queens being presented as something that’s good, normal, not the devil and something that’s sick. On the other hand, I think that the show has created a language. You have a lot of kind of middle class, white gays going around and being like, ‘yaas, word’.”
