I think the difficulty I have with this is around gender. If sex has primacy (and of course it does!), and gender has no real meaning, and I think it is bad, can I also be against one sex dressing up in the gender stereotype of the other sex. If I am against that, it almost feels like I am part of enforcing gender conformity - if you are a male you must always dress and act as a man, if you are a female you must always dress and act as a woman. I think I am probably running into a difference between GC and radfem??

I’m not a radfem and just shy of GC, but I don’t think this is it. They believe gender as in sex-based stereotypes/expectations have meaning in our current society but that they’re socially constructed and so they want to get rid of them. So I guess it’s the power behind them they want to get rid of and so that we get to a point that “masculine” vs “feminine” are only biological distinctions and aren’t tied to clothing, career choices, personality traits, etc.

They’re not saying that men can’t wear dresses, but I do note that drag queens do more than wear dresses. They tend to go by female pronouns so it does go beyond that and I can see from their perspective that they’re seeing it as hair, makeup, and clothing -> she/woman.

In any case I do note a lot of hypocrisies in drag, but I am not personally offended by drag and so it’s just not something I’m going to spend emotional energy on. It’s not a hill for me to die on. I will say, the OP does include one of the better explanations of drag I’ve seen and that makes it more sympathetic to me: spoofing the idea that gay men are women and mocking the heterosexual expectations applied to gay men. I think that’s probably why I don’t feel offended by drag. The subject matter doesn’t feel like it has anything to do with womanhood to me. So seeing it as spoofing femininity in the context of heteronormative patriarchal standards applied to gay men clicks better with me.

And I agree that drag can go in a lot of directions. So it’s not so much the medium that is problematic to me but rather what someone expresses with the medium. But I do think we should still think about why drag queens are such a big cultural thing and drag kings are not.