‘Drag Race’ Star Hormona Lisa Slams Donald Trump’s Anti-Trans Orders: ‘It Feels Surreal’
RuPaul’s Drag Race star Hormona Lisa stood with her community on Monday (Feb. 10) when she called out President Donald Trump for pushing an anti-transgender agenda within his first few weeks back in office. (Spoilers ahead for episode six of RuPaul’s Drag Race).
In an elimination interview with Entertainment Weekly, the Chattanooga drag performer spoke about her experience watching the current administration attempt to strip the trans community of their constitutional protections through a series of executive orders.
“It’s hard to find the words to describe how I feel, because I didn’t think I’d have to feel like this in my lifetime,” she said. “I thought fighting to be valued as a person and seen as a person was over with … now we’re going backwards with how these people don’t see us as human. It’s crazy.”
During his first few weeks back in office, Trump has signed an alarming number of executive orders aimed at further marginalizing the trans community in the United States. Among a flurry of other actions, Trump declared that the country would recognize only two genders, attempted to withdraw federal funding for gender-affirming care for trans youth, sought to ban trans athletes from competing in women’s school sports and aimed to prevent transgender people from serving in the U.S. military. Most of these executive orders aimed at the trans community are already being contested by transgender advocates through the court system.
As a trans woman, Lisa explained that she’s already learned to “validate and love myself [so] I don’t need it externally,” which is a practice she encouraged those reading to “focus on developing” under Trump’s second term. “It’s not going to be the last thing to happen towards trans and queer people in general,” she said. “It makes it more important to know what you bring to the table and that it has value.”
When it comes to the direction that the U.S. is headed, the performer was more uncertain. “I’m struggling to put the words together because … we’re kind of going in a different direction these last four years, with public perception of trans people, then you have stuff like this come up,” she said. “It feels surreal.”
Lisa was one of the 14 cast members of RuPaul’s Drag Race season 17, on which she became the only queen of the season to be hand-selected by RuPaul for the competition. However, in the Friday (Feb. 7) episode of the reality series, Lisa wound up in the bottom alongside Lana Ja’Rae after failing to impress the judges in this season’s ball challenge. Losing her lip sync against Ja’Rae to Olivia Rodrigo’s “Get Him Back,” Lisa became the third queen to be eliminated this season.
Stephen Daw
Billboard
