Usually I breeze past J.M. Sorrell’s columns, but her latest, published in the Gazette three days before the Hampshire Pride march, was too over the top to ignore. This column created a toxic anti-transgender stew by mashing together her feminist friends’ opinions, more rants about drag queens, and online reports about the attempted and completed suicides of two young lesbians in Brazil.

Conflating all trans people with the mentally ill trolls who attacked these Brazilian women online is ridiculous. I assume Sorrell is getting her information not from interactions with real trans people, but from rumor and from obscure, unvetted, biased sources like the ones I found online when I searched for the cases she cited.

It’s impossible to determine what people or groups created these websites and whether their information is true. If I were still teaching introductory college writing and a student cited this junk, I’d fail them in basic research methods.

I first met out trans women through lesbian social groups and neighborhood friends in the mid-1990s. Far from being threatening, these women were among the shyest, most mild-mannered people with whom I’ve been acquainted. Since then I’ve always had trans friends with whom I have common interests — politics, writing, the arts, queer history. Not one of these transgender people desires any more than what Sorrell says of the young Brazilian lesbians: They “simply want to live their authentic lives.”

We feminists of various stripes can argue till the cowgirls come home about whether drag is misogynist. But calling drag “anti-women” strikes me as a shortsighted, white, middle-class point of view. This view of drag ignores not only the drag houses created in the 20th century by Black and Latinx gay men and trans people as alternative families and homes, but also the subsequent drag king movement and the role of Black lesbians and other people of color in that scene.

I find the infighting in our LGBTQ+ world disturbing, especially given the number of transgender people who are killed in violent ways every year, and the glut of new state legislation outlawing medical care for trans people and public education about gender differences. While right-wing politicians across the U.S. are putting us on their hit lists, we should be uniting with and protecting one another, not bickering about tired drag stereotypes or whether men are killing women or trans people more brutally.

With nearly 500 anti-LGBTQ bills in state legislatures in this country right now, we don’t have the time or resources for infighting.

The Republican-dominated legislature of Wyoming won’t stop at expelling the first transgender legislator — they don’t like lesbians, either. The Ohio neo-Nazis in full face masks, carrying swastika flags and guns, won’t end with protesting drag queen story hour — you’d better believe that they’re coming for the feminists, too.

Michele Spring-Moore lives in Northampton.

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