Within queer theory, we have been accustomed to think no commonality exists between drag and transgender identities. This is a half-truth; by all accounts, our modern comedic drag queen, parodying and degenerating femininity, has little to do with transgender womanhood, a structure seemingly typified by a type of necessary secrecy, as exemplified by the discourses concerning ‘passing’ and ‘reading’ – the ability of a transgender woman to avoid public scrutiny on the basis of her gender performance. Transgender womanhood, in other words, seems too much a project of basic survival and self-sustainment to function as a space of analysis, a place to turn a critical eye towards the workings of gender as a system of oppression and violence. But the languages and realities contained with drag performance and transgender existence are too complex and too evolved to reduce them to projects of laughter and living, both historically and contemporarily. Incorporating historical, economic, and racial forces of interpellation, queer theory implores us to articulate, not just drag in the singular, but drags – multiple configurations of resistance, of action, and of living. We can appreciate drag as survival, as weapon, as politics, and as radical reassignment. Fragmenting drag in such a way allows newer and stronger connections to be made between it and the transgender experience; so much so, in fact, that drag and transgender, within context of each other, become mutually inarticulate. Speaking to similar populations with too similar promises has, in a way, made drag and transgender synonymous. 
	 Daniel Harris’ “The Aesthetic of Drag” provides a typical representation of the held divide between transgender and drag identities. ‘Verisimilitude’, Harris argues, is the primary divisor between the two. He holds a similar, though not immediately related, belief that the gender play of effeminate gay men is, though disdainful of ‘realism’, still a function of masculinity and ‘maleness’, and that this is both intentional on the hand of its participants and recognized in the heterosexual eye. He advances that all drag is fanatical and comedic in nature and is a product of parody. The rest of his text is a slow walk from these axioms to a unified theory of drag aesthetics, a narrative that need not be confronted, other than to challenge Harris’ construction of the drag subject. Harris’ drag, contrary to his contention, reflects a very specific positionality within the drag-preforming population; other drag communities do not exhibit, or even exhibit in retrograde, the traits he ascribes to them. Examining historical studies of certain racialized drag communities, like those presented in Paris is Burning, confirms this.
	However, Harris’ lexicon and the disjunctions it has with contemporary verbiage in queer life needs to be understood. There exists some contiguity in semantics between his ‘transvestitism’ and ‘transgender’. In modern usage, the former refers almost exclusively towards a population who wear clothing and use mannerisms associated with the gender opposite that of their birth assignment, though it may be increasingly falling out of usage. However, this definition has been marked by fluidity; even as Harris defines transvestitism as a position, like drag, reached through adopting clothing at odds with the gender of birth assignment, the only separation made between them is between their relative comfort with being addressed and functioning by the gender they were assigned at birth. Hence, the term ‘transvestitism’ contains ambiguity, it could easily refer to transgender women outside of specific medical discourses. Hence, expanding Harris’ text to include transgenderism, though unsupported by a literal reading, is a coherent reading and fair response to latent changes in the semantics of queer language; the subject of Harris’ terminology may not be literal transvestite people, though rather those who enact a gender at odds with that they were assigned at birth.
