	And so but what is verisimilitude? Even if there is permitted a meaningful distinction possible to subject to analysis between gender as preformed and gender as assigned within queer theory, a contention yet debated within the literature, is the reification of gender within the concept of verisimilitude an issue? For ‘verisimilitude’ to function as a coherent critique there must be a ‘real’ to gender outside its preformative function. Judith Butler famously problematized this concept in her seminal Gender Trouble. Her argument is, unfortunately, too complex to repeat in its entirety. She first invokes the Foucaultian concept of power producing its subjects, before extending this argument to the idea of womanhood; arguing fonts of power, through subjugation and violence, since created the space of womanhood. She later argues that this system is self-sustaining, the forces of power and the gender it inculcates are entirely an invention of this system and an extension of power. 
 Within queer theory, Butler’s arguments have been well-repeated and accepted. And within Butler’s framework of the production of gender, the focus on sex and ‘verisimilitude’ become incoherent, as it becomes impossible to speak of a ‘verisimilitudinous’ gender. As the mechanics of gender product continually renew themselves and re-create their subjects within their systems, there loses a sense of a ‘real’ or ‘untainted’ or ‘non-verisimilitudinous gender’ as all gender, assigned or not, becomes an artifact of production.
	Harris’ view on ‘verisimilitude’, too, consolidates a few wildly disparate groups within drag and transgender communities with no mention of their existence, despite the fact that they strongly threaten Harris’ model.  Harris’ construction of the drag subject leaves little room for the subtle drag and the ‘obvious’ deliberately non-passing transgender person. Of the latter, queer studies have been replete with analyses and narratives of the genderfuck, butch transgender women and femme transgender men, and the genderqueer. 

Through transgender and the world of non-normative gender embodiment, space is provided for gender play more multifaceted and experimental than Harris’ ‘stylistic idea of the transvestite’ which ‘attempts to blend seamlessly into the general public’. As a discourse, transgender is able to function as loud as the shriek of the comic drag queen and as soft and unobtrusive as the woman too silent for stealth, prioritizing survival over passing. Harris’ drag, in comparison, is similarly in need of reconstruction, having been a product entirely of whiteness, upper-class forces, and lacking in reflection of specific manifestations of drag.
	Paris is Burning provides an example of the specificity so missed in Harris’ text. The film provides examples of the comedic drag performance, that which Harris implied dominated the drag scene, but in the racialized and primarily lower-class New York drag scene, more than parody, ‘realness’ defined the aim of drag.  

These, and other, accounts of drag performance and drag identity imply that drag does occasionally pursue a politics of authenticity and of ‘realness’ and that the pursuit of these factors fail to successfully differentiate drag and transgender identities and experiences. 
