Before the GOP/Right decided that drag was evil

[Ocelot II]

5. In Peter Pan a woman was playing a boy, but that was OK.

What they hate about drag is that it's men dressed up as women, because men shouldn't do that. It's not masculine. The loathing of drag is basically a toxic mix of misogyny, homophobia and gender insecurity. Amanda Marcotte has an interesting analysis:

Drag, probably more than any other cultural artifact of American life, exposes how much of femininity — and how much of gender overall — is socially constructed. The whole point of drag is to celebrate how much you did not wake up like this. The exaggeration of drag draws attention to the lesser, but still time-consuming, effort that everyday women and other femme-presenting people put into performing their identity. As feminist writer Simone de Beauvoir wrote in 1949, "One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman." Drag, like Beyoncé, takes that concept out of the lofty world of academic theory and makes it part of the pop culture understanding of gender.

Needless to say, conservatives hate that. The growing fascist right, as represented by the Proud Boys and other MAGA-centric groups, especially hates that. As I've written before, it's important to understand how much the surge of far-right politics in our era is rooted in misogyny. Fascists recruit by appealing to straight male insecurity and grievance over women's burgeoning equality. They motivate each other with the promise that they can return men to some imaginary glory days when the line between the genders was thick and inflexible, and women's role was unquestionably that of subservience to men.

In service to that ideal, they tend to argue that gender is not socially constructed, but a biological imperative. It's easier to cast women as a born servant class if everything culturally associated with women — especially the way women are expected to look, walk and talk — is deemed to be "natural" rather than understood as learned and practiced behaviors. Drag performers and trans people, simply by existing, throw a wrench into that understanding. They stir up not just queerphobic rage, but misogynistic insecurity about how all of us perform our genders. That double whammy is fueling the redoubled rage against trans people and drag performers we're seeing all around us. More to the point, right-wing culture warriors do not draw fine distinctions between misogyny, homophobia and transphobia. It's one big rat king of gender insecurity and fury for them, one that drag especially aggravates.

Conservatives aren't just unnerved because drag reveals how much of femininity is performative. The thing is, once you understand that, it starts to become clear how much that's true of masculinity as well. Those right-wing militia dudes marching around in camo and wielding assault rifles are, in their own way, doing masculinity drag. Granted, it's a lot less fun than the more familiar version. There's always a grim, sad character to the chest-thumping theatrics of right wing hyper-masculinity. Despite all the showy proclamations of courage and strength, you get a strong whiff of fear and weakness from such behavior. They seem to worry that relaxing, even for a moment, will expose the soft-handed losers underneath the guns and baggy cargo shorts. They most definitely did not wake up like this, and are terrified that we can see that. (Believe me, we do.)

The rest at https://www.salon.com/2022/12/09/maga-are-obsessed-with-harassing-drag-shows--heres-why/

Obviously, it wasn't always like this. Shakespeare's actors were all men, regardless of the gender of their characters. In those days women weren't allowed on the stage - one of that era's expressions of misogyny - so men or boys had to dress as women to play Juliet or Ophelia. And nobody thought the male actors were being emasculated or turning gay by dressing as women - in fact, they understood how much of femininity was performative because they performed it. As Marcotte points out, the MAGAts are performing masculinity drag themselves.