HuffPostGay Posts Offensive Video of Drag Queen Shooting Trans Writer

Huffington Post’s Gay Voices section has finally removed a video from a drag performer which parodies shooting a prominent transgender writer.

I refuse to link the video here, but this is what HuffPostGay finally said after being flooded with tweets and emails (including my own):

Note: This page originally contained a video by drag artist Alaska Thunderfuck. We believed that the clip was one example of how diverse gender-variant communities are currently engaged in a complicated conversation about important issues regarding language, identity and privilege. However, we now realize that the video is patently offensive to many people and ultimately now feel it goes beyond being useful in this discussion and therefore have removed it from the site. We apologize.

Look, I don’t always agree with Parker Marie Molloy, and her name is not always held in the highest regard across the entirety of the LGBT community, but she is still an active writer with a large following. She’s a member of the Trans 100, for Chrissake. Seriously? Alaska Thunderfuck’s new parody video ends with her killing an obvious parody of Molloy. For anyone who has been following this debate, the parody is obvious.

This was unconscionable.

Many commenters claimed that I was expressing outrage or anger over RuPaul’s history of transphobia and drag culture’s issues with the same, but I assured them I was not. But this? Mocking transgender murder? BY A FELLOW QUEER PERSON? Now, I am angry. Members of drag culture themselves are often targeted for the same reasons as trans people, and often because of the conflation between the two.

Such “parody” only hurts all of us. And HuffPostGay? You should have known better than this.