If You Made Fun of Lil Nas X's Halloween Costume, You're Part of the Problem

By now you’ve probably seen Lil Nas X’s amazing Halloween tribute to Nicki Minaj. While many on Twitter immediately gave it the recognition and the love it deserved, there were plenty of trolls who were quick to resort to both homophobic and transphobic insults. The unwarranted backlash Lil Nas X received from the trolls begs the question: Why is it more permissible for certain straight cisgender men to dress up as women, but the minute Lil Nas X does, people are up in arms over it?

Bad Bunny dressing in drag for his “Yo Perreo Sola” music video didn’t receive as much outright hate or as many transphobic comments. When Quincy Brown dressed as Frida Kahlo this year, the comment section of his Instagram was full of praise. There seems to be this unspoken rule that so long as a man is either dressing as a woman for a joke or is purposefully “unattractive” in womenswear, then it’s cool. To be clear: Lil Nas X absolutely killed it as Nicki Minaj. His costume was so good he might as well have been a doppelgänger. Yet, people asked if he was transgender. That suggests that those making fun of his costume, or those trying to bring him down, subscribe to the antiquated assumption that transgender women aren’t women — they’re simply gay men in disguise. It also reasons that the people making these comments are so caught up in their sense of self they don’t realize everything isn’t about them. Lil Nas X didn’t dress up as Nicki Minaj for you, he dressed as Nicki Minaj for himself because it made him happy.

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