Peppermint in Survival of the Thickest. Featured photo by Vanessa Clifton, courtesy of Netflix.
Spoilers ahead for Season 2 of Survival of the Thickest.
When Peppermint learned she’d be coming back for Survival of the Thickest’s second season, she “did 100 million backflips,” the drag superstar and trans icon tells INTO.
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In Season 1 of the Netflix comedy, she stole the show as a drag performer and friend to main character Mavis Beaumont, a stylist played by series creator Michelle Buteau. In the recently released Season 2, Peppermint’s back and better than ever. This time around, she’s taking on a larger role in the story: her character (who also happens to be named Peppermint) is prepping for her wedding to fiancé Harrison, played by Dan Amboyer. Over the course of the season, that means shopping for the perfect dress and bringing a very grand (and very gay) ceremony to life.
In a year as fraught as 2025, the significance of telling queer stories on television — especially trans stories — isn’t lost on Peppermint. “Most people learn how to connect with, learn about our stories, and learn how to treat, frankly, LGBTQ people from what they see in film and television and media,” she says.
She points to GLAAD’s annual Where We Are On TV report, which tracks queer representation on television year over year. Its most recent edition looked at the 2023-24 season, which saw decreases in representation across the board compared to the previous year: across all television platforms, GLAAD reported 128 fewer LGBTQ+ regular and recurring characters than in the 2022-23 season. Trans representation was even weaker, with just 24 trans characters total on TV (5.1% of all LGBTQ+ characters), a decrease of eight characters and 0.3 percentage points from the previous year.
That in mind, Peppermint says, her return to Survival of the Thickest “just felt like a gift.”
“When it comes to LGBTQ representation, there’s a lot of examples out there that do it poorly,” she explains. “But being able to have a hand in helping provide what I think is appropriate LGBTQ representation, and accurate and authentic LGBTQ representation, is just par for the course with Michelle [Buteau]. She wants to be inclusive and diverse, and she wants all types of stories represented.”
That means not only putting underrepresented folks in front of the camera — which Survival of the Thickest does in spades — but putting them in roles behind the scenes, too. It amounts to what Peppermint calls “one of the most diverse and inclusive sets” she’s ever been on. “I felt a level of comfort that I’ve never really felt on a set before, because I didn’t have to worry about who’s looking.”
That was especially true for Episode 6, “The Category is Love, Bitch,” which centers on Peppermint’s wedding. For the episode’s shoot, the set became even queerer than usual, thanks to a colorful cast of guest stars including Monét X Change and Honey Balenciaga, a full-out ballroom performance at the reception, and — of course — the wedding in itself.
While her character’s wedding is beautiful in its own right, Peppermint is especially grateful for its role in the show’s overall storyline. The episode brings one of the season’s main conflicts to a head, as protagonist Mavis is forced to choose between two romantic interests, both of whom showed up to the wedding: one as her date, and one at Peppermint’s request in a well-intentioned ploy to get them back together.
“It didn’t even dawn on me until I think we were actually filming our wedding, that I realized that my wedding, the character’s wedding, was the intersection for so many different storylines,” Peppermint reflects. Her character’s wedding is so important to the plot, she reasons, that it couldn’t be censored out of the show even if the powers that be wanted it gone.
“If you go through and remove everything — like our government is trying to do — having to do with Peppermint, this trans character, the whole show falls apart,” she says. “And that is a gift, because it shows that, contrary to how trans characters have been used in the past and historically and traditionally, my character is more integral to the storyline in the series than, like, the first role I played — which was, you know, ‘Hooker to the Left,’” she jokes.
“In a really sort of woo-woo, esoteric sort of way, it shows that LGBTQ+ people, but trans people, specifically Black trans women, have connections in their lives that go beyond them just being ‘the trans person,’” Peppermint adds. “We are your friends. We are your relatives. We are your loved ones. We are your partners. We are people that work with you. We are people at the wedding!”
Earlier in the season, another Peppermint-centered episode, “Mind Ya Business, Bitch!”, sees the character struggling to say yes to a wedding dress. Her search inspires Mavis to create a bridal pop-up especially for women that the fashion industry tends to cast aside, including trans and plus-size women.
“I think it’s probably, even more so than the wedding, an episode that just really speaks to me,” Peppermint says, connecting the character’s experience to her own history with shopping for clothes.
“Listen, I am an experienced drag entertainer who has been working and living in New York City,” she explains. “Now, things are very different with regards to how one would get their costumes — especially post-things like some drag reality competition shows.” (We have no clue what reality show she’s referring to.) “But prior to that, when I was working in the clubs, I would have to go down to the only part of town in New York City that was selling my size.”
That meant braving Midtown — what Peppermint calls “tourist central” — and “getting kicked out of dressing rooms, told that I’m the wrong gender for this and that,” she recalls.
“I’ve had the experience of trying to shop in a store just next to everybody else — just buying my things; I’ve got money! — and being made to feel like I’m offending people just with my presence,” Peppermint says. “Being made to feel like I don’t fit in because of that, and that I’m not worthy of doing the shopping in that store, has really harmed me.”
Survival of the Thickest delivers the exact opposite message. By the end of the episode, Mavis’ bridal pop-up has become a reality, and she dedicates her new store to “anyone else who has cried in a dressing room because we have felt like the fashion industry has forgotten us.” With that, Peppermint emerges in the wedding dress of her dreams — and it fits her like a glove.
“The fact that Mavis, the character, caters to Peppermint and shows her that all these different body types are not only welcome, but celebrated and really the focus, just feels great,” Peppermint says. “It felt like someone really touched my 20-years-ago-shopping heart.”
The episode holds special significance in the current political landscape, she adds, where trans people in America are having more and more rights stripped away by the day, from the legal definition of gender being changed to only male and female, to trans folks’ legal documents being marked with their assigned genders at birth.
“Those things, straw by straw, chip away at your ability to have a life that is an easy life to live, or a life that is even livable realistically,” Peppermint explains. “If you can’t do things like use a public bathroom, or have any identification documents that really match — a lot of people are shrugging their shoulders to that, but if you don’t have those things, then it just makes it so difficult. It almost makes it impossible. And so, something as simple as being accommodated to with a wedding dress just speaks even larger to me now, and I think it will to audiences too.”
That political consciousness extends to the wedding episode, too. Amid the unbridled joy of the day, Peppermint gives a speech expressing not only her deep love for her now-husband, but her gratitude in defying the odds as a trans woman. “I so look forward to growing old with you, because I know that it’s an opportunity that so many of my — of our trans sisters just don’t get,” the character says. “But here I am, blissfully happy.”
Peppermint helped create that moment, she says, knowing that even the fictionalized version of herself is “a woman who’s alive in the current day and age, who’s seeing what’s going on around her, [and] would want to speak on more than one level in a speech like that.”
“I hope that people who don’t have a connection to the queer or trans community are able to take something away from that, and I hope it can inform how they think and feel about trans people in the future, especially up against all the headlines that we’re seeing coming out these days,” she adds.
Overall, though, Peppermint’s big day — and her arc on Survival of the Thickest as a whole — is nothing short of a fairy tale. Her friends and family shower her with affection. Her father walks her down the aisle. She marries the love of her life. She looks drop-dead gorgeous.
“There doesn’t need to be something wrong with Peppermint’s life, or Peppermint, or a trans woman: she’s alive. You know, statistically, she shouldn’t be, but she’s alive,” Peppermint says. “Not only is she alive, she’s thriving. People love her, and you can tell a lot about how people impact other people by the people that are around them, the people that crowd them with love and take care of them. And we see so much of that in this season.” ♦
Survival of the Thickest Season 2 is now streaming on Netflix. Check out the season trailer below.
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