Kerri Colby is best known for bringing trans excellence to the stage of RuPaul’s Drag Race, appearing on the show’s 14th season and laying the groundwork for her drag mother, Sasha Colby, to slay and take home the crown the following year. But her posts on social media around trans healthcare have the internet up in arms, including her Drag Race sisters.
The discourse began on Wednesday, when Colby posted on X, writing, “Babyyyyyy y’all gone really hate me when I say I don’t believe children should be medically transitioning. I think affirming them to outwardly express the gender they identify with until adulthood is plenty. Period.”
In follow-up posts, she continued that only adults should be able to make choices around starting hormone replacement therapy due to “potential long term effects of transitioning for adults.”
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“I just don’t see a child truly being able to forecast into a future when they can’t even pick what they want for lunch or what college they want to attend or how they plan to build a retirement investment plan,” she wrote.
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“All this, this little stunt, being the result of being dumped by an actual trans woman is f*cking insane.”
With such a catastrophic election, the Democrats were always going to start playing the blame game. And now the loss is trans people’s fault, apparently.
Other trans folks across the internet were quick to set the record straight: trans children are not undergoing any irreversible gender-affirming care, and the only children with access to HRT are over the age of 16 and must undergo extensive therapy before starting.
That included Bosco, another competitor on Season 14 of Drag Race and a fellow trans woman. “The boogieman of ‘children having transgender surgeries’ is a Trojan horse to lay the grounds to take away access to gender affirming care for all trans people,” Bosco wrote in her response to Colby. “Love Miss Kerri and not trying to dunk on my sister but we can’t be echoing this bullsh*t in our own community. Let’s put on our critical thinking caps divas.”
Colby’s statement received plenty of other criticisms, too, from pointing out the dangers of spreading misinformation to wondering how someone who’s so proudly trans could throw their own community’s youngest under the bus.
On Thursday, Colby returned with a follow-up statement. “A very insightful conversation has been started and for that I am thankful,” she wrote. “ I realize the way I approached the conversation should have been handled differently, and I apologize. Thank you to my sisters and brothers who have talked through this with me and reminded me how strong and beautiful our community is, but also how harmful the manner of how I phrased things can be used as talking points that spread misinformation.” See Colby’s full statement in her post below.
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