Kornbread reveals Drag Race helped her family become 'more accepting' of her trans identity

RuPaul's Drag Race star Kornbread says that her time on the Emmy-winning competition series has started a process of acceptance among her family, after the season 14 alum publicly came out as trans in November 2021.

Joining Dotdash Meredith's roundtable discussion in honor of International Transgender Day of Visibility, Kornbread discussed trans representation in media as part of a panel including writer and performance artist Alok Vaid-Menon, Brave Space Alliance founder LaSaia Wade, and lawyer and trans activist Kylar W. Broadus, and moderated by actor, writer, producer Scott Turner Schofield. Kornbread began by detailing a recent meeting with her family in South Carolina, where she says she could feel a move toward acceptance, but that there was still a lot to learn — and not just for her own sense of comfort.

"My point-of-contact cousin was like, 'Everybody has been whispering and wondering if you're coming dressed up,'" Kornbread said. "In my head, it's not dressing up, to me this is what I look like, this is what I go out as every day. To them it was still a whole dressing up thing." She added that she stressed to them that her pronouns are "she/her at all times," and that she aims to keep educating them so "they can be more accepting to more people outside of just me."

Kornbread also cited her time on Drag Race — on which she spoke about the difficulties of being a queer person raised in a religious family — as helping her family see her for who she really is.

"Had I not done that show, had I not said the things I did on that show, my family wouldn't understand more of what being transgender is; my family wouldn't be more accepting, my brothers wouldn't be walking around call me she/her and their sister," Kornbread finished. "There's a lot I can learn still, and should be using our platform to do."

Wade and Vaid-Menon also spoke on the importance of recognizing the work that trans people are doing to better the lives of the entire community, such as Wade's work in establishing her LGBTQ+ center on the South Side of Chicago.

"We need media to be saying, no, this is actually what's happening…. Correct the record and debunk transphobia, and actually feature adequate, accurate representation of what trans lives are, not the fantasy," Vaid-Menon said, later explaining that their distrust in media coverage of trans people — including a strained focus on only famous trans people — is rooted in a desire to show that value in the fight for equality largely comes from "the work that you're doing on the ground" as much as visibility in front of the camera.

"I trust trans people. LaSaia and I are working together and we're always finding ways to amplify what's happening on the ground. But the media doesn't care about trans people unless they're famous. So, what we have right now is a crisis of so many murders of nameless women and those stories need to be told of who these women were, what their lives were, their ordinary trans lives also matter," Vaid-Menon said, seemingly referencing recent deaths of Black trans woman in Chicago like Elise Malary and Tatiana LaBelle. "My indictment of the media is: why do we have to be on a TV show to be visible? Is it possible to actually tell the stories of everyday trans people while also telling the stories of people who are navigating media and entertainment culture?"

Watch a segment from OUTSPOKEN's panel for International Transgender Day of Visibility above.

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