Jinkx Monsoon has been outspoken about their identity as a gender nonbinary person since being crowned the Season 9 winner of RuPaul’s Drag Race. The campy queen from Seattle told Billboard earlier this year, “Just because you were born with certain genitalia doesn’t mean that anyone gets to tell you to live your life any way prescribed by the genitalia you were born with.”
Monsoon reinforced this idea with the jazzy parlor song “Just Me (The Gender Binary Blues)” from their recent album, The Ginger Snapped. Now, they’re reiterating the importance of nonbinary acceptance with a new music video for the track, which released yesterday.
The video sees Monsoon sauntering and singing their way through Provincetown, MA, while a gaggle of people representing multiple different aspects of LGBTQ culture follow them. Since winning Drag Race, Monsoon has become one of the gleaming stars of Provincetown, with Provincetown Magazine saying of them, “Audiences here get to witness an incredible talent who takes the art form to new heights with unrivaled creativity and imaginative spark.”
Monsoon is also shown both in and out of drag throughout the video, presenting as male and female to echo the song’s ultimate message that identity matters more than physical anatomy. “Now in the past I’ve caused confusion, it’s true/ But what’s the fun of living life pink or blue?” they sing.
Fans on Twitter were quick to acknowledge the video’s timeliness — Monsoon dropped the video yesterday, amid an intense online debate about comments made by RuPaul in an interview with The Guardian. RuPaul said that he would “probably not” allow fully-transitioned trans women to compete on RuPaul’s Drag Race (Ru has since issued an apology on Twitter for his comments).
Monsoon told Billboard in January that “Just Me” took multiple interactions regarding gender from the singer’s life and wove them together to represent the “thesis” of the song. “I sat down with Major [Scales, Monsoon’s collaborator] and went through all the most poignant moments in my life that someone has made some kind of comment either positive or negative about my gender and my gender presentation,” they said. “He wove it all together in the song with the main message being that at the end of the day it doesn’t really matter because I’m just me.”