As RuPaul’s Drag Race ramps up for its first “all winners” season tonight, it’s worth revisiting what is perhaps the most monumental “first” the show has had in its 13-year stint: Kyle Sonique Love’s crowning last September, which made her the first trans drag queen to win an American season of Drag Race (predated only by Thailand’s Angele Alang crowning in 2019).

But this trans victory didn’t happen in the blink of an eyelash extension. Having kicked off in 2009, it took 13 regular and six All Stars seasons for a trans woman to snatch the crown. Infamously, it also took RuPaul retracting the reasoning he gave in 2018 to not allow trans performers to participate in his show. “Drag loses its sense of danger and its sense of irony once it’s not men doing it,” he told the Guardian that year. Months later Gia Gunn became the first openly trans contestant to enter the competition for All Stars 4.

Despite being known as the “Gay Super Bowl” or the “Olympics of Drag”, trans people were purposely excluded for the majority of its run. It’s not surprising, then, that emerging trans drag performers from the local scenes also experience exclusion and occasional lack of support from audiences and event bookers.