Kiss singer debunks comparison between transgender youth and comedic cross-dressing.

How Kiss and Bugs Bunny Reinforced Traditional Gender Norms

A Personal Journey with Kiss

In the mid-1990s, when the original line-up of the rock band Kiss briefly reunited, I was a teenage alternative rocker. I took my rock music very seriously, and although I had never heard anything by Kiss other than “Rock and Roll All Nite,” I instinctively knew they were precisely the kind of music to which the self-serious rock of the ’90s was meant to provide an “alternative.”

So, I assumed they sucked. I mean, they looked like they would suck — all that dumb make-up, the frizzed-out perms, and studded leather? It all seemed to typify bloated rock excess and, by extension, inauthenticity. I didn’t listen to a full album from Kiss until about 2005, but when I did, I quickly realized I had been wrong. It was fantastic. I loved it.

Paul Stanley’s Recent Controversy

Still, there are things I don’t like about the band. Most recently, my frustrations have stemmed from various public statements from frontman Paul Stanley. Stanley has a tendency to wade into contentious political debates. His opinions on Covid-19 were especially grating to me: He was among the many celebrities who railed against those of us who refused vaccination.

I tolerated this because Kiss is also very patriotic — but individually, Stanley is not usually known for his conservatism. Thus, I was pleasantly surprised last week to see that Stanley used his sizable platform to speak out against the medical malpractice being inflicted upon children who are labeled “trans.”

The Two Forms of Criticism

Stanley’s critics fell into two camps. When it came to the substance of Stanley’s remarks, some felt he was unqualified to make them. Others had no problem with Stanley’s past or his band’s legacy but thought his opinions were wrong. But the critics in both camps are wrong. Kiss didn’t play a role in fomenting the trends that Stanley is now challenging.

Comedic Cross-Dressing vs. Transgenderism

It is true that popular entertainment has often depicted men and women (and rabbits) who tried to pass as the opposite sex. Bugs Bunny is one example. But these are in no way similar to the trans propaganda aimed at today’s youth. The difference is that 20th-century depictions of cross-dressing characters actually functioned to reinforce traditional norms related to sex.

Bugs Bunny in a dress was supposed to be funny. The reasons aren’t hard to ascertain. First, audiences grasped any man who would want to pretend to be a woman (or vice versa) was patently ridiculous. Secondly, when characters from entertainment history dressed as the opposite sex, it was typically an effort to disguise themselves.

The gender-bending in Kiss functioned in a similar way. The incorporation of feminine clothing and style into a rock-and-roll performance by men was intended to be a spectacle — one that shocked the audience. The femininity was insincere: This was underscored by the aggressively heterosexual themes addressed in the music and the bombastic sonic conventions of hard rock.

Funny Cross-Dressing a Thing of the Past

Indeed, humorous presentations of cross-dressing — which have consistently been a feature of Western forms of entertainment since the ancient Greeks — have all but disappeared from our media. It is not uncommon in children’s programming to see situations when a boy or girl adopts the signs, preferences, or mannerisms of the opposite sex, and other children in the program start to snicker, only to have an adult character step in to teach them the moral lesson that all these stereotypes about sex and so-called gender identity are obsolete and hurtful.

These troubling trends are what Stanley was warning us about. It is a great irony that a famous rock-and-roll clown is one of the few celebrities with enough maturity (though just momentarily!) to grasp the serious business of an ideology that is normalizing medical interventions for kids with sex confusion.