So far, so cruise-ship entertainment — the sort of thing you could just about wince through after 10 complimentary daiquiris. But Patrice’s bimbo pisstake found a more conventional audience last week when Dublin Zoo decided to use him to front their Mother’s Day promotions, “Mams Go (Pants?) Free”. Festooned in green and yellow, Malahide Mammy gleams like an overshaken can of Sprite, presumably the perfect enticement for every actual woman who plans to celebrate another year of child-rearing by seeing a funhouse-mirror mockery of herself. Like every bizarre instance of drag acts being shoehorned into such institutions, the premise is deliciously spurious: the zoo wrote on its website that the event — part of its broader “All Things Irish” program for Saint Patrick’s Day — would be “vibrant”, filled with “warmth, humor, community and heritage” and a “strong sense of togetherness”. Nothing says solidarity like a honking set of foam breasts.

The backlash was swift and merciless. Even in the capital of the most self-congratulating, aggressively progressive country in the world, a drag act gasping his way through animal enclosures in a sordid simulacrum of motherhood went down like a can of cold setting spray. It was described as a “national disgrace”, showing Irish mothers “what Dublin Zoo thinks of you”; another bemoaned “how far we have fallen in stature to now be denigrated and codified as a mere pantomime dame”; yet another decried a “symptom of a sick Europe”.

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Whatever Dublin Zoo’s campaign was, it was not as cataclysmic as all that. At most it was a misguided scramble for sodden scraps of virtue from the 2010s, an embarrassing hangover from an era which rewarded public bodies for aligning themselves with the queer omnicause. After all, the gender-critical movement has spent years making the entirely convincing case that words do not equate to violence — that verbal accuracy and reality did not “erase”, “attack” or “endanger”.

The outrage at the zoo’s campaign is not surprising, nor unjustified — but its sense of crisis (the “sick Europe”, the “national disgrace”) feels overegged at a time when Butlerian bollocks has been so comprehensively punctured. The daydream of gender performance shoved down the gullets of students in the middle of the last decade is over; the nasty stereotypes it concealed — the breathless sex-object nonsense which clearly inspires the likes of James Patrice and Andrea Long Chu — are by now plainly obvious.

Much contemporary drag does away with its good-natured, witty founding fathers. Consider music-hall prototypes such as Dan Leno, known for playing the ultimate panto dame: the joke was an inflated cartoon of femininity, later also the subject of Dame Edna Everage and Lily Savage — not women themselves. These characters were brutal, snobbish, fussy, funny; the humor centered on the dimension of their egos and not the dimension of their bosoms. Acts like the Malahide Mammy replace insight and critique with pointless pornographic jibes, double entendres robbed of primary meaning and masochistic male role-plays of female sexuality — all that’s left is writhing, moaning voracity under a hideous wig. Like other favorite progressive pastimes (porn, prostitution), drag has become yet another sacrifice to the male libido. In so doing it flattens the original radicalism of drag — its capacity to mock stereotypes — by imposing them back on its subjects.

It’s a mechanism recognized by Ben Appel in his Atlantic piece about having been an “effeminate boy”. Where modern drag tends to collapse womanhood into vicious sexual caricature, well-meaning chin-strokers in activist circles, academia and the medical establishment collapse non-conformity into essential identity — you act like a girl, so you must be one. Instead of asking the more daring question — what does “like a girl” mean anyway? — genderism prefers neat taxonomies and interventionist “solutions”; androgyny is not a charm or incidental quirk but an opportunity, even a pathology, to correct as soon as possible. This must be why Mammygate struck such a nerve. No demographic is more clear-eyed than mothers about the pitfalls of gender theory, which is why Mumsnet became an intellectual vanguard in the protection of sex-based rights (to the horror of the polite media establishment).

The zoo itself has carefully sidestepped criticism, having a spokesman state that it was “disappointed that some commentary on social media has taken elements of the campaign out of context”. It would continue, it sniffed, to welcome “people from all backgrounds and communities every day” including, I presume, that embattled community of middling drag queens. The PR team, like the long-suffering wardens of the elephant enclosure, must have spent all day shit-shoveling. Shortly after, the zoo put up a mealy-mouthed post about International Women’s Day, thanking the women among its staff (none of them named, mind).

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By the next Mother’s Day, all this will have blown over — it will be some other institution’s turn to put its foot in it. Public bodies remain vulnerable to these cock-ups because they are hopelessly time-lagged, five years at minimum behind a culture sick of being expected to laugh along as another mammoth Marilyn flashes the congregation at Tumble Tots. Institutions — libraries, arts centers and other “third spaces” manned by frustrated middle-class libs — can’t seem to shake that cringe, focus-group-friendly fun which sees them blundering into the sorts of promotional crises that more canny corporate bodies manage to avoid. Long gone are the mastectomy scars inexplicably emblazoning a Costa coffee wagon; for-profit firms have a way of deserting sinking ships while the activist elite bubble to the sea bed.

It’s no mystery why: the sorts of overeducated grunts who land in directorial roles at beloved institutions develop a toxic benevolence born of resentment against the relative lushness of the private sector, and the “fascist” politicians who work against their interests. They blindly impose their radical views as righteous correctives to the world that has personally wronged them. In Ireland, a formerly ultra-conservative nation which only in recent decades has adopted progressive social policies, the urge to overcorrect seems even more pressing.

For the art form of drag itself, this state of affairs is pitiful; once desperately uncool institutions start paying you to gyrate in front of giraffes, you have to question your own radicalism. Drag was once an affront to bourgeois respectability; now it is considered, by some at least, the bourgeoisie’s favorite family-friendly entertainment. And that is my great objection to the Malahide Mammy and her league of gelatinous lookalikes; bereft of a sense of novelty or protest, the transgression she represents is simply tedious. Like her prosthetic breasts, the joke arrives before the queen; all her lines have been purred before. What she speaks to is not a culture in decline — on the virtues of genderism she lost the argument years ago — but cultural institutions still in hock to well-meaning but misdirected orthodoxies which insult the very people they’re meant to serve. How much longer must we suffer these humiliating episodes where public bodies self-flagellate for meaningless causes? What next, a tribute to NHS nurses starring up-and-coming drag superstar Florence Naughtygale? Enjoy, ladies — this one’s on us.

These days we are accustomed to a somewhat tamed version of drag. But the best performers have always pushed the limits of acceptability: I once appeared at a comedy night at the Edinburgh fringe hosted by a drag queen whose interaction with the punters was not so much waspish as downright libellous. At another, I remember a drag artist smoking liberally during the performance, blowing smoke at a pregnant woman on the front row and saying “I hope you have a miscarriage”. It was a far cry from RuPaul’s Drag Race.

Traditional drag is clearly meant for adults. So what explains the growing enthusiasm for “Drag Queen Story Hour”, in which drag queens visit schools, libraries and other council venues to read to young children? For whatever reason, this bizarre subgenre has been championed by celebrities and politicians who wish to be seen as being on “the right side of history”. Last week the MP for Walthamstow, Stella Creasy, tweeted about taking her infant son to a show in which a drag queen called Greta Tude “put so much energy into story telling and entertaining local children”. Her colleague Nadia Whittome replied, describing the event as “so wholesome”.

But do fans of drag really want it to become “wholesome”? The appeal of drag shows is that they revel in sexual dissidence, as the American drag queen Kitty Demure has pointed out:

“I have no idea why you want drag queens to read books to your children… Would you want a stripper or a porn star to influence your child? It makes no sense at all. A drag queen performs in a nightclub for adults. There is a lot of filth that goes on, a lot of sexual stuff that goes on, and backstage there’s a lot of nudity and sex and drugs. Okay? So I don’t think this is an avenue that you would want your child to explore.”

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The sexual element of drag is impossible to deny. Even the more tepid drag queens, whose repertoire extends no further than lip-synching to Donna Summer, tend to interlace their performances with suggestive gestures, provocative quips and the occasional slut-drop.

That’s not to say drag queens can’t adapt to a younger audience — they are actors after all. It’s perfectly possible for performers of Drag Queen Story Hour to read stories to children without all the eroticised preening and pouting we have come to expect from them. But why would any self-respecting artist want to do it? There is something deeply mystifying about drag queens who choose to anaesthetise their art form in order to regale infants with tales of teddy bears and picnics.

While many drag queens are happy to tone it down, others have made little effort to modify their raunchy style for children. It may be that only a handful of performers fall into this category, but all it takes is a few viral videos for parents’ worst fears to be confirmed. Many such clips have appeared on the “Libs of TikTok” Twitter account. The most recent shows a drag queen teaching a small child to dance for tips in Palm Springs, California. A previous video showed a drag show at a club in Dallas attended by children in which the words “It’s Not Gonna Lick Itself!” appeared in large neon lettering on the upstage wall.

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It’s not just American parents who are worried: the trend of sexualised children’s shows spread into Britain well before Drag Queen Story Hour. Last year, Redbridge Council commissioned an event at a local library which featured an actor dressed as a bare-bottomed monkey with a large fake penis attached to his crotch. In April, The Family Sex Show — devised by Bristol-based theatre company ThisEgg — was cancelled after parents discovered that it featured full-frontal nudity and content about masturbation, despite being aimed at children as young as five.

Do these artists have no comprehension of the innocence of childhood? If so, they’re not alone. Sex education theorists seeking to transform the curriculum argue that children ought to be taught about sexuality as early as possible. But it can hardly be considered prudish to object to five-year-olds being urged to “try sexual practices” with their “sexual parts”, as the website of The Family Sex Show suggests.

All this explains why drag performers are struggling to convince parents their intentions are benign. Inevitably, many critics have raised safeguarding concerns. Protesters disrupted a Drag Queen Story Hour event at a library in Reading last week, chanting “paedophile” and accusing the performer of “child grooming”. Such accusations are, of course, unfounded and unhelpful. Yet they also speak to the emotive nature of this debate, in which some reckless artists refuse to observe boundaries around children.

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In response, library staff have been trained to refer to drag queens as “pantomime dames”, as though they were in any way synonymous. This is misleading, and possibly insulting to the acts, as it strips away the political history of the genre and enervates its impact. There is more to drag than cross-dressing; it is a satirical commentary on gender roles and heterosexual norms, a means to stretch the ambit of decorum. If drag is not transgressive, it ceases to be drag. So why would drag queens sanitise their work?

It is difficult to escape the feeling that all of this is a form of goading, a way to provoke those who are perceived as “conservative” and “reactionary” and to increase the visibility and normalisation of the LGBTQ+ movement. Stonewall recently tweeted a claim that “research suggests that children as young as two recognise their trans identity”. It’s hardly surprising, then, that Drag Queen Story Hour is being interpreted as an extension of Stonewall propaganda.

It’s not just the overt sexuality of some children’s drag shows that is alarming. Drag has long been seen as an excuse for men to mock and fetishise what it means to be female — and has even been compared to black-and-white minstrel shows. Feminists can’t be happy that children are watching men aping extreme stereotypes of womanhood. Surely, it would be prudent for local councils to stay out of this fraught debate?

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The organisers of the current UK library tour of Drag Queen Story Hour say they want to “show the world that being different is not a bad thing, and by providing imaginative role models for children to look up to, we can change the world book by book!” While it is not uncommon for children’s stories to convey a moral message, it does seem strange that so many drag queens are keen to undertake a pedagogic role that, in contrast to their typically bacchanalian late-night productions, must seem somewhat insipid.

Drag delights in the smashing of taboos. There are many genres and art forms that can be sanitised for a younger audience, but drag has at its heart a lascivious energy, a fuck-you attitude to societal norms. If you strip away all that to make it age-appropriate, what is left? Just a man in a dress. And Widow Twankey already has that covered.