Pax the Transwitch

Get to know your Mx Weirdo winners! Every week, Gladys, IzzyDead MotherEffer, and a team of local drag kings, queens, and performers bring you a weird, wild, wacky, and creepy show that isn’t for the faint of heart, but is super important. In anticipation of the winner’s showcase, we bring you some seriously spooky profiles.

Pax Transwitch claimed the crown in November.

Name: Pax the Transwitch

Instagram Handle: @transwitch

Pronouns: she/her or they/them: trying to be less attached to binary identity

Gig: When it comes to what she’s serving us, Transwitch is very accurate. The look is witchy, spooky, and always on-point, but the performances are often dark, troubling, and hard-to-watch, even when she’s conveying a much-needed message.

“My whole platform is about trans people; I wanted transness to be more visible in drag in Denver, and experiences of transness to be shown—really shown. So to do that justice, in one performance, I asked Heavenly Powers, who also identifies on the trans spectrum, to sexually assault me on the stage and to slur me if she could. And she did. That was the realest and most difficult performance I’ve done so far. It was triggering and scary and painful in more ways than one for both of us, but it was real.” 

Quotable Quote:

“As far as drag being an expression or performance of gender, I really hate any distinction between drag performers and how they were assigned at birth. I feel like it’s inherently transphobic; even the concept of a hyperqueen is in the arena of drag focusing on someone’s genitalia or the assumption of their identity. It’s reductive. We all just do drag. The body doing it shouldn’t matter, except that it does still, and that’s why I do drag the way I do it. “

What you can expect: Interactive experiences that support the trans community and genuine expression.

“Honestly, I do plan on making a fair amount of my performances interactive with the trans community, having people vote on what parts of trans experience I perform. But mostly, I plan to continue to be unapologetically myself in the kindest and most accepting way I possibly can and highlight my and other people’s experiences of transness and of gender as accurately and viscerally as I can.”

Catch Pax this Thursday flaunting her witchiness alongside the other Mx winners at Weirdo.

Header photo by Stu Osborne