“And how long have you been on hormones?” I’m in a consult appointment for top surgery — a double mastectomy — and the surgeon is scribbling away at my paperwork, taking brisk and efficient notes in a shorthand legible only to himself. He has, perhaps, glanced up at me once or twice after the perfunctory greeting at his office door — the effect is not so much one of curt rudeness as it is one of mechanical smoothness: He has done so many of these consultations that he can more or less run on autopilot now, with the practiced assurance of an unflappable master. “Oh, about three and a half years ..read more

A magnetic notepad hanging on a fridge. In 2014, I moved across the country to LA. I was fresh out of undergrad, and had just taken a job as a music archivist. I would spend much of my time over the next two years by myself in a room with boxes of old sheet music, cataloguing what I found. It was a time of many firsts for me: My first real job, my first time finding an apartment, my first time living on my own, my first time owning a car. I was, in retrospect, in extremely over my head, and it’s small wonder I felt as overwhelmed as I did, but at the time I just felt more unrelentingly stress ..read more

Sometimes, you have to bend the truth to sell an opera. From the initial casting call, New York City Opera has been advertising their new Stonewall opera, with libretto by Mark Campbell and music by Iain Bell, as the first opera commissioned by a major company to feature a trans character specifically written for a trans singer. It’s a claim that’s been picked up by outlets from OperaWire to the New Yorker, but while the larger claim may be narrowly true, the specific way the role has been cast in this production is a travesty, not a triumph.We will almost certainly never be able to conclusive ..read more

As a trans theatre-maker and critic, many people have asked me my thoughts on Tootsie, and most of them are surprised when I say I think it’s unsalvageably transphobic. After all, the show doesn’t have any trans characters, nor does it contain any explicit messages of hate directed at trans people. But just as a celebration of German culture can still be antisemitic even if it never mentions Jews and a boss who calls his secretary “sweetie” can still be sexist even if he never explicitly tells women to die, the core conceit of Tootsie’s plot strengthens tropes that harm trans women in pervasiv ..read more