I’ve been working on my comedy routine lately. You know, transgender comedy sometimes seems to me like an oxymoron. When I was going through the transition and everything – this was the 1980s! – it was all very serious and grim. Even the doctors were grim. The only kind of humor I had with the 2 other trannies I knew in Cleveland was strictly gallows humor. Everything was going so badly – lovers, family, job, hassles on the street, push-back from the medical establishment – that was the only kind of humor we knew.
How times have changed. And the trans-community is so much larger, the issue so much more visible. For years now, I feel like we’ve been so heads-down in activism and advocacy. And it’s difficult not to take it all seriously when kids are still dying simply because they are gender-different. This is serious stuff. And I’ve been very, very angry about gender discrimination for a long time.
Still, somewhere in my soul I feel I’ve reached a point where it’s okay to poke fun at ourselves – and others – around gender. That if the time for anger is not past – and I don’t believe it is – the time for humor and laughter is also now. We’ve made an amazing amount of change at warp-speed on all things trans by being strong, determined, serious, energetic and – yes – angry. Maybe the next step in educating people is to get them to laugh at themselves and how much the whole gender system is screwed up.
That’s why in my material, I always start out making fun of myself, and then gradually subtly, I move the focus around to them and mainstream culture, and before you know it the jokes are about the gender system.
I think maybe Butler was right: rigid binary genders require a sense of humor because at its core, it’s really a comedy no one laughs at. Actually it’s really very funny. Maybe now we make them laugh.
One Trans Show 