Getting Bad Reviews, Trans Representation and Not Seeing Yourself on Stage.

I want more than just "representation".

I got a bad review and frankly I couldn’t be happier.

Published 18 months ago, I stumbled across it the other day. The production company were right to shield me from it, but not for the reason you think.

It was my professional debut as both a playwright and an actor. So many poorly written plays have spilled out of me over the years, but this was my first to be produced. It’s about a gay couple, two men settled into comfortable middle-age. The provocative wrinkle? One of them has been secretly transitioning without telling their husband. It was a delight to wallow in a defensive, frustrated and bitchy character playing opposite a dear friend (and co-writer) who is, body and soul, a Labrador puppy. While I gnashed my teeth about the injustices of the world and the plight of trans women, he, a white cisgendered gay man, got to bumble through all the awkward flubbing of pronouns and the uncritical meander through the world’s heteronormative brain-washing.

It was fucking hilarious, sad and frankly a delight to make so many people cry at once.

While the show was generally well received, one reviewer took umbrage with the both the writing and my novice skills as a performer. In their assessment there were structural problems along with feeling the contrivance of my manner and a deep unlikeability in my performance. This is all so fine by the way, I’ve never claimed brilliance in any field and I know I have much to develop in this one, but I can see why the company shielded me from this particular review. Beyond the above criticisms, the thing the reviewer felt most strongly was that “they didn’t see themselves in the trans character”.

Take a moment to let that one sink in.

The reviewer saw a trans person “existing” and saw nothing of themselves in the character. But here’s the problem, this wasn’t a cisgendered person complaining about having to watch some unhinged queer spiraling into incomprehensible self-reflection so niche that it excluded all others from joining them on the journey… no…

The reviewer was a fellow trans woman.

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As my morning coffee bubbles, I’m listening to a laughable text-to-voice reading of Ari Drennan’s recent piece, Guns pointed outward: why I'm adopting the Morgan Page rule in 2025. It’s a wonderful article about infighting in queer communities and the irony of hearing a digital performance with zero nuance isn’t lost on me. Do yourself (and your community) a favour and make room for it in your thought-cabinet. Even the blunt instrument of algorithm-generated voice doesn’t dull the compassion of the prose, the kind, considered plea to take a firm look at how our community continually rends itself to sheds all the while under assault from without.

To be clear, I’m not suggesting the author of my “singular bad review” was damaging the community by offering their critique. I’m glad they gave it. The mantra of “the day you look upon your art with satisfaction is the day you stop improving as an artist” is written on the backs of my eyelids. No, the thing that I found most compelling about Ari’s piece and what sparked my connection to a negative review from a year and a half ago is the acknowledgement of “how trans people are viewed”.

Ari points out all the ways in which we should consider the shape of public discourse. The reviewer did not hold back on their opinions about my portrayal of an “angry trans woman”, so unpleasant and flippant that her pathos is “unearned”.

God, I love this bad review!

I know that the vast majority of my writing is so steeped in sarcasm and snark you’re probably waiting for my rug-pull and bitchy clap-back about someone who “dared to criticize me in a public forum”. No, that’s not what this is. I love this article because it opens the door to talk about what is REALLY happening in my art. The big reveal about the play… a play where I gleefully extol the virtues of trans girl dick being an upgrade of the “standard issue” meat and two veg? A play where I get to describe in luxurious detail the very texture of post-HRT ejaculate? A play where I explicitly call out the failures of cisgendered queers and their abandonment of trans people? All of that is just smokescreen for the truth of the work. I didn’t write it for trans people to see themselves... I wrote it for cis people to see themselves.

Yep, that’s right. I, a trans woman, wrote a play about being trans for the cis folks.

Despite all its overt discourse about gender roles, the emotional hook of the work isn’t the “tragedy of being trans”, it’s the tragedy of being in a relationship with someone who doesn’t understand you. Some may think I’m shirking a responsibility to my community, that I should be ensuring that they feel seen and represented. The reviewer certainly thought so, articulating that they felt little to no emotional connection or sympathy to the trans character, that it was a “wasted opportunity” to represent the community and how felt more sympathy to the bumbling accidentally-hate-crimeing-his-spouse husband.

Baby girl, I wasn’t trying to represent our community, that isn’t my job.

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I sat in the foyer with a little old lady after a matinee. She was in town for the weekend. Bored with nothing to do she picked us on a whim to pass the time and walked in knowing nothing about the play. In my break between shows we talked, her hand in mine. She told me about how much she felt her own words were coming out of my mouth when I said “I hate when people tell my ‘you’re so brave for doing this’.” and that “this isn’t an act of bravery, it’s an act of survival!”. She told me that as she sat there in the dark auditorium she was flooded with the memories of when she fought cancer. She told me how decades earlier people said the exact same thing to her as the curative poison ravaged her body, as the weight fell from her bones and the hair from her papery skin… that she was “brave”… and how she wanted to scream in their faces that she wasn’t, she was just desperate to survive.

If you arn’t picking up what I’m saying, I’ll be as explicit here as I am on stage in the monologue miming the act of “trans woman ejaculation”: I don’t think that asking cisgendered folks to feel sorry for trans people and showing how different our lives are is enough to save our community. We need to show them that we have more in common than not.

Unconditional is a play about being misunderstood by your partner. It just so happens that the inciting incident is about one of parties discovering their gender identity. It’s full of arguments about how much of a mess gets made in the kitchen, about your husband not listening when you talk to them, about the inescapable feeling of drifting apart. Again and again cisgendered folk came to me, thanked me and explained how surprised they were to see themselves on stage. Surprised at seeing their own experience of womanhood, their own relationships and the pain of the “marital bliss myth” they knew deep in their bones.

The myth of “marital bliss”? Oh, didn’t you know, honey? It’s a fucking scam.

I’m genuinely so glad that a young trans woman saw this play and saw nothing of themselves in the trans character. Actually, I’m over the fucking moon! It gives me hope. It means they haven’t felt the loneliness that women my age (cis or otherwise) feel. That they haven’t been crushed under the weight of the white picket fence and the 2.5 kids. Crushed under the weight of having to give up everything that they could possibly be simply because no one ever told them that they don’t have to fit into the “traditional version of womanhood”.

This is what people saw. More than my tits, more than me gleefully extolling the superiority of girldick, more than the portrayal of an unhinged trans woman sobbing in a bathroom because she realised that she’s to blame for fucking up her life.

They saw their own lives and were surprised that it was in a vessel like me.

The “tragedy of transness” is not that we are “different”. It’s that we are fundamentally the same as cisgendered folks, but the political divide of the world, that ever growing chasm seeking to separate trans and non-binary people from the rest, is a contrivance. It may look like a vast distance, but it isn’t. “Mainstream culture” is told again and again that we are “other”. That we are so unlike cisgendered folks that we are incomprehensible, our ever-evolving language is alien, strange customs and fundamentally deviant lives. All of this is smoke screen to cover a simple truth of what the true division on our world is.

The chasm is not horizontal… it’s vertical.

Transgender and non-binary suffer the same (if not worse) inequalities around housing insecurity, food insecurity, financial insecurity. They suffer workplace exploitation. They suffer harassment and assault… just like cisgendered folks.

I understand that a trans woman wanted to walk into an auditorium and see herself represented on stage. Sorry honey, you are a unique and magnificent individual. I wouldn’t dare flatten down the experience of all trans folk just to make some of us feel “seen”. No, if I’m gonna do that I’ll be doing it to I get cisgendered folks on our side.

I’ll never fix the world with my obnoxious bullshit. I may very well alienate my own community in doing so, but if I can equip one cisgendered person, give them the insight to be able to say, “I’m not going to vote for that guy. He’s trying to take away someones rights, rights that we already fought for and won.” then it’ll all have been worth it.

Because we don’t have the numbers by ourselves.

If trans and non-binary folks only relied upon the actions of every member of our own community (which, frankly we don’t even have right now), we STILL wouldn’t have enough to turn back the conservative tide. So I’m sorry, I won’t be tearing down my community, and I won’t be relying on simply existing and hope that it is enough. I’ll leave it to someone else to do “the representation”, I’ve got bigger plans.

–S