On Leaving, Returning, and Leaving Again

Reflections on the past few (tough) months.

I’m certain I’ve left my heart somewhere in the Irish sea. Hearing news of the UK Supreme Court’s ruling that decrees trans women are not legally women, I was stood onstage of the Smock Alley Theatre in Dublin, teching a show about being trans. I usually try not to put too much of myself in my work: I find it dangerous, I’ve been burned before, and fondly refer to my quasi-autobiographical college works as ‘vomit plays’. But this one was different: I put my lived and learned experience of being non-binary into a play, and challenged myself to write it in Irish. Back to my roots, to the facets of my identity I am certain of. Irish and queer. That much I know to be true.

My family went on a trip to Paris when I was twenty and my older sister was stopped on the street outside the Centre Pompidou to be told by a street vendor that she must have Spanish blood. Dark and gorgeous, that’s what he was getting at. I, excited at the prospect of being of more than just Irish and Scottish, was quickly brought back down to earth when my mother told me that evening that her sister had taken an Ancestry test recently and, no, we were Donegal and Glasgow, sin an méid. Perhaps I should do better to trust Parisian men on the street.

Whatever disappointment came from not being more than just Irish has subsided greatly six years later as I’ve moved to the North of England.

The people in Liverpool love my accent. They always tell me they have family from Mayo who emigrated – it’s truly a wonder how there’s anyone left in Mayo with the volumes of people who tell me this. They almost always assume I’m from Dublin, which hurts, but I’m quick to tell them, no, this is a Kilkenny accent. An hour and a half south of Dublin. That line gets said at least three times a week. Coming from a small town in Ireland, the only other places I’ve lived in my life are New York and Galway. Liverpool is a glorious medium between both – it has the scrappiness of Galway with a New York pace. I love it here, my new home, a place that accepts me and my oddities and my assertion that I am neither male nor female. So why does coming back here for the first time since my show in Dublin feel like a betrayal?

Probably because there is a group of women in Scotland who think that trans people shouldn’t exist, that they pose a threat to the safety and wellbeing of cisgendered women. These women, bankrolled by JK Rowling, were the ones to take the ruling on biological gender to the UK’s Supreme Court. I understand that it’s more than just a small group of Scottish women who are looking to bring harm to trans people – I am well aware that trans people are being warned not to enter the US, and if they’re already there then good luck – but let me just wallow in the accusation first. That trans people pose a threat to cisgendered people is not true. Trans women will not hurt you, they never have. What they will do is be the backbone of every LGBTQ+ rally and organization and protest that has or will ever happen. They have done this since the dawn of queer, since queerness has existed (always) and been recognized (very recently). But you, reading this, you don’t need to be reminded that trans women are the best, do you? I’m preaching to the choir.

My show that was going up during the ruling was called Ní Liomsa an Teach Álainn Seo. This is Not My Beautiful House. I have a habit of stealing play titles from songs, for some reason my original creativity falls short when it comes to naming. It’s from a Talking Heads song, a group of freaky people who made freaky music about being odd and, naturally, I am a huge fan. The line was chosen when I listened to the Best Of… in my first car, an old Skoda, and realized my body was not my own. In the context of being born female, it did not belong to me but to the world, and in the context of being non-binary, I did not know how to function within it. Of course, I’d known this before, but it was the voice of a cis male hero that made it click. Ironically, the Skoda was also not mine. My sister passed it down to me when she emigrated to Australia. (She’s dark, gorgeous and kind).

In my play the main character, An Té, is non-binary, but is unsure how to put it into words. They state, when asked if they’re a trans male, that what they feel is “not a want of something more / But of things less.” They point to the things they want less of: their pubis, their hips, their breasts. A reviewer came on opening night and fell asleep, and wrote in his review that the binary was too black and white for his taste, and I thought that is the point of a binary. Maybe he’s secretly an ally but is just unsure how to put it into words. It’s tough being in theatre, but it’s tougher being trans.

So the show closed after two nights, like it was supposed to, and I’m down a grand and a half, just like I’d knew I’d be, and I have to fly back to a country that doesn’t believe I exist. I don’t pretend to know any answers other than a strongly-willed ,“cop on”. For all my love of language I cannot formulate words to describe the hurt and disappointment I feel. I used to love Harry Potter, too, you know. But seeing JK Rowling smoking a cigar in her success of stripping trans women – women – of their rights is obviously enough for me to shuck my childhood cocoon that idolized stories of magic and empathy. I will take real-life empathy over the fictionalized magic any day of the week.

And while the hurt permeates and I try to formulate my next steps, I also understand that I cannot return to Ireland. I am not wanted there, either. For different reasons, maybe – for the fact that I can’t afford to live with my partner there, or can’t afford to be an artist there, or simply can’t stand what it’s all coming to. Perhaps in my pursuit of artistic success, the glory of being a struggling artist abroad is shinier than being a broke artist at home. This need to leave, this drive to make something of ourselves elsewhere before the Grand Return, is that a facet of the Irish transgenerational trauma that we almost pride ourselves on? Is it a topic of honour to say we struggled abroad for the benefit of earning respect at home? My first few months in New York brought me an independence I’d never known and so I blagged my way into staying an extra semester. The conditions were that I had to take an unpaid internship in an Off-Broadway Theatre to go towards my college credits, and that my parents would stop paying for my rent. I very quickly learned that independence is much juicier when someone is bankrolling it.

That second semester, where I worked two jobs plus the internship, and never got to see the amazing friends I had made during my first few months, made me desperate for home. It was no longer a case of loneliness – this is significantly dulled when you live in Bushwick – but of graft: an emotionless need for survival. There were no more parties, no time to create, but instead little money and reduced friendships. I went from being twenty-one to being intensely depressed.

But I could not come home early, because I had no success to show for it. People would have known I had failed; returned home having spent so much of my parent’s money and all I could say was that I had ushered James Franco to his seat that one time. When we cannot take it we take it some more, grin and bear it, and feign enjoyment at the pillory.

I could tell you that I’ve learned nothing, that all these years later I have chosen to live abroad again and to work fiercely for little reward, but what a disservice that would be to myself. I have tried stifling the creative core in pursuit of a good income and it makes me unwell, I have tried living at home as an adult but then the creative core feels stifled. I have certainly learned more about myself if very little about how to exist in the world.

Maybe I need to feel like I have something to come back to, that the homecoming will be grand and joyous and will feature affordable housing and an artist’s dole. It has only ever fallen short of those terms, and now the terms in which I reside in the UK mean that I’m paying tax to a government that hates trans people. And I haven’t even taken it very personally, actually. I have that Irish ability to tap out of whatever nonsense the English are getting up to. I exist within a bubble of the social media reality I have built with my own two hands: this includes having a para-social relationship with Alok Vaid-Menon and seeing my queer friends thrive at their art. People like my stories about protecting trans women all the time. We’re all listening to CMAT. Surely to God these Scots women are a myth? I have to keep reminding myself that, despite the fact I don’t follow them or read their articles in The Telegraph, they do, in fact, still exist.

If I’m questioning where to go - unable to exist in the UK, unable to survive in Ireland - how are the trans Britons feeling? They are more trapped than most, without the privilege of freedom of movement in Europe, and the distinct lack of safety in America. It’s not utopia we’re asking for, really, just a right to existence and survival.

I am very lucky that I come home regularly for work, and the people of Ireland are good to me, I would never deny that. I’m also a feminine enby, I’m not the androgynous gender-bender I might be yet. I look like a woman, I was assigned female at birth, I have not changed my name. I am an incredibly privileged trans+ person. And still I’m heartbroken and scared. The deep well of anger I felt as a teenager towards gendered injustices has dwindled to a puddle as I’ve grown up and seen more and more injustices, not just gendered, pile up sky high. You’d think the well would be overflowing at this point, but actually I’ve just gotten more lethargic. Instead of shouting I just cry now. I know it’s just a moment, and that I won’t be crying forever. It’s just a period of mourning.

I’ve always found good and evil to be very black and white, and it’s so tempting to give in to that school of thought. It’s so much easier to process, that bad people do bad things and good people do good things, rather than recognizing that most of us exist on a spectrum. We can stop punishing ourselves so much when we start to recognize the spectrum. But in these states of mourning, I allow myself to cheat. I like to list small activities that are objectively good to do. Like, it’s good to remind ourselves of the pure joy that permeates from the queer community. It’s good to be around trans friends. It’s good to point and laugh at the obvious xenophobia in the Harry Potter books that we missed the first time around, and to laugh at our stupidity for having missed it. It’s good to text each other the phrase “what a time to be alive”. It’s good to laugh incredulously from the other side of the screen.