From the Stage to the Statehouse and Back Again

Nicolas Shannon Savard: Hello, and welcome to Gender Euphoria: The Podcast, a series produced for HowlRound Theatre Commons, a free and open platform for theatremakers worldwide.

I'm your host, Nicolas Shannon Savard. My pronouns are they, them, and theirs.

We are returning from a little mid-season break. Had to record some more interviews with the fabulous artists you'll be hearing from in the coming weeks. 

Today, it's just me on the mic. I wanted to talk a little bit more about some of the overarching questions I've been discussing with artists this season. From what work are our stories doing in our communities against the backdrop of the surge of anti-trans politics in the U.S. in 2025? 

How are trans artists, especially those of us living in hostile political-cultural environments, finding modes of creative joy, resistance, advocacy, and community building? 

What lessons do intersectional queer and feminist histories offer us in responding to this current moment? 

How and where and for whom are trans stories doing work in our communities? 

And how are trans and gender nonconforming artists renegotiating, challenging, reshaping those narratives? 

So while these questions are, of course, related to my work as a podcast host, a scholar-researcher of trans and queer performance, the urgency behind them is coming from what I've been seeing on the ground as a trans artist and educator living and working in the Midwest. So it feels worth it to answer some of those questions as they relate to my own work.

As an entry point, I'm going to draw on my experience writing, touring, and evolving my own solo show, Five and a Half Feet of Fearsome, over the past several years. 

So where are we going? So I'll start with telling you a little bit about the show itself, a bit about the context that I was responding to when I was first writing and who I was building upon. In the second section, I'll talk a bit about the pieces of the show that I adapted for testimony opposing anti-trans legislation in Ohio, where I was living. Most of that work happened between 2022 and 2024, and that was really where I started actively grappling with the work that trans stories are doing in hostile political environments. Through the process, I was looking to gay and lesbian activists of the past as a guide to how to respond and how to keep moving forward. In the third section, I'll dive into the process of remounting the show for a festival run in 2025. I'll talk a bit about the process of taking Five and a Half of Fearsome from the stage to the statehouse and what it was like to come back again to the stage. The show required quite a bit of revision with a new focus on taking our stories back to respond to the political moment that I was looking at in Ohio at that time. So without any further ado, let's dive in. 

Chorus of voices: Gender euphoria is bliss. Freedom to experience masculinity, femininity, and everything in between. Getting to show up as your own self. Gender euphoria is opening the door to your body and being home. Unabashed bliss. You can feel it. You can feel the relief. Feel safe. And the sense of validation and actualization. Or sometimes it means being confident in who you are. But also to see yourself reflected back. Or maybe not, but being excited to find out. 

Nicolas:How have I, as a trans artist, been renegotiating, challenging, reshaping the stories told about us in politics and in the media? So I started writing Five and a Half Feet of Fearsome in about 2018. A lot of the inspiration for it came from processing this simultaneous rise of trans visibility in public life and in the media, and also the political battles that were starting to brew at that time. Thinking most specifically about the North Carolina bathroom ban. Other similar legislation in educational settings, in medical settings, popping up across the country. At that time, I was relatively still early in processing my own understanding of myself as a genderqueer trans person. 

It was an interesting time to come out when I did in 2015, to say the least. And the idea for the title Five and a Half Feet of Fearsome came from this kind of thought experiment that I did of what if I could actually do all of the things that Fox News says that I'm doing as a trans person. And honestly, that was a powerful thought. They really do think I am wreaking havoc on the country. And the show came out of kind of this idea of embodying “what would it be like to step into that power?” Five and a half feet… because I am about that tall with shoes on. 

So the show is framed as the annual meeting of the Gender Deviants and Other Queer Folk of whichever state I'm performing in. The purpose of this meeting is to unveil the “Transgender Agenda,” which of course, item one is to welcome the new recruits. And two is to indoctrinate the children. This one is definitely an old narrative about the queer community in general. But I found that language cropping up. I pulled news clips and headlines of parent protests over kids books featuring trans characters. And so the solution, if we can't have human characters, was to come up with an animal mascot. So there's a platypus puppet show. 

Item number three is to burden the medical system. This was essentially the argument behind the ban on transgender troops in the military in 2018, that our medical care was too expensive. I walked the audience through how to perform the “Transgender Healthcare Dance.” It's a dance with a hula hoop, so you get the visual metaphor of jumping through hoops. Item number four on the Transgender Agenda is to unravel the fabric of the American family. And it's this series of short vignettes where I play both myself and my mother. And she is trying desperately to usher this gender variant, often gender defiant child through girlhood rites of passage. 

I toured the show to fringe festivals in Kansas City, in Indianapolis. I went to trans summer camps. I went to colleges. I had a whole tour planned out for the summer of 2020, which the pandemic kind of derailed that. After that, I kind of moved on from Five and a Half Feet of Fearsome and the jokes didn't feel so immediately pertinent as trans acceptance seemed to be growing at the time. I felt like it was time for new material. 

Then in 2022, I was living in Columbus, Ohio. We had a bunch of new representatives join the state legislature. We had a whole lot of new anti-trans bills. Also a lot of bills targeting diversity, equity, and inclusion from elementary schools up through colleges. I was seeing what was happening in my own community. Lines from the show kept kind of resurfacing for me and feeling very relevant again. The transition from “clearly a joke” to “the actual words coming out of a legislator's mouth” three miles down the road from my classroom was unsettling, surreal, destabilizing, scary. Which brings me to the question of how are those of us working in politically hostile environments finding creative joy, resistance, advocacy, community? 

At that time, I realized I had stories; they needed somewhere to go. Things that are really ringing in my ear at that point is the old feminist phrase, “the personal is political.” That was feeling really real at that time for me. I was doing what I could find to do, calling my senators, calling my representatives, writing to them. I attended a testimony workshop with Equality Ohio, the statewide LGBT advocacy organization. After that workshop kind of came to them with this offer to brainstorm what else might I be able to do. I'm a teacher. I'm a storyteller. I might be able to help beyond just writing by myself in my apartment. 

What we ended up coming up with was creating this Storytelling for Testimony Rapid Response Guide. It has a bunch of prompts for stories to include in one's testimony, a structured outline for letter writing and making the connection between proposed policies and personal stories and broader community impacts. 

A lot of where that prompt writing and that capability to make those connections between the personal and political really comes from in 2015, I participated in one of Tim Miller's “Body Maps” workshops and have been really, really inspired by his autobiographical storytelling and connecting it to much broader political issues ever since then. A lot of that came into play as I was doing this work with Equality Ohio and with another organization called Honesty for Ohio Education. 

Stories from my own shows that ended up in my testimony in front of my state representatives. I took some of the ideas from the “Indoctrinate the Children” section into my testimony at the state of Ohio's board of education with one of their anti-LGBT resolutions. Showed up in my best respectable teacher drag. Another one of the bills that cropped up in Ohio was a bathroom ban across all educational settings from public and private K-12 schools, museums, sports facilities, including higher ed. 

So some of my text from that testimony I actually pulled from a script I used to call Texas Senator Lois Kulkurst who wrote the Texas Trans Bathroom Bill. I had a few genuine logistical questions about where I would be able to pee while visiting the state for the 2017 Mid-America Theater Conference in Houston. In my show, Unpacking, I reenact that phone call. That came up again in my testimony opposing Ohio's HB 183 and I took a similar approach–with props! 

I laid out these six different documents it would take to prove that I am the person listed on my original birth certificate, which is the bathroom I would be required to use. And I looked the representative who wrote it dead in the eye and asked “Do I need to carry them with me? Who needs to have this on file? My department chair? The building manager for each building I teach in? Gonna need a folder for all of that.” 

So the parts that I ended up using most from my shows related to trans healthcare access in Ohio. Most of the bills–and there were several reintroductions and versions–attempted to ban gender affirming care for transgender minors. Several did put restrictions on adults as well but didn't end up passing. The general stated concern behind these bills was that trans related healthcare was “moving too fast,” and they wanted to crack down on a system that doesn't have enough oversight or research behind it. I will note: doctors say otherwise. Decades of research do say otherwise. 

And this is really where things kept coming up from the “Transgender Healthcare Dance.” There was this huge disconnect between these politicians saying that it's too easy to access trans healthcare, and all I could picture was all the ways I had to contort myself through that hula hoop to tell the story of how I managed to get healthcare in their state. Things that ended up in most often in my testimony were also parts of the final section of the show where I'm growing up as a gender non-conforming kid in the early 2000s. And I lay out the various ways that I attempted to take stopping puberty into my own hands and shaping my body into my own hands. 

In the show it's a funny and poignant and kind of radically hopeful story but to step back and look at it in a more clinical setting… Having just the straight facts written down is heavy. The actual line that I wrote in the testimony was, “It gives me great hope that today's transgender youth may not have to experience what I did growing up. Medicine, research, therapy, and social supports exist today in ways that I could not have imagined 18 years ago. Please do not take that away.” 

The exhausting part of doing this advocacy work outside of my full-time job, in part, was sending it over and over as bills moved across different committees, got revised, cropped up in unrelated areas, moved between the House of Representatives to the Senate to the governor's desk to a special commission. It was a lot of people to send this incredibly vulnerable story to. It's a story about my body. This kind of brings me to how joy and community were a really big part of the resistance here. 

Political advocacy for your own access to health care, to inclusion in education spaces, to generally exist in public space is a long slog. And, as I've said, it's exhausting, which is really why performances of celebration, acts of community, and laughter in the face of it all are so, so important. There's an essay I come back to, again, by Tim Miller. He co-authored this essay with David Román called “Preaching to the Converted.” I read it at the beginning of grad school and it's one that has just stuck with me for years and years. Basically what the essay is is kind of a clap back to critics that say that they were doing gay political performance wrong by speaking to gay audiences rather than trying to get straight audiences onto their side, or educate them, or something like that. It really dives into: what does performance do for community and for queer identity? Queer theater for queer audiences, Tim Miller and David Román argue, is really about coming together to negotiate what our identities mean, develop shared language and reference points to grapple with questions, find little moments of hope, rehearse ways things could be different for us. 

With all of that in mind, while I was doing this testimony (for part of it in the spring of 2023), I was teaching a class on civil rights activism and the arts at Case Western Reserve University. We were covering groups like ACT UP. I made a point to show both the iconic images of the die-ins on the lawn of the FDA building and between the pews in St. Patrick's Cathedral, but I also included images of the sassy picket signs and the giant inflatable condoms. There is a research project to be had in the hilarious costuming that ACT UP got up to–for another day. 

One of my favorite examples of Queer community and joy in the face of politicians literally trying to strip away your rights was spending time with the other folks delivering opposing testimony at the state capitol in Columbus. In the hearing room, there's a certain level of decorum expected. It's quiet. In the overflow room, on the other hand, the hearing room decorum does not apply. And that room would often become like a crowd at a sporting event. We would spend a good amount of time talking back to the live feed of what was happening in the hearing room. We would boo disingenuous, offensive questions. Cracking jokes back at the screen, cheering for especially well-delivered points. After you delivered your testimony, you were greeted by a round of applause, cheers, high fives. It brought a certain amount of levity and laughter, sometimes gallows humor, but it made it all bearable. Reminded us that the folks fighting alongside us outnumbered those against us a good ten to one most of the time. 

So this brings me around to restaging the show in 2025. I think what brought me there was how the original show had had to respond to a changing political conversation. What had been a very fringe conversation in 2018 was now incredibly mainstream. When before I had to really dig for the audio clips to pull from and the headlines, now there was a truly overwhelming amount. I also felt like I needed to incorporate my own evolving understanding of and relationship to my own body and identity. Major changes to the show coming back to the stage after being on the hearing room floor was a full face of drag makeup with eye black. The show ran in 2025 at the Borderlight Fringe Festival in Cleveland. Legislature was actively debating a drag ban at the time, so it felt on point. 

Another major change to the design was a screen projected behind me. So as I'm performing the show, I've got news headlines of everything that's happening, interspersed with screenshots of email updates from Equality Ohio asking for testimony, giving updates on bills, my own emails to legislators, screenshots of my own written testimony that I sent. The “Transgender Agenda” also had to be updated for 2025. Of course, we welcome the new recruits. “Indoctrinate the children” is still a phrase that was relevant and one that had to become increasingly so. I made sure to include celebration of folks fighting for LGBT inclusion in schools and kids programming. I had examples from Ohio specifically to include in my imagery there. 

The turn to address the opposition got a lot more serious. I pull a clip of President Trump's address to the Senate where he declares that on day one of his presidency, he's going to end the “transgender insanity” in schools to stop the indoctrination of the children. The Platypus Puppet Show gets a whole lot more subversive when the president is threatening to “eradicate transgenderism” and where there are now states where the themes in it are actually illegal to teach to children. 

Agenda items three and four probably got the biggest update. We went from “burdening the healthcare system” to item number three is now “trans takeover of American healthcare.” The hula hoop dance got a whole lot longer, in part, because I had experienced more roadblocks and hoops to jump through. The new version of it, many of the hoops are repeated coming out to doctors, therapists, receptionists. One of the steps is that you have to listen to the therapist read back the letter officially diagnosing you with gender dysphoria. I have an edited version (for just quality of spoken word) of the actual letter that my therapist wrote for my gender confirmation surgery. I cast a friend of mine to read that in voiceover as I'm completing the rest of the steps.

Shout out to my dear friend and collaborator, Aubrey Helene Neumann Jones, who played the disembodied therapist voice speaking to me over the god mic. 

I get all the way up to step thirty-nine, and at that point, it is a workout. I am dripping sweat. The drag makeup is melting down my face, but also the “Transgender Healthcare Dance,” especially for me living in Ohio at the time, wasn't just the actual personal medical care anymore. There was the entire political backdrop to it and the threat of it going away. I didn't quite know how to transition between that and item number four, which had been “unraveling the fabric of the American family.” That didn't feel quite right to me anymore, but I didn't want to cut those vignettes. It's where a lot of my personal story comes out in the show. Many of my favorite parts of the show are in that section. I ended up just journaling one night where I felt blocked and it turned into this monologue that reframed the final section of the show. I'll play that for you here. 

Nicolas (performance recording): You would think this is the end of the dance. I thought so too, but I just so happened to live in Ohio where trans healthcare is a hot topic of political debate. So there are just a few extra steps. An encore, if you will. Cue music! 

[piano music: “Maple Leaf Rag” by Scott Joplin]

Step forty. Write to your state representatives. Express your concerns about their latest proposal to limit gender-affirming care. Recapture trauma. 

Forty-one. Reschedule your annual physical. The LGBT clinic had to close to investigate a credible bomb threat. 

Forty-two. Call your representatives. Urge them to vote no on making it even more difficult for you to access healthcare. To vote no on banning gender-affirming care entirely for the trans teens that you work with. Recount your trauma. Relive your trauma. It doesn't have to be this way. 

Forty-three. Check in with two security cards every time you pick up your prescriptions. 

[Music begins to fade.]

Forty-four. Prepare your testimony. Take the day off work. Drive to Columbus. Join hundreds of trans adults and kids and their parents and your doctors and counselors at the statehouse. Bring your therapist's letter. Bring your binder full of paperwork from your doctor. Bring your stories. Stand before a government committee. Come out to them. 

Half of the members don't understand trans lives. Recount your trauma. The other half don't want us to exist at all. Relive your trauma. They are afraid their own children could grow up to look just like you. They'll do anything to stop that. No matter the cost. No matter how deeply offensive the reasons. 

Pause. Breathe. 

Know when it's time to walk away. Remember, comrades, you don't owe anyone proof of your humanity. Especially not when they insist on painting you as a monster. 

I am tired. I am tired of giving my story to doctors. I am tired of giving my story to politicians. I am tired of giving my story to misinformed half-strangers just asking questions about something they saw on Fox News or read in the New York Times. I am tired of being asked for my story for educational purposes. I'm told it's such important work, usually unpaid, so the straights can learn how hard it is to be transgender. 

I don't want to do it anymore. I want my story back. I want to take my story back. I want to hold all the pieces that have been torn out, dissected, searching for evidence of illness, suffering, deceit, mental instability. I want to take them and breathe life back into them. 

Item number four on the transgender agenda. Take our goddamn stories back. I'll start here. I'm ten years old. My mother is sitting in the green armchair in the basement… [performance audio fades].

Nicolas: I launch into the same stories. My mother and I going through these girlhood rituals: reading Judy Blume, learning about periods, getting my first bra–turning it into a slingshot, prom dress shopping going terribly. There is a break in the middle for Bertha the Furious Uterus, which is the drag queen I made of my uterus as a way to cope with having endometriosis as a transmasculine person. It's an adventure. What else is a queer kid to do? That series of vignettes with my mom ends with a little “welcome to womanhood” for me, and she gives me a menopause survival kit sort of care package. 

When I performed this at Hobart and William Smith College this past November, one of the questions a student asked me during the talkback, first, he praised me for my bravery in sharing the story. I managed to hold back my eye roll. I have some feelings about being told I am brave and resilient as a trans person, because often I don't feel like I have much of a choice. But he asked, how do I find the courage to tell this story when there is so much backlash?

And I think I end up coming back to that Tim Miller essay, again, “Preaching to the Converted.” I don't get a lot of backlash to my shows. They're very much an opt-in kind of thing. I'm pretty clear about what it's about. But that show and that space is the place where I get to tell the stories that I can't in a Senate hearing room, where I get to frame it in my own way, where I get to crack all of the jokes, where I get to say things to other queer people. Doing the show in and of itself is not the part that requires bravery. The show makes a space where it's possible to say the things that I'm afraid to or can't or would have much larger consequences if I did in other spaces. 

I think that's where I'll leave it for today. 

Of course, in Gender Euphoria: The Podcast tradition, I must leave you with a snapshot of queer joy. This one also comes out of a moment of community resistance. This is 2023 at the Near West Theater in Cleveland. They were hosting a Drag Queen Story Hour during Pride Month, and the local theatre community heard that the Proud Boys and other neo-Nazi-esque groups planned to show up and protest a Drag Queen Story Hour. As a group, I commend the Cleveland theatre community for taking the best possible lesson from the Laramie Project. They organized an angel action. A hundred people showed up in brightly colored floral shirts, and we all had rainbow umbrellas. We created a barrier between the neo-Nazis across the street, all ten of them or so, and the kids and their families going into the Drag Queen Story Hour. They all got to walk through this bright rainbow tunnel with this chorus of a hundred people singing, You Are My Sunshine, just getting louder and louder to drown out the protesters with the megaphone on the other side of the street. That is how “You Are My Sunshine” becomes a protest song. 

This has been Gender Euphoria: The Podcast. Hosted and edited by me, Nicolas Shannon Savard. The voices you heard in the intro poem were Rebecca Kling, Dillon Yruegas, Siri Gurudev, Azure D. Osborne-Lee, and Joshua Bastian Cole. The show art was designed by Yaşam Gülseven. This podcast is produced as a contribution to HowlRound Theatre Commons. You can find more episodes of this show and other HowlRound shows wherever you find podcasts, including on noncommercial open source apps like Anytime Podcast Player for iPhone and AntennaPod for Android. If you loved this podcast, please share it with your friends, your colleagues, your students. You can find a transcript for this episode along with lots of other progressive and disruptive content on howlround.com. Have an idea for a meaningful podcast, essay, or TV event that the theatre community needs to hear? Visit howlround.com and submit your ideas to the knowledge commons.