From the very beginning of my life, I knew that I was different.
Born one month prematurely, I quickly had difficulty standing and walking. While my parents thought my pigeon-toed “ballerina” walk was cute, I was constantly falling, scraping and bruising myself over and over again; a Disabled Sysiphus whose endless task was to simply walk across a room. Finally, when I was two years old, they decided to consult a professional, and I was diagnosed with Cerebral Palsy.
Except they never told me: not wanting me to think I was anything but “normal,” they decided to keep my diagnosis to themselves, only ever telling me that my legs were “different.”
But what they failed to realize was that, by keeping my diagnosis a secret, they were cutting me off not only from my identity as a Disabled person, but also from my community.
In high school, I began to realize I was “different” in other ways, too. Tasked to write about “something that made [me] feel uncomfortable” in my senior year English class, I wrote a play about a crush I had on a fellow female classmate. Through playwriting, the dam of my normalcy broke; I realized I was queer, and, in turn, began to unlock the many pieces of myself I had masked over with “normalcy” for all those years.
Including my transness and my Disability.
Now, as a Trans-Disabled playwright, representation, access, and community-building lay at the heart of my mission as a writer, artist, and human. I believe that artists are creators of culture with the power to restructure societal narratives—and thus, society itself—to be Anti-Ableist, Anti-Transphobic, Anti-Racist, and Anti-Oppressive. Through writing, I aim to transform society by catalyzing audiences to question its so-called “norms.” I hope to empower audience members to become the fullest, most liberated versions of themselves, and, in so doing, to learn to respect others as the full, complex, human beings they are, and to join the push to create a more equitable community and world.
But I don’t just write plays that are explicitly about Disability or transness: I write plays that are inherently ontologically Disabled and transness. While it is wonderful to see the proliferation of queer (and, more recently, trans and Disabled) narratives on stage and screen, I believe the next step in accepting, amplifying, and uplifting queer, trans, Disabled culture is in presenting art that is not necessarily about what it is to be queer, trans, or Disabled, but that instead illustrates what it feels and is to be queer, trans, and Disabled. Doing so will not only have incalculable benefit to fellow queer, trans, Disabled audiences who see it, but also to anyone and everyone struggling to be more wholly and whole-heartedly themselves.
Together, I believe we can create honest, accessible, and intersectional theatre; theatre that builds community by showing everyone that not only is there no “normal,” but that the best “normal” is one in which that embraces and uplifts every aspect, intricacy, and truthful facet of yourself and those around you. A theatre that creates true societal change by reshaping culture to be deliberately, unapologetically inclusive.
And that would make all the difference.