As the chorus of voices lifted in the final kaleidoscopic song of Gender Euphoria, the first mainstage all-transgender show in Australian history, something rare and vital was communicated. So many trans stories are tragedies; it’s easy to miss the triumphs. So much of the world is still so stigmatising and cruel to trans people that it’s easy to overlook the joy. More than just relief at having escaped something, the show tells us, being trans is also about having found something. “Goodbye gender dysphoria,” proclaimed cabaret star Mama Alto, “Hello gender euphoria!”
Staged for one night only on Thursday at the Arts Centre as part of Melbourne’s Midsumma festival, Gender Euphoria explored the distinctive joys that can come with being trans. With songs and stories, ballet and burlesque, the show represented a bracing antidote to the pervasive grimness of the present moment. As trans people are targeted for erasure by governments and individuals alike, it was the purple-frilled gender educator Nevo Zisin who provided the unyielding reply: “We are not a myth. We are not a phase. We are here.”
Gender euphoria is a concept whose time has come. In 2013, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual updated its entry on what it then called gender identity disorder to focus instead on gender dysphoria: the discomfort or distress a person can feel about their assigned gender. The change reflected a growing awareness that being trans – not identifying with the gender that other people thought you were when you were a baby – isn’t a problem in itself; the problem is the distress this can cause.
This approach is useful and necessary, but it’s missing something. It’s all push, and no pull. It builds itself entirely around what trans people are seeking to escape, whereas the experience of trans people tends to involve at least as much of a sense of being drawn towards something.
When young trans people experiment with presentation and self-conception, they’re paying attention to what feels good as well as what feels bad. Along with the push of gender dysphoria, there also breathes the pull of gender euphoria: the sense of fulfilment or joy that comes from living as the gender you feel yourself to be. This is the hole in our ideas that gender euphoria fills – the type of joy on radiant display at the Midsumma show.
Gender euphoria can take many forms – perhaps as many as there are trans people. Onstage, Harvey Zielinski boxed, exulting in his body, as he related small moments of strangers speaking to him as a man. Bailee Rose and Ned Dixon sang the feeling, their high and low voices blending into a pelagic harmony of self. The poet Fury ambled onstage in a dressing gown, speaking with the knowing smile of an eccentric uncle about to send someone on a quest for buried treasure. Gender euphoria looked different for each of the cast-members, but what united them was a sense of fulfilment, of brightness, of propulsion. What united them was a type of joy that shouldn’t be as rare as it is.
Despite Mama Alto’s optimistic farewell to it, gender dysphoria remains an important part of many trans people’s stories. Significantly, though, dysphoria isn’t necessary to be trans. A cart can be pulled without being pushed, and most trans people tend to experience a combination of push and pull – dysphoria and euphoria – as they figure themselves out. Part of what trans people’s journeys involve is an ever-increasing attunement to these feelings, magnetising them into a compass capable of guiding us forward. What a show like Gender Euphoria does is widen our eyes to the breadth of possibility in being trans – and especially to the distinctive kinds of joy that, because of the steeper path hiked to it, trans people are simply more attuned to.
Dysphoria is important, but it can’t be the entirety of the story told about trans people. Being trans, ultimately, is not just fleeing something that feels wrong. It’s also about finding what feels gloriously right, grasping it with both hands, and singing with all the voice it gives you.