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The Guilfordian

The student news site of Guilford College

The Guilfordian

The student news site of Guilford College

The Guilfordian

Tranny Roadshow: laughs and learning about defying gender norms

With many unique performances including an anecdote about a child’s surprise encounter with rabbit guts, a reflective piece on incorporating and rejecting different versions of masculinity, a penis monologue, a story about lion costumes and marriage, an acoustic guitar performance, and an underground garage rock music act, the Tranny Roadshow celebrated gender variance on March 29 in Dana Auditorium. The show reunited during their year-long break from touring specifically to present their “multimedia performance art extravaganza.” Artists who self-identify as transgender combined their intrapersonal knowledge and talent for humor to stir distinctly pronounced laughs, pockets of chuckles, and several bouts of clapping from the audience.

Guilford welcomed them to a stage where expressing individuality – something that can either transcend and/or mingle with gender – is not shunned.

Performing her spoken word piece, one performer, Ryka Aoki, admits to ultimately loving her penis as a part of herself. However, sometimes she wishes it were easier to wear that “cute Hello Kitty bikini from Hot Topic.”

“Don’t think of it as cutting off, think of it as rearranging or turning around,” she said, explaining the idea of a sex change to her penis. “It’s something we’re going to go through together. Whatever we decide to do will be for us.”

Another act exemplified a universal idea: people can decide which aspects of any gender to attribute to their identity.

Playing a recording that tracked the tone drop in his voice over two and a half years at various intervals of male hormone injections, Kelly Shortandqueer, co-organizer of the Tranny Roadshow, shared part of his transformation with the audience.

He struggles with seeing “most versions of masculinity as slightly ridiculous” and concurrently feels that “female socialization has a monopoly on (his) insides.”

“I have to decide what I want to incorporate and what I want to let go of,” he said.

Sara Eisenberg and Joe Pelcher, who organized the show at Guilford with the help of PRIDE, Senate, and Gender Equality Now, support this sentiment.

“Something that draws me into the (GLBTQA) community is the emphasis on individuality,” Eisenberg said. “You have to come to find your own identity – that’s the deal.”

Though it’s a collaborative show, the artists in the Tranny Roadshow concentrate on showcasing who they are as individuals.

“Being transgender is the linking factor between the performers, but it’s more about who you are,” Pelcher said. “It’s about how that coincides and is affected by being transgender.”

Jamez Terry, co-organizer of the Tranny Roadshow, compared his outlook on life to a flower boy at a wedding who confidently strutted down the aisle, not bothering to look back, and tossed petals into the air.

“Being married is like wearing a costume all the time, a costume of being straight,” Terry said while dressed in his lion outfit from his own costume-themed wedding last summer. “Being straight is not as much fun as being a lion.”

At the end of his act, he unzipped his costume to reveal a shirt that said ‘felon’ and jumped off stage, grinning and powerfully flinging flower petals from a basket as he walked up the aisle.

Not all performances pointed to transgender issues; some simply illustrated hilarious situations.

Red Durkin described a scene from her childhood as a backup vignette because of sound problems.

One day, she began to chase a rabbit, yearning to make a pet out of this creature in her backyard. “I realized why kids normally can’t catch rabbits,” she said. Approaching and picking up this rabbit only yielded bunny guts and blood on her hands.

“The Tranny Roadshow is about presenting transgender people as multi-faceted and multi-talented,” Kelly Shortandqueer said after the show. “Being transgender is a part of who we are, but it’s not everything. We want this show to be about any and all of the pieces of who we are.”

Many people recognize the importance of this avant-garde show’s place in the Guilford community as well as in the larger context of the world.

“It was an amazing show,” said senior Sam Sklover. “That’s what Guilford stands for: expanding on what gender and sexuality means.”

“It’s unfortunate that artists who make good art aren’t allowed on stage because they are discriminated against,” Pelcher said. “It’s not an easy life and bringing them to a college campus is a wonderful thing.

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