 Good evening ladies and gentlemen. I'm Oscar Eustis. I'm artistic director here at the public and I want to welcome you to this town hall. Thanks. I'm gonna get out of your way pretty quickly but I just want to say a word or two about what has prompted this event. The public from its beginning has rooted itself in what we consider the great tradition of America is the idea that the culture, the country belongs to everybody, that inclusion is central to what makes America America, that the promise is of a country where everybody gets to participate, everybody gets to speak, everybody gets to be the hero of their own lives. And that's what the public's tried to do from the beginning. Inclusion has been central to the cultural version of that project that is the public theater. But what that means, the beautiful thing about the promise of America is also the scary thing about the promise, which is it's always expanding. It would never done if we're actually gonna believe in what this country has set out to do. And when we program Southern Comfort, a beautiful play which is opening tomorrow night that focuses on the transgender experience is based on a documentary about transgender people, that engendered immediately some controversy and some criticism of the public which we welcome can be difficult but we welcome it. And so it's led to some institutional and personal soul searching on our part. What we are trying to do is figure out a number of different questions and I'm going to talk about the public for just a second and I'm going to get out of the way and we're going to talk about this in a bigger context. But here at the public the things that we're trying to wrestle with is how can we make sure that this theater is as safe, as friendly, and embraces transgender people in as complete a way as possible in the audience and on the stage. How can we make sure that there's a way to give voice to the transgender experience and to allow transgender people to speak for themselves and for their experience to be reflected in the work that we do? How is it possible for us to nurture and develop transgender talent so that we're giving an opportunity for the fullest possible expression of that voice? All of those things are complicated. They're important. They're the task that we're faced with. We are learning. We are not done yet. But this town hall is just one of a series of things, series of actions that we're undertaking that is attempting to broaden who we are and by doing that to actually fulfill what the mission of the public theater is. So thank you very much for being here tonight. I really thank the panelists for being here tonight and I'm looking forward to the next couple of hours. Thanks. Hi, everyone. My name is Stephanie Ibarra and I'm the director of special artistic projects here at the public and on behalf of Michael Friedman, the director of the public forum and the entire public forum team and the public theater staff, welcome. I want to give you a little bit of context for what's going to happen tonight. This is not your everyday panel discussion. So hang in there with me for just a second. The way we're going to spend our evening is we're going to spend our evening listening to each other, right? So ideally, all of the voices here in this room, the voices who are with us out in the Twitter sphere and watching on live stream, we're going to come together and share thoughts, ideas, experiences and we are all, in theory, going to reflect on what we're hearing tonight and we're going to leave here with a better understanding of how each of us individually and how collectively we as a theater community can get better at being more inclusive of all experiences and reflecting those experiences on stage. So if you're game to do that, then I've got some ground rules for you. So we're going to start in just a second. We're going to listen to our panelists. We've assembled these panelists from a broad spectrum of life. Each of them tonight is bringing to bear their own sort of macro view of the world at large and also their own experience with the transgender issues that are facing the transgender community today. So we're going to hear from them. We're going to talk for, you know, five to 10 minutes each. And then we're going to open the floor to you. Not at first, not for questions, but for thoughts. We're going to invite you to stand to each of these microphones and just share your thoughts. And we're not here to respond. We're just here to listen. And just so you know who's in the audience with us tonight, who's listening. We've got artists from all disciplines in the New York theater community trans and cis alike. We've got leaders of artistic institutions. We've got casting directors. We have professors from leading training institutions. We have live stream folks across America. And we have our artistic unions represented tonight. So we've assembled, I think, hopefully the right people in the room to help move forward coming out of this conversation. Does that sound good? Ground rules? Yeah? Excellent. Great. Then I'm going to start with some very brief, top line introductions, because we would be here all night if I actually tried to dive into the accomplishments of these people. Referring to my notes. Sitting right to my right. This is Polly Carl. Polly is the co-artistic director of Arts Emerson at Emerson College in Boston, and the director and co-founder of HowlRound and the dramaturg of our production of Southern Comfort. Michael Silverman is the executive director of Transgender Legal Defense and Education Fund. Cecilia Gentili is currently the trans health program coordinator at Apeachek Community Health Center, and also just performed in the Foundry Theater's production of A.O.A. and Kate Bornstein, author, playwright, performance artist, theorist, activist, and just on tour with our men, women, and the rest of us, among other things. So we're going to start right back here where I began with Polly. I'm just going to dive in. I'm going to dive in. There's nothing worse than starting a panel about representation. I feel certain that this is a setup for failure, however, I'm going to do it anyway. So I am delighted to be here. I am certain that my views are my own and I am actually representing myself. And I just want to start first with a story. I had a phone call from an artistic director, a friend of mine in another part of the country calling me about a play about transgender lives, but he was trying to put on at his theater, and he had cast five of six parts with transgender actors, but the six part, also trans part, he was having trouble casting it. He was doing the play was written by a cisgendered man who had been asked to write the piece by a transgender friend of his. And he was trying to decide whether he should go on with the production because he was getting a lot of flak for doing a transgender play by a non transgender person that would only have five of six transgender parts cast with transgender folks. And we had a long conversation on a phone about this and we talked a lot about all the places he had looked for the casting, whether he should do the show or not. I took the question to my students. I have a group of students at Emerson College and one of them is helping live stream creative producing students. And I asked my students what they would do under similar circumstances. And they said to me that they would, they, they, they kind of lean toward not doing the show. And I was like, wow. So I think I'm a moderate Democrat in this, in this scenario. Because I was like, do I was trying my friend to do it. I was really thinking about the young people who were going to go to a theater and have an opportunity to see some part of their life told by some people that could they could relate to. And I thought about in my own experience, the incredible importance of being seen on stage. And I talked about with them, you know, I also felt like, you know, how we, the words I like to use are rigor and generosity. How do we bring rigor and generosity to the imperfection of, of representation on stage. And so those are so anyway, it was an interesting conversation. I don't know that I'm right. And I don't know that my students are wrong. They may well be right. But I know that I came down on, I didn't want the story not to get told, because it felt too important. So about the time I'm having that conversation, a dear friend, Oscar Hustis gave me a call and asked me to come and dramaturg Southern Comfort. And I was really torn about being asked to do the production of the being the production from it. I was torn for a few reasons. One is the team that's been working on this creatively has been together for a number of years. And I don't know if you've ever tried to dramaturg a show that people have been working on for seven years. But that can be very tricky business in any kind of, in any kind of show. So I was, you know, concerned about coming on with, I tend to have strong opinions, I was concerned about coming on with strong opinions about the show. And I was also, I was also concerned about the responsibility bearing the responsibility of trying to represent and speak for all transgender people, which I just can't and unable to do. And so I really, I had a late night of no sleep, thinking about it. And ultimately, I kind of found it irresistible to do the show, because I felt like it was going to be important that it was going to bring important conversations into the room that we would all sit and have this conversation, and that that was more important than, I don't know, other things. And so, and, and of course, I looked out in a way. The creative team is completely a group of delightful people who welcome me into the process, valued the contribution that I could bring, both as a dramaturg and as somebody who thinks about being transgender in the world. And, you know, it's not uncomplicated, it's not uncomplicated to do a musical about transgender lives that doesn't have all transgender people in it, it has, it has a series of complications. But there's been something really incredibly great about the show and working on it. And in a way, I think for all of us involved, a little bit lifesaving, you know, I think sometimes I work in this business, I wonder the world is falling apart around us. You know, Donald Trump is alive and well. And, and I think what is what does theater have to say about that? And, and then I think of working on a show like this. And, you know, it's been, it's been really a little bit lifesaving for me personally, to be in a space the first time in my 20 years in the business, to be in a space with five other transgender people in a room making theater. That's never happened before. It's been very moving to me personally working with the transgender actors on the show, transgender stage management, production staff, assistance. And, and I didn't realize how much it means to be seen. And the public theater has made every effort for us to be seen in this process. And I, you know, the first day I got here, and the stage managers wanting to have a conversation about how I feel comfortable in which bathroom I should be in. And I was like, I'm sorry, I've never, am I in the theater? I mean, and I've been, I've been traveling around the country working on a lot of theater in a lot of theaters. And this is the first time I've seen a theater have this kind of deep conversation about gender identity. So, so anyway, I guess, you know, from my vantage point, transgender people have to be making trans theater about transgender lives. They have to be in the room. We have to be in the room. We have to be doing this work. It is lifesaving to see yourself represented in some way, even if imperfectly. And, and so it's been a real honor and pleasure to work on the show. Thank you. So we've just been rooted firmly in what most of us know and love, this sort of theatrical medium. And Michael, when you and I first started talking about this particular event, you were like, I'm not a theater maker. And I said, that's exactly why we want you here. So if we blow out past the theater, past New York City, looking at America, yours, I think you've got a decent sized lens into what's happening in our, in the policy changes that are happening around transgender folks and the fights that you're fighting, I mean, on every single front from the macro policy changes to the very simple, like legally changing your name. So I wonder if you could talk a little bit about your work. I'm happy to. First, you know, thank you, Stephanie. Thank you, Oscar, everyone at the public for organizing this. I'm really thrilled to be here. I'll, I'll, I think what we're seeing in the world at large is very much connected to what we are doing here this evening. And while I'm not a theater maker, I'm a theater goer and I'm a lifelong born and raised New Yorker and I it's probably my fourth decade coming to events at the public. And I can't tell you how thrilling it is for me to have the table turn, have the tables turn from being an audience member to being up here at a moment where what I've been working on for my whole life, which is LGBT and most recently transgender specific civil rights, at a meeting point where this is what the public theater is working on. And this is the questions the theater community is asking. And so that's an incredible thing. Thanks to my co-panelists, many of whom, a couple of whom I'm meeting for the first time, some of whom I know. It's amazing that we're engaging in this conversation to smooth out those bumps and to figure out the best ways to be inclusive and open and equal. It's a tale of two worlds in a lot of ways at the moment and they're not necessarily about politics. In many ways they're about people who know transgender people and people who don't. We just saw last week and maybe some of you read some of the stuff in the New York Times about it. There are houses of the South Dakota legislature and they're proposed to restrict the ability of transgender kids in South Dakota school to use bathrooms and sex segregated facilities like locker rooms, play on sports teams. They match who they are as boys and girls. These are kids who already face tremendous amounts of bullying and harassment and difficulty just getting through everyday life in school. And what we knew this bill was going to do was just paint a bull's eye on these kids' bats. You are going to have transgender boys, transgender girls who are the only boys and girls at school who couldn't use the boys and girls bathroom who are going to have to go to the nurse's room or we're going to have to have a whole monitor stand outside while they went in so that no one else, God forbid, would see a transgender kid in the bathroom. We thought this is a disaster for transgender kids and when I said it's about like who knows transgender people and who doesn't, the governor said I've never met a transgender person. Well it turned out he was wrong. He had been the head of the Children's Aid Society and there was a young transgender woman in South Dakota who had been a resident of a facility that was under the Children's Aid Society's management and she got in touch with the governor and meetings were arranged and a group of transgender kids went to see the governor of South Dakota and said hey we go to schools in South Dakota and this is going to hurt us and in fact at the last minute we didn't know what was going to happen you know we're busy preparing press statements you know he signs it into law he vetoed it. He vetoed it. I confessed that I was surprised and it just reminded me of the power that comes with well coming out and it's not just power for us as LGBT people to be who we are but it's actually the power we give other people to learn about us to know about us to give them an opportunity to ask whatever questions they have. Sometimes those questions are difficult for us you know in a lot of ways we drew a short scrawl simply by virtue of who we are and it's a lot of burden that's put on us to explain who we are to people that we have to do it that is part of the path to our liberation. I'll give you some more just a little bit of a picture and I'm going to turn it over to Cecilia. Life remains an everyday struggle for transgender people you know we do these kinds of high level things high level I'm calling them you know around the country but we also do a lot of local work in the various communities around the country. One of them is here in New York because that's where we founded and where our organization where our headquarters is and we do things like provide very basic legal services to people people who want to change their name change their gender markers so that their identification and legal documents match who they are so when they're doing basic everyday things like going for jobs going for healthcare trying to use public transportation or go to the airport people aren't constantly stopping them and say wait a second who are you you don't look like that name doesn't match what you look like that you know the gender market doesn't match what I'm seeing so on and so forth. What we see among the clients that we are serving I'll just one statistic two-thirds of them are earning less than ten thousand dollars a year. I can tell you that our database is structured in a way that you know we just check off a box from zero to ten ten to fifteen fifteen to twenty. Once people drop below ten they're essentially have no discernible sources of income and so as we think about access as we think about opportunity as we think about inclusion it's important to recognize that we have people who by virtue of the way our society is structured in a lot of way on the outside of many ordinary daily tasks and they're living at the margins and those daily tasks are just basic things like getting jobs so as we think about you know all that it's just you know food for thought as we explore this larger discussion. My name is Cecilia Gentili and I am a trans person a trans woman I'm not just a trans woman a trans woman of color and I am a Latina and I am also somebody that lived in this country for many years without a legal status and I also am somebody that was former incarcerated I'm also a former sex worker and a fierce advocate for sex workers' rights and I work in a clinic. Go figure. So I am the girl that gets you your hormones if you're looking for them. That's what I do for living every day and you know I'm always at the end of the day hormones and that being the last thing that people need when they come to my clinic it's a lot of you know factors that have a lot to do with your social well-being that end up being much more important than hormones because how important is to have a period when you don't have a house you know how important is for you to have a period when you don't have a job and you know I am going to take an opportunity also to thank Michael because they helped me change my name and that has been like an awesome thing to you know one day I was coming back from Dallas I think I don't know what I was doing in Dallas you know in the airport like you know of course it was a problem and they started calling my all names you know this person come here like yeah yeah no no we're calling this person yeah that would be me no no no we're calling this person like dude it's me trust me and believe me it is me give me my fucking ticket so I know how important it is like the work that you guys do and I really wanted to take the opportunity to thank you for it okay so I do all those things and I also am a storytelling so I tell stories that happen to me and some people think that they are funny so I think they are funny so and that's what I do so my experience with theater is very free because I'm in control because it's my freaking story so I say however I want it you know and I change it however I want it and it may end up totally different than how I thought it was going to end and you know that's what I do somebody happened to see me like a couple months ago in a storytelling and they offered me to do an acting gig and I go like what do I have to like minimize all these words but to begin to begin with they're super super extremely difficult for me because I think in Spanish and I have to translate to English and then say it and then mean something while I'm saying it and if you cry while saying it it will be better so that's what I do that's how I end up being here I'm extremely grateful for you guys having me here I'm free or honored to be with such an amazing group of people so well I started doing this this acting thing and I did it and it was fun and I loved it and of course I love attention so it was amazing you know having all these people looking at you at once is like this moment this is amazing like you know and so you know the question is oh my god you were so great you know how long have you been doing this and I never you know did theater you know and and and and I started thinking and like you know I do not have a past with theater when I started my transition I was about 17 years old and it was me my best friend and we both needed money so when we started doing it in Argentina in the 80s the end of the 80s I know I know nobody want to believe that in the 80s I was always 17 but I was so I started doing the same thing that I do now like storytelling right and this is what happened I started transition transitioning and my friend didn't my friend lives as a gay man that does theater as a woman dressing as a woman and I started transitioning so we were both doing the same thing in his career advanced to the point that he is like a very renowned actor in my country that still do acting as a female in what it was going to be my career didn't go nowhere so that makes me think how less important our narratives become when we cross that barrier of gender and I lifted you know first hand and it was really hard for me to stop doing that that was something that was so fun and I love doing because I wasn't able to do it anymore because it wasn't it wasn't fun anymore because it was coming from a point from a person that was trans and when my friend as a cisgender gay man did the same thing like dressing as a woman it was fun and it was interesting and it was edgy and when I did that nobody wanted to listen to it so that's what I wanted to put out there like with my experiences with theater and so I'm so happy to be able to be doing things again and like you know and you know it's always a secret opportunity life and I'm taking full advantage of it so thank you so much hi I'm so excited to be here this is right here is where they did hair and I'm just going wow and I'm here now and that was a time when are you a boy or are you a girl was just starting to enter the public discourse hoarding I've made I've got talking points here because my memory is pretty Swiss cheesy I've been acting and I'll call it acting for slightly over 60 years when I was a little boy I didn't know how to be a boy so I watched the boys and did what they did you know I'm kind of kind of watching the guys you know with the guys now you're too femic I love you but that's how I ended up I know baby it's sweet okay oh god I'm sorry oh good okay good all right good okay okay so this this this watching other people and taking it on has for me become the essence of acting when I studied acting in college I had gotten accepted as pre-married and I just looked at all of the mathematics requirements for that and my first day I dropped out and I started doing theater my father was so pissed off but I loved it I said yeah I know how to do this it's what I've been doing all my fucking life is acting I don't call myself a trans woman I'm not a trans woman I'm not really any kind of woman I'm not any kind of man I've always called myself or when I could finally get words to it I've called myself not man not woman and there's words for it now um gender nonconforming genderqueer non-binary those words weren't around and so theater for me trans theater for me has always been quest to eloquently articulate who I am in such a way that I don't scare people in such a way that I don't prompt people to throw things at me which they did on my very first performance in theater rhinoceros in San Francisco I wrote a play called hidden agenda and co-starring Justin Vivian Bond in the role of Urqueline Barban 18th century French from Aphrobite she was fabulous we've been collaborating to this day but this was back in the 80s 90s 89 that's where I met you and we fell in love yeah anyway so um this was theater rhinoceros they did three men's plays and three women's plays and they had to debate whose they were going to take off in order to do my play which was not man not woman and I think they they they took off one of the gay male plays and everybody was incensed and there was someone outside the theater giving out rotten fruit which they would throw at us every now and then this was my first experience of getting on stage doing trans theater where am I going with this I don't know but I was developing a language for not man not woman at the same time we started doing talk shows talk shows started welcoming transsexuals which was what we used to call transgender people and I was going on herald I was going on this that and the other thing and the thing about being on live TV in a chat show studying is you're acting you're being the best possible you that you can be you're being the smartest you that you can be and I noticed that this wasn't very different from what I was doing on stage and the more I did the show toured it around hidden agenda it was like three of us and a stage manager we toured around the country until the NEA National Endowment for the Arts was defunded they defunded the National Endowment for the Arts because of queer theater basically that's who Jesse Helms and the other senators were complaining about was us so a lot of us paired back on what we were doing and I started doing solo shows that was fascinating I spoke in metaphors I took on multiple characters in my solo shows and I wasn't really being me but I was being a metaphor of me I was telling stories that were of somebody else's life but it was my life and then I started writing because even funding for solo shows was drying up so I wrote a book called gender outlaw on men women and the rest of us thank you this was a big deal it was one of the first books about trans written by a trans person and not such lofty language I didn't have lofty language and so I spoke like I'm speaking to you right now and this was a big deal and I'm glad of that the subtitle of that book was called on men women and the rest of us and that's now the title of a show that I'm touring around the world I'm back doing theater I've just come from England where now this is amazing I performed to two full houses standing room only in London's West End that hasn't happened here England I was I was really warmly welcomed they have a great history of warming of welcoming all of a bellicentrics and so that's what I've spent my life trying to be is a lovable eccentric and they welcomed me now this past November I got on a big rock star bus with Caitlyn Jenner and five trans women and me the non-binary one and for six seven weeks we had cameras on us and microphones on us from the moment we woke up to the moment we went to bed and this is called reality TV and for me it was acting and I was being the best possible me that I could fucking be day and night when you're on stage I would say that it's safe I like to think of it as a dangerous space but there's a certain amount of understanding that you're not going to really come up here and attack me in reality TV you'll see people saying the most outrageous things because they're surrounded by bodyguards you don't see the bodyguards we were surrounded by bodyguards and so we were just full of ourselves and we could say all the things we wanted to say it's theater there was no script occasionally the executive producer would say oh I like what you just said could you amplify that a little bit more okay sure or hey hey I've got a great idea for a story arc you and Jenny Boyland are at each other let's play that up and okay sure and that wasn't hard she never asked us stuff that was till she never asked us to lie and that's important to know about I am Kate it's it's a lovely lovely show so anyway now I'm learning to at this stage of my life I'm 68 years old I'm learning to loving I've learned to lovingly and eloquently articulate my experience as not man not woman and I could not have done that without a grounding in theater and building my whole life around theater so I'm grateful for this opportunity to get yet another dimension to theater here and you mentioned their casting directors in the audience they are among us thank you very much okay thank you all so much for being so honest I mean when Michael and I were reaching out to each one of you like this is going to be amazing and that just far exceeded everything that we had hoped for so thank you again and now we've just we're now all grounded in this shared experience from these wonderful people and now I'm going to turn the floor over to you but not before we go over the ground rules one more time so this portion of the evening for the next little bit we're just listening we're not asking and answering questions we're not cross-talking we're not disputing we're not debating we're just sharing our peace and listening to each other yeah we'll ask you to keep I'll ask you to keep your remarks if you have them to share to around two minutes I won't be timing you we're also we've got comments from coming in I think from Twitter so we're going to invite the Twitter universe to share thoughts in 144 characters or less and you can tweet those comments at public forum and why use the hashtag public form and why or hashtag howl round we're checking all of those things and we have staff members from the public theater who are going to step to the mic and give voice to those tweets as they come in so and we're not also going to be afraid to sit in silence for a minute or two but if we sit in silence too long then I'm going to pick back up over here this is a great conversation to have so let's get started and I'll start we're going to start the evening by inviting a friend of the public theater Taylor to the mic I'm a genderqueer theater maker here in New York a couple months ago I wrote a letter an open letter to Oscar Eustace and the public theater about Southern Comfort and then Oscar Eustace wrote back to me and now we're having this meeting in all seriousness I'm so incredibly happy to be here the fact that this meeting is taking place is a huge testament to the public's desire to improve as a result of the Southern Comfort process and I can personally say that in all the public since writing that letter I've been met with nothing but kindness respect and a joyful curiosity about how the public can learn more and do better in my original letter I asked a lot of questions many of which have been answered so now I have some statements that I'd like to give here first I want to let everyone know that the message has been received they know the people of the public have heard what I and all the people who read the letter over 300 of them and many many other artists and allies have said and they recognize that the fact that in this musical Southern Comfort the fact that cisgender not transgender actors are playing trans characters in a show about trans lives is for lack of a better phrase bad it's bad they know that we live in a post Laverne Cox world she's here it's happened and so now we live in a casting cis people as trans characters is no longer acceptable or edgy or cool they know that trans people are real they know that there are lots of us in who are really vital to the theater and performance art and cabaret communities here in the city and they also know that unfortunately Southern Comfort now joins Transparent Ray and Zoolander 2 on the wrong side of history when it comes to trans representation and storytelling all of these things make the same mistakes they're all cast inaccurately they all focus too heavily on surgery and on the genitalia of the trans protagonists and generally function as platforms for cisgender anxieties instead of letting trans people and stories speak for themselves and they also know that they're going to have to do something to win back the trust of many many members of the community as a result of what's happened with Southern Comfort not just talking they're going to have to do something and they're going to have to change them second I want to let everybody know that the public is an institution that puts artists first and as far as I can tell that is why Southern Comfort is currently cast the way that it is the logic as I believe and this is just from what I've gleaned from various public things is that this group of people who were creating this musical Southern Comfort for almost 10 years now long before this sort of trans cultural have been working with this group of cisgender actors for a long time so to ask those creators to recast the piece now would be to not put those artists first as an artist I really appreciate the public commitment to the people it works with and I understand how close knit a group of people can become when they make a piece of art together and how difficult it can be to ask members of this group to leave late in a process and I also want to say now that I am not here to disparage the talent of anyone involved in Southern Comfort I saw the show last week everyone involved is clearly extremely talented but as I said in my original letter this is not about talent but equity equity is what's at issue here and I wonder if one let's say a commissioned artist of the public came to the public and said I want to do a show about a poor black family performed entirely by white actors in blackface and the public said for what purpose and they said oh no reason really not for any sort of like grand theatrical or artistic or genre reason just because I've been working with them for a long time and I think this group of white actors would do the best job of telling the story of this poor black family would the public do that would they go along with that would they hold a nationwide casting search for black actors and then only cast two black performers in the show and then leave the rest of the roles to white actors in blackface and then marketing for the show describe the pieces about being a group of black friends how far would they go I'm not sure I do not know how far the public will go to put its artists first but I do know that I'm deeply unsettled by the idea that artistry is being given as the reason why the gender version of blackface is happening at the public theater right now I also want to give some big picture context about the trans experience in the US today and how art fits into that Southern Comfort, the story if you don't already know is about a trans man who dies of ovarian cancer because transphobic doctors won't give him medical care because he is trans 17 years have passed since Robert Eads died and things have actually not gotten that much better for trans people in America since then according to the National Transgender Discrimination Survey that was published in 2011 over 63% of the trans people surveyed had experienced a major act of discrimination in their lives because they were trans so that's getting evicted, losing your job getting denied healthcare like Robert Eads because you're trans based on a study published by the Human Rights Campaign last year 2015 so last year was the deadliest year for trans people on record and most of the people who we know were murdered and it can be kind of hard to know because so many trans people are still misgendered in the media were trans women of color and trans people of color generally face much, much more violence and discrimination than white trans people and for all of these reasons and many more suicide the rate of suicide among trans people is incredibly high at the time of the survey I mentioned before 41% of the people surveyed had attempted suicide the national suicide rate at the time of the survey was 4.6% and no, in this trans we're having none of the major artworks that have been made trans, tangerine, transparent none of them have done anything to change these statistics yet the connection between art and real life has not yet been made if you want to help with these real life problems I'm going to post a list of organizations to the public's Facebook page after this meeting if you need a place to start give your time and money to these organizations that's really the best way to go right now and in fact art can sometimes exacerbate the problems that it's trying to solve Southern Comfort is doing this right now one of the main ways transphobic people try to invalidate trans lives is by saying that trans people are just pretending to be themselves so trans women are really just men in dresses and trans men are really just women with short hair they're lying to us in this musical we literally have a man pretending to be a trans woman and a woman pretending to be a trans man but somehow I'm supposed to take it seriously as a musical telling me that trans lives should be validated more wrap it up um last thing I want to say there's so many as you said it's a bumpy road but Mr. Ustaz I want to direct this one directly to you there's a pretty simple way you can start solving it which is to start putting trans artists first there are lots of us as I've said there are many many ways you can do this M.J. Kaufman who's a trans player right now on your emerging writer's group which is fantastic now produces plays translated make programming for trans kids and elders please help demand that transphobia be eliminated from theatrical workspaces and rehearsal rooms across the city it is there needs to go hire trans administrators not just trans artists do all of this and more for people who are living at the intersections of different oppressions only like injustice is not a contest but if there is a group of people whose problems are ignore more than trans people especially in the theater community, so help them out even more than you're helping us, like do both at the same time. Take your pick, honestly, like there's so many different ways and we all have to start somewhere. For the rest of you, even if you don't run the public theater, I can let you know that writing letters is a very effective way to create change. Um, thanks Taylor. And that's what I got. Anyone else? I first saw Kate speak 17, 18 years ago. Oh God, sorry, I'm Shakina. I also wrote something. It starts with my name. My name is Shakina Naifak. I'm the Artistic Director of Musical Theater Factory. I'm a transgender performer and activist and a co-founder of the new Trans Actors Guild. Both of my solo shows, bookending my gender confirmation, premiered across the hall at Joe's Pub. Incidentally, both shows feature songs written by Julianne McDavis, composer of Southern Comfort, and Joel Wagner, one of the so-called co-cast members and musicians in the show. Both shows will also be having encore performances at the pub in June. So come hear me sing about my brand new pussy. Because I'm really focused on my genitals and I welcome you to join me in that quest. I was also the Associate Producer at Barrington Stage Company in 2013 when we produced the world premiere of Southern Comfort. I was just beginning my medical transition at that time. I'd been out as trans for 10 plus years. And I worked with the creative team to support their efforts in accurately representing the transgender experience. I wanna put myself back in the narrative surrounding this show since my involvement hasn't been mentioned in the midst of the casting controversy and up until now I've chosen to remain silent. I loved being part of the chosen family of Southern Comfort. And I know how hard it is to break a show family up. Over a year ago when the public was in talks with SoCo and the SoCo producing team, I met with director Tom Caruso and advised him that continuing to cast the show without trans actors would be a grave mistake for the production. Now I admire the production's loyalty to the artists who originated the roles and I admire those artists themselves. But we've reached a moment politically when it's no longer justifiable to let non-trans actors represent us. Not when there are so many gifted trans actors looking for work and not when there are so many trans people facing violence and discrimination, oftentimes these same actors and oftentimes on a daily basis. I commend the public for standing by this show, for standing by its creative team and its phenomenal cast. And to my fellow activists and agitators, I commend all of your work as well. I only ask that we consider the foundation laid by those who came before us before striking out in righteousness or anger, even when both are justified. For me personally, Joe's pub at the public has been an artistic home. I'm proud to contribute to the lineage of transgender and gender non-conforming performers who have carved out space for our stories on that stage. We are at a pivotal moment in the quest for transgender liberation. A liberation that not only grants us equal freedom to pursue our life, liberty and happiness, but also puts in place strategies to dismantle the systems that have kept us invisible and kept us oppressed. As theater makers, we can agree that storytelling is one of the essential tools for creating that sort of political, social and cultural change. I hope from today on, the creative and producerial teams behind any show featuring transgender characters will engage in exhaustive casting efforts to ensure these roles are represented authentically. We cannot and should no longer allow for transgender people to be relegated to supportive roles in the telling of our own stories. Thank you. So little low. My name is Meredith Lucin. I am an LGBT staff writer at BuzzFeed, but I am here in my capacity as a trans woman and a big theater fan and as a history of performance. And Cecilia provides me with my hormones and Michael. Yeah. And Michael's organization helped me greatly with an eviction case that I was involved with last year for being trans. So I do have experience with some of the people on the panel. The couple of things that I wanna say are that I didn't prepare anything. I wasn't prepared to talk necessarily, but I've been interviewing a lot of actors recently. I interviewed Eddie Redmayne, for instance. I profiled him for his role in The Danish Girl. They also interviewed Jen Richards and Angelica Ross when they were doing her story. And I think that we are in this really, really pivotal moment where on the one hand, people are saying there aren't enough trans actors and the trans actors are saying, well, here we are, right? Look, look, look at us. And I think that one of the things, the two things that I can think of that are really important and Angelica Ross said this in my interview with her is that theater organizations aren't looking hard enough. If your expectation is that a trans person is just gonna know where casting calls are, is gonna know where all of the institutional routes are in order to be able to get a part as a trans actor in a trans movie, then that's not something that you can expect given all of the obstacles that trans people deal with on a day-to-day basis, you know? And then number two, I think one of the really difficult and one of the things that I would say is that as a person who's had a reasonably good career, despite being a trans person of color, a lot of the reason why I have that good career is because I assimilate into these settings. It's easier for me to assimilate because I pass as both cisgender and white and I've somehow acted my way into acting as both cisgender and white when it strategically suits me. But I think that it's really also really important for people to recognize that cultures within a lot of artistic institutions in various settings are very, very geared towards cisgender, white, abless, sort of default assumption and it's really, really important that people not only say, okay, we're going to cast this part, but also ask what is it that when we say that an actor is trained or is of good quality? What are the opportunities that we give trans actors? And then the last thing that I was gonna say is that is it also like somebody I know there's so many amazing trans actors of color and like you can ask me further news if you're casting directors and would like to hire some. Thank you. Start with MJ and then we'll have it. I'm MJ Kaufman, I'm a playwright and a member of the Emerging Writers' Group here at the Public Theater and I wanna speak a little bit about the cultural moment that we're in right now where there seems to be an increased number of trans people in the media on TV. People have mentioned Transparent and Caitlyn Jenner and it's pointed to the new black and one thing that I've noticed is that everyone seems to be calling us a progressive moment but in fact that as these representations have been increasing actually the like microaggressions in my life have kind of skyrocketed. And I realize that that's actually because none of these representations are authored by trans people and so everyone sees them and they assume things about my life and then think that they can ask me those invasive questions and make assumptions about me. And so this idea that the story needs to be told no matter who's telling it, I'd ask us to be a little bit more rigorous about that question. And to say that telling our stories without us is actually exploitation. But since coming here to the public theater I haven't met very many other trans artists who are involved who aren't specifically involved with Southern Comfort. And that's too bad, you're missing out. Hi, I'm Azur Elzborn Lee. I am a trans theater maker. I'm a playwright and I'm an arts administrator in a Virgo. Okay, so that being said, I know a lot of people in this room, right? So I'll just go ahead and follow up with what MJ said. First of all, it's not acceptable to produce plays about trans people by cis people. It's just not acceptable. Stop, stop it. There are plenty of trans playwrights out there working their asses off, right? Some of us are not able to finish our work because we don't have enough work to sustain our lives to pay those bills, right? It's acceptable to have more than one of us in the same room, right? So you can have more than one trans person in a program or in a room because we don't speak for every trans person, right? So there's that. Think about multiply marginalized people, right? So not just white trans people, right? Not just white trans men, but there's a whole spectrum of us out there. I'm non-binary, sort of masculine, but them. So is my boyfriend, right? So what do I want to say? Oh, right, so we're trying to get the work done, right? We're meeting, so there was a trans theater artist convening in December that was at New Dramatists and organized by Hall of Rounds and there's a write-up coming out this week. I helped write it, right? I'm one of the writers. It's gonna be on Hall of Rounds. Please check that out. Please connect with us. We're getting a second convening together. We want it to be bigger, right? We need money, so if you have money, give us some money, right? So that we can get together and make this work happen. We're really, those of us who are fortunate or unfortunate enough to have sacrificed our lives to the theater, right? We wanna be able to work. So that's what I'll say about that. Hi, can you hear me? My name's Buzz Letzky. I'm a visual artist, filmmaker, and newly a professor. And so I was recently in an art show that was all trans-visual artists, which is, oh my God. The Trannosaur. You have voted. Oh my God, that's so cool. Saying something, that's so exciting. Okay, so yeah, I was just in this different art show that was all trans-visual artists, which is really exciting, and I felt like I had to say yes, right? Like, you're getting this opportunity to be with your peers in an institution that's a higher level than usual and you're actually getting paid for once. But yeah, it was cisgender curators, and I guess I kinda wanna bring this up because I don't know. So the narrative of the show, like it was about, like one room was archives about trans history, then the other room was trans art, but it sort of felt like the narrative was like, here's all these terrible things that happen to trans people. Here's what they're doing now. And like, you know, I think that it was well-intentioned, and I'm friends with the curators, and so it's been a really awkward experience, but it's a really good example of like how a well-intentioned cis person could have easily partnered with a trans curator to try to like soundboard some of those ideas. Also, I wanted to say, I think it's really dangerous to compare cis people playing trans people to Blackface. I think it has a really different history, and I think that, you know, it's just a grayer area because, you know, like before I came out as trans, I could have been easily perceived as cis, and so, you know, part of me doesn't really want to assume people's gender identities if they haven't come out yet, or I don't know, I just think it's a different thing, and plus Blackface is still happening all around us. It's not like we can really be sure that the public wouldn't do Blackface because it's, you know, like the Nina Simone documentary and da-da-da-da, everything is happening. That's all. Hi, y'all, my name is Mebe Burke, and I'm taller than this microphone. I'm a director and a choreographer and a writer and a performer and a trans advocate. I've mainly had this conversation on Facebook posts recently, so I've never done this in person, right? I was recently asked to co-curate a transgender theater festival at The Brick with MJ Kaufman, actively, and when they approached me about it, I asked them, why are you doing this? They wanted the theme of transgender art, and my question was, why are you doing this? Are you doing this to tell stories about trans people and do the thing that everybody's doing right now, or are you doing this to cultivate a space for trans artists to exist and make work? I was not interested in a festival that was talking about transgender things. I was interested in a festival that was letting transgender people exist without having to talk about their identity, without having to talk about their genitalia unless they wanted to, and just giving them a space to exist and create without the cis people telling us what to do. Again, it's very important to me that this conversation starts from the other side of the table, and we have trans people in charge of their own narrative, and being able to create your own piece of work, make sure that you cast it the way that you want to, and make sure that you are not getting another white, straight cis man to win an award for a role that he should not be playing. At the end of the day, when we have Eddie Redmayne and Neil Patrick Harris and Jared Leto winning all of these awards, and well, Eddie Redmayne didn't win, but when we have those people lined up to win awards for Best Actor for playing a woman, I just think about that young trans girl sitting at home watching that show, realizing that no matter what happens to her, no matter where her life goes, her story would be told as a man, and anything that she does in her life, Eddie Redmayne is up to tell her story, and that's not fair to me. I don't want my story to go to Mitch Grossi. Ellen Page, please play me. Thank you. Sorry that it's theater and the thrust. I can't really talk to you much, but I'll try to look over. Hi, so my name's Hattaya Josephson. I am as young as I am trans, so I'm very young. I am a trans man, and I feel very lucky to be here for a couple of reasons. One of them being that I'm kind of here by accident. I actually know Taylor, awesome, who actually brought me into this narrative a little bit by accident, invited me to a meeting that I actually thought was this meeting, where I would be sitting in the audience listening to a bunch of cooler trans people than I talking, and it ended up being a little bit smaller, and I got to talk about a lot of things, and it was super cool. So now getting to talk to more people about those things, a couple of things. So I feel lucky for a lot of reasons, one of them being that I am super young, and I get to share my experience with people who have done a lot of the heavy lifting already for us, especially in theater, being a young theater maker. I too am an actor. So getting to know that I get to be up here and speak to people who've gone through much more than me, I recognize that I have a very different perspective, and that's why I named myself Trans-Switzerland in these discussions, because I usually brought a little bit more of a jolly approach of I was very excited about Southern Comfort at first. I moved to New York to be an actor right as it came to the public. I just thought it was so cool, it was so foreign to me, and I had no idea that that could happen, in that there would be this dialogue. So at first, I wasn't really upset about the casting. I very much recognized that it sucked, but I was like, well, cool, it's happening, and that's important, and as this dialogue continued, I do remain thinking it's cool. Just because I think that there are steps to progress and that this is a cool one, and yes, we're not completely there, and it would be great if all trans actors were up here because I know so many talented ones, even just personally, but it happens over time. And just that we're here and that this is happening, and that I don't know if there are any older trans people here than me who I know there are. If you ever thought this dialogue would be happening at such an important institution like the public, that this itself is cool, and we will get there and we will get better, and that's why we need to be preaching and saying things, but it's cool that we're here. And so, Tran Switzerland just wants to say that it's great to be trans right now because I'm also lucky that to be a young theater artist where being trans is kind of in right now as annoying as it is, it's kind of cool if you're trans and you want to be in theater. So, as much as I don't wanna spend the rest of my life playing the same trans roles, I also don't wanna spend the rest of my life ignoring the fact that I'm trans and not being represented, so whatever that means to get trans people on stage to tell their stories, however we have to get there, I think it's so cool that cis people, trans people like, are helping and aiding in this process to get us there, and I'm very thankful for this and for all the things that the public theater is doing. I just wanna pause for a sec because we're hearing so much and the question that is on my mind that I wanna just really quickly, if I may, I get to do whatever I want because I'm the moderator. I wanna hear from you, Polly, from you, Michael, from any of you, what your experience is of like, what comes next? How do we move forward? What are you seeing in the theater world in terms of institutions making progress? What have you seen outside the theater world in terms of institutions making progress? What comes next? I've thought a little bit about institutions because I've worked in them for a long time. You know, I always feel like there's an interesting, healthy tension between artists and institutions. They happen, they're different entities to say, and I feel like there's some really exciting things happening in the world of artists around conversations. I mean, every kind of conversation you can imagine is one of the great joys of working in an organization like Hollaround because there are just so many artists doing so many amazing things. And I think in a way, you know, telling their own stories and I think that's really important. I think institutions move at a really different pace. I will say my experience of working in theater institutions, I work at a lot of, you know, I suppose, slightly larger institutions, so I'll speak from that perspective and I think change is really slow. In fact, I wrote an article, gosh, maybe four or five years ago, a boy in a man's theater, about being in the theater at that point maybe 15 years and for the first time seeing like a kind of butch-y dike woman on stage in Fun Home and going, wow, I'm 15 years in and it took that long to see that happen. And so I feel like, you know, the theater is slow. I don't think the conversation about transgender lives are in, is alive and well in our institutions yet. I think in fact, the public has, you know, is in a way helping to spark that. I think there are some other theaters around the country that are trying to do that as well. My sense is institutions will do it imperfectly, probably always to some degree because institutions are imperfect entities and artists will ideally be pushing them to do it better. And I think that's the dynamic and the tension and there is change but my experience, you know, 20 years in is it's really slow, it's very frustrating. And I think this question around transgender identity, I mean, I don't even hardly see it happening really in most of the theaters that I work in at all, I mean, really at all. So I think we have a lot of distance to travel in terms of that. Our artists talking, yeah, all over the place and you know, you can type in transgender on the search engine of HowlRound and you know, a lot of articles will come up but you know, that's an imbalance that, that's our work, you know. Is this resonating for any, or activists on stage when you, in your work, watching people, states, you know, the policies move forward, the institutions, what does this resonate at all? Change is slow, that sounds kind of familiar. I find that idea of like change is slow, very like comfortable for people. Change is as slow as you want it to be. And I think like, I'm gonna go back to what you said, what you asked, what happened next. And what happened next is compromise. We have to compromise and all of these things that we've been saying now, I would like to see them actually happening tomorrow. And you know, compromising, but the talent is there, what is missing is the opportunity, right? So for all those people that have those keys to open the door for that talent to become a reality and have the opportunity, have to compromise, make a clear decision that they want to invest their time and their money to foster that talent to become a reality that is gonna show what a trans life is. Any other thoughts before I hand it back over to me? Cool. Hello. My name is Dan. I am actually, I'm a cis man. So if any trans person wants to like grab the mic and cut me off, I'll just back off. But I just wanted to speak to something I've noticed since the beginning of this conversation in a lot of conversations about this that I've noticed particularly in theater, which is that there's a generation gap. Even in this audience, I mean, you notice there's within the queer community there is a kind of older generation of trailblazers who did amazing things in the last century and beyond. Not that people who did things in the century before are here, but you know, and then there are younger people. There are people for whom words did not exist. I mean, neither man nor woman versus genderqueer. There's a lexical gap there. There's just a gap. And so I think when younger people get angry about things like this, because there is a lot of anger in the queer community, in the younger queer community, which gets directed at institutions and artists and casting and it gets directed a lot of places. And I think something I've noticed is that the trailblazers of generations past can get defensive about that, because it feels like because we are angry that things aren't perfect, that we're invalidating the steps that have been taken. And I just wanted to say that to anybody who may be feeling that way resist that defensiveness, because I think in this, because we are angry because we know it can be better. And we're angry because the trails you have blazed have opened our minds up to the possibilities of the future. And in this situation, I think anger is not combative, it's constructive. That's enough. My name is Frances Voice-Rapkin. I'm a playwright mostly. And now I'm a director as well. I have a theater company called Tight Raid Group. And I say I'm a theater director as well now, because I've been working on a play for almost over two years called Won't Be a Ghost. It's going to be opening in April at the brick. And I feel like if there's any time to plug a show and get over your self-consciousness, it's now. So Won't Be a Ghost tells two stories. One is the historical story of Magnus Hirschfeld. And if anyone has gotten over or just decided to submit themselves to the pain of watching Transparent, he was figured in the most recent season. So, but he was, anyways. There's a number of trans characters in this play and it's taken me two years to get that casting right. And I think my biggest, I mean, I'm a trans writer and I live in a trans community. And my biggest hurdle was money. I don't have any money. I'm definitely in that lowest category that you named in terms of status. And I think that there's these issues going on right now that are just like where in the pipeline is the problem? I think that like we all know there's people out there. We're friends with these people, but like I couldn't pay someone and someone couldn't take off work to make that kind of commitment to the craft. It's just a different kind of quality of talent and experience. And I think that like when there's more stories out there consistently when, you know, if anybody comes to see the show, you're gonna see four amazing trans feminine people performing and you're gonna see, you know, other trans people involved in this work. So I think that, you know, we all made a big sacrifice by being financial sacrifice and time sacrifice to make this work happen. Kind of just jumping off into the abyss because we don't know if any of this will turn into anything, but now all these people have this experience on their resumes and we hope that people in the next level take notice. So thank you. We just have a few more minutes left just to say. Hi, I'm Zoe. The other day in my music theory class, somebody, you were talking about musicals, Fun Home Hamilton, somebody brought up why can't theater be more current? And the answer that my professor gave was, well, it takes like seven years to produce a musical. So the things that we're hearing about now are things that were really important seven years ago. So like really quick, how many of you make theater? So seven years ago, you people were not sitting in a room talking about trans people. You were not talking about trans rights. None of this was happening. So seven years from now, I expect to see all of your musicals up on Broadway, off Broadway. I expect to be hearing about these rights and it'll be like this conversation was just something in the past, you know? So these are the faces of the future. This is what theater will be. This is what matters, so that's all. Jesse, I am as can be. So again, you can beat me up later. But I am a disabled actor and I think that these problems are 100% of representation that we have talked about here can be applicable to people of color and the disabled community. So like, just like apply this to that later. That's the first thing. And then the second thing is we're talking about a lot of representation of trans roles. We're not really talking about just general casting breakdown and general roles. Why can't those go to trans bodies, disabled bodies, bodies of color? Why are we tied to whitewashing able-bodied normativity washing normal roles in a normal casting breakdown? That's my question of the world. So, ponder as you are. I'm Kyle and I'd like to see more cohesiveness between communities in the LGBT, not leaving out the L or the G or the B, you know? And I brought my husband to a trans rally, a trans march this past summer. And there was somebody there carrying a sign because they had their agenda. They were carrying a sign that said like fuck your marriage. And I just got married two years ago and my husband waited 57 years to get married. So it was really important to him and he came away from this trans rally with such a bad taste in his mouth for so long being a cis white guy, gay guy, you know, that he was the privileged person there. I just would like to see more cohesiveness in community within the community. We're gonna get kicked out of this room in like five minutes. Before we go, before I wrap things up, I wanna ask this panel, if you haven't listened to this room, if you have any final thoughts, reflections, advice for this community of artists, theater makers? I don't necessarily have any advice, but you know, I'd love to be a fly on the wall for a conversation like this in 20 years because it will sound dramatically different because a world of opportunity will change so many dynamics and I'll be fascinated to hear what that would sound like. So much of the struggle, I'm not just here in the theater. There's no trans representation in major law firms, right? There's no trans representation on Wall Street. There's no trans representation in the Fortune 100. So these conversations, well, these conversations aren't happening everywhere. So it's great that they're happening here in this community, but I'd love to hear what it sounds like in 20 years because we will be making progress and that will change a lot of these dynamics. When the National Endowment for the Arts defunded queer theater and queer performance, we were pretty broken. That was a big fucking deal. That's where our livelihood was coming from. And it came down to, oh well, we're gonna make theater anyway. So if for any reason you're not cast in a show, if for any reason your show isn't selected by a well-funded theater, produce it anyway, please, it's that important. The same, I think it's that little thing. Just, you know, I think it's time for us to take action and to stay. Like, you know what? I don't want nobody to write my story, so I'm gonna write it my fucking self, you know? And I never wrote anything, but I'm gonna do it. And you know, and something we've got, and we wanna do something and we don't have space, we're gonna perform in a fucking park. And you know, it's time for us to take action and I invite everybody to help us be a part of taking those actions. Just really happy to listen. It was great to listen and thank you all for what you had to say, it was great. And I think it's an exciting, to me this is an exciting conversation, so thanks for listening. Now I'm gonna say some stuff, which is mostly thank you. First of all, thank you. Thank you all for being here. I wanna say thank you to the public forum team, Michael Friedman, Drew Boussard, Kelly Grag, and thank you for putting them together. HowlRound for being here and for allowing this conversation to be out in the world across the nation. Thank you so much for coming and doing this. And to our virtual audience, thank you for being here with us tonight. And most importantly, thank you for bringing your voices to these microphones, for bringing your hearts and your open minds to this conversation. I hope that everybody is leaving here with just a little bit more awareness of what's happening in our community with regards to our transgender artists. And I'm hoping too, that we can all kind of reflect on what we can do as individuals in our own little corner of the theatrical world, what we can do to help push this conversation forward and to help make change. That's it. Thank you so much for being here.