There’s a moment during Zoë Comeau’s F*cking Trans Women, a story of “trying to navigate intimacy and hot fucking sex with bodies that don’t fit the norm,” when a cartoon-animated penis runs across the screen behind the stage. It’s the kind of impromptu moment of levity you might have expected from a Seth Rogen film or a Mindy Kaling script—and moreover, not the kind theatre audiences have seen, historically, for a one-act show centred on trans lives. Which is exactly the point, if you ask the show’s writer, producer, main performer and director: Queer stories can be told with humour, too.
“Within the queer community—and especially within the trans community—it’s rare that anything… lighthearted comes to fruition,” Zoë Comeau says, speaking by phone with The Coast in the lead-up to her show’s premiere at the Bus Stop Theatre. “I remember when I first transitioned, even in the doctor’s office, they tell you all the possible complications and all the issues that can arise, but they don’t talk about the beautiful moments that are going to come; they don’t talk about the good things to look forward to.
“And I find that’s the case with a lot of trans media, especially nowadays in the political climate that we’re living in. There is a lot of negative news. There’s a lot of fear mongering. There’s a lot of people who just seem confused about what the hell it means to be trans and what it is.”
Enter F*cking Trans Women, Comeau’s labour of love and ode to a zine by the same name. A one-woman show in which Comeau—a Dalhousie theatre graduate and Théâtre DesAssimilés creator—plays two different transgender women finding their way through relationships, FTW is running from July 26 to 30 at the Bus Stop Theatre (2203 Gottingen Street).
“It’s a show that not only serves as entertainment, but serves as a guide,” she tells The Coast.
The show marks a return to the stage for Comeau, after it premiered at last year’s Halifax Fringe Festival. But this version, she says, is “completely different” from its predecessor. If the original was primarily a stage reading, the new-look show has fresh stories, costumes, sound design and the financial backing of both Arts Nova Scotia and the Canada Council for the Arts. There’s also the added flourish of on-stage animation. (Along with the aforementioned cartoon penis, a version of Leonardo da Vinci’s “Vitruvian Man,” reimagined as a trans woman, makes an on-screen appearance.)
The animations serve, in part, as visual aids for Comeau in her storytelling—“memorizing 70 to 80 minutes of text is a lot,” she says. But they also add an extra dimension to the stories themselves, as she weaves between characters, costumes and personas.
“Nobody really wants to see a play with only one character for over an hour,” Comeau says. “They want diversity; they want a change of pace. They want different language being used and explored. So I’m playing with a lot of different aspects of the show.
“It’s only two different voices, but there’s so much material there that is universal, that can speak to so many different people—and not just trans people, and not just trans women.”
From zine page to the stage
Though it stands on its own footing, it would be impossible to tell the story of Comeau’s F*cking Trans Women without the zine that inspired it. First released out of Iowa as a digital zine in 2010, it would go on to be hailed as a “comprehensive guide to trans women’s sexuality” in Sexuality & Culture, a “guiding star” in Xtra and “groundbreaking” in Broadly, for its blend of humour and sex advice aimed at an oft-ignored audience.
“It completely changed my life,” Comeau says.
She first came across the zine nine months into her transition, in November 2021.
“My partner comes home from work and asks me if I’ve ever heard of muffing,” she tells The Coast. She hadn’t. (You’ll have to look it up for yourself.)
“I’m like, ‘What the hell is this from?’ I did a deep dive on the internet, and I found this zine. And as I was reading it, it just completely reimagined my sexuality and how I could relate to my own body… I just knew as I was reading it, immediately, that this was information that had to be… spoken out loud, that had to be communicated to audiences, and not just audiences, but to people.”
The earlier stage reading of FTW, Comeau says, relied more heavily on the zine for its source material. That’s changed. Since the Fringe Festival, Comeau has written her own stories into the script—some of which take personal turns—“to really bring out the multitude of different trans experiences that exist.”
Under the guidance of Theatre New Brunswick’s Natasha MacLellan, FTW’s dramaturgist, Comeau wrote and revised the play for months. Some of the source material is deeply personal: In her early 20s, Comeau shares, she was in a relationship with an abusive partner who threatened to out her as trans to her family if they broke up.
“The show is my way of finally trying to take the power back,” she says.
Part of that power reclamation has been working to ensure FTW is a welcoming, inclusive place for its audience. The show has active listeners for any attendees who want to leave at any point if they find the material to be triggering: “I want people to know that this is a safe space, and a happy place to be.”
Overall, though, the message is a resoundingly positive one—and a celebratory one, at that, for Halifax’s trans community.
“It’s just so important for people to notice that we are not different,” Comeau says. “We like to communicate with our lovers. We like to touch our lovers, and to be touched. We love to foster healthy relationships that are based out of love and respect, and honestly, adoration for each other’s bodies.
“What we want is to just exist and love. And fuck.”
Where to watch the show: The Bus Stop Theatre (2203 Gottingen Street, Halifax)
When it’s running: Wednesday, July 26 to Sunday, July 30
Tickets: $10-$20 (find them on Eventbrite)
—With files from Morgan Mullin
