Daddy Let The Girls Out: This audioplay celebrates the freedom and friendship of trans femmes

Queeries is a weekly column by CBC Arts producer Peter Knegt that queries LGBTQ art, culture and/or identity through a personal lens. 

Four years ago, before creating and starring in the massively acclaimed TV series Sort Of, Bilal Baig brought together a group of trans artists in Toronto. Their mission? To capture the experience of communal trans femme joy through a live show. Buddies in Bad Times had offered them a one-night slot at Rhubarb, their festival of new performance work, and they had carte blanche to do whatever they wanted with it. 

"I did not know anybody in the group except for Bilal," says Gabe Maharjan, who would become one of the creators of the show. "We just kind of got together, and it was really Bilal who was leading us through exploring whatever craft we were drawn to, whether it was poetry or comedy or whatever else. They were very open to giving us the space to explore creation and then slowly transition that into a concrete performance."

"I had no idea what to expect," adds Mars Alexander, another creator. "Bilal was just like, 'Come, I want you in this group. It's just about trans girls, come do something.'"

Ultimately, this process would lead to Trans Gemmes, which was indeed meant to be performed for one night only at the 2019 Rhubarb Festival. Except it was so well-received that it came back as Trans Gemmes 2.0 for an entire week worth of performances at the 2020 edition (which ran in February, so just before you-know-what). And now, Buddies has brought it back once more as Trans Gemmes: Daddy Let The Girls Out (Oral Edition), an audioplay that anyone can listen to anywhere they'd like through the end of August.

An audio experience capturing "a wild night full of pillow fights, flashing lights, trans rights, and burgers," Daddy Let The Girls Out comes to your ears via that same team that met up in 2019. Directed by Baig, the performance was co-created by Maharjan, Alexander, Leon Tsai, Scarlett Jodha, Uniqua and Nikki Rock.

"We just kind of kept going with it," says Maharjan. "And it's always been a very open, collaborative kind of approach. Bilal will usually have an idea of like, 'Ok, I really want to focus on the gritty, ugly dirtiness of what it can be like to live trans sometimes. Go as far away from the pretty stuff.' That was a theme at one point, and then it was just left open to all of us to do a little creating… whatever we wanted to do that inspired us. And then we built from there."

The result clearly connected with audiences.

"People really, really liked it," says Alexander. "I think there was just something about a bunch of trans people coming onstage and just doing their thing — how they bonded with each other and [were] obviously having so much fun doing it as well. And I think it made a really big spark."

"I'm hoping for a fourth edition, too."

Alexander feels that a huge theme that connects all the iterations of Trans Gemmes is the power of trans people when they come together — "when they create their chosen family and when they're just doing what they want, how they want."

"I think our freedom and femininity really inspires people," says Alexander. "I just feel like trans people don't give a fuck sometimes; we just do what we want. And that's exactly what we did onstage and in this audioplay."

Maharjan says this specific edition of Trans Gemmes has been a real opportunity to revisit the 2020 stage performance after so much has changed in the world and in their lives. 

"That was my last stage performance before the pandemic started," Maharjan says. "So in the lead-up to releasing this, we were revisiting a lot of the text that we had created back then — thinking back to how we had staged it and then reimagining it for this audio experience."

"A key component of the premise is that it's like the characters are going out for a night. And so it's just the journey of making the plans happen, getting out the door and deciding whether you even want to leave your home in the first place, and then getting out there. What happens while you're out there?"

Maharjan describes the flow of the audioplay as "surreal, episodic and segmented." 

"You kind of jump around through all of these extreme moments happening throughout the night. You get all the way to the end where there's a beautiful moment of getting late night fast food. And so it's this celebration of community coming together to go out, but now specifically focused in this audio experience."

"The pandemic is still a constant thing and numbers are going up. So for people who aren't going out, who don't feel comfortable with that, I feel like it does offer a little bit of that community that they can step into with this experience."

Another thing that has changed since 2020 is that Baig, the fearless leader of Trans Gemmes, has found serious success in their Peabody Award-winning TV series, Sort Of. And their collaborators could not be more happy for them.

"All of Bilal's successes, none of them are surprising," Maharjan says. "They're all super exciting, but I'm like, 'Of course.' I think from the beginning it's always been clear that Bilal was going to be doing big things."

"One thing that I always just really hold on to and admire and want to emulate in my own way is the way that no matter what they are working on or how big it might get, it always really is a focus on the community and thinking about how the art impacts people who receive it. That's never not the centre of their world. Even when it gets huge."

Listen to Trans Gemmes: Daddy Let The Girls Out (Oral Edition) via Buddies In Bad Times through the end of August.