Felix O’Connor recounts the horrors of single-sex schooling, the many signs that he wasn’t what everyone assumed him to be and opens up a dialogue with the awkward teenage girl he left behind.
The comedian will bring his show ‘Bad Girl,’ to Dublin Fringe Festival, where his show tackles the subject of struggling to fit in at an all-girls school when he wished that one day he might be able to grow a beard.
“I felt isolated, and I felt that something was wrong, and I eventually felt like I needed to transition. I spent a lot of time in the library, bathrooms for sure,” Felix told the Irish Independent.
“I think a lot of people have a lot of complicated feelings if they went to a single sex education facility.
“I don’t think that it’s a great way to raise kids and teenagers, I think it brings up issues down the road a little bit. A lot of the girls in my school saw boys as a different species.
“I’ve heard similar stories from the All-Boys School side of things. That segregated education means that people are entering the workforces and people are entering college, and suddenly they don’t know how to talk to anyone. The show is focused on my experiences in an all-girl school.”
Felix explained that although school wasn’t a great experience, it’s where he found his creative spark which led him to the Dublin Fringe Festival stage.
“I guess some of my best memories of school were like being involved in creative stuff.
“I didn’t have a huge number of friends and social support but getting involved in things like musicals, singing and theatrical stuff was my happy place. It’s always been an outlook for me where I could express myself.
“Comedy is an interesting medium for storytelling and for sharing stories. People like to laugh, and it makes those stories more accessible to people.
“I’ve always talked about being trans and being queer on stage, taking stories from my adolescents, I can’t really do that in a 10-minute set. So I wrote a larger show around it and gave myself a license to be a little more emotional about it and not just have it be a joke.
“I think there’s a misconception that it’s difficult to joke about trans stuff. As a trans comedian and as a comedian with other trans comedian friends, I think there’s plenty of humour to be mined from the trans experience, but I think it requires familiarity with the lived realities of being a trans person in the world.
“Something that I talk about in the show is the feeling of responsibility that I have to the community and representing the community in a positive light by striking that balance between telling my own personal stories and not feeling like I have to be a perfect representative of the trans community.”
Bad Girl is part of the Dublin Fringe Festival and will be performed at the Bewley’s Café Theatre.
