Can you tell me a little more about the show that you’re developing as part of the fellowship?
Kelindah Bee Schuster: The working title is “Daughter to Daddy.” And it’s about that journey. It’s about trans masculinity and fertility. It’s about being the daddy to oneself that you didn’t have. It’s about reclaiming my body and redefining fatherhood for myself, as something that is safe and protective and home. The show does that through drag and burlesque, as well as through poetry and narrative prose, which Kate has been really helping me with, pushing me to write in prose rather than in poems.
I froze my eggs last year in order to preserve my fertility, because I started taking T. But when I was about to embark on the egg freezing process, I found out that my AMH [anti-mullerian hormone] levels were low as a result of taking T. There was this contradiction of having to stop taking T in order to basically take estrogen so that I could one day be a dad. It was a mind puzzle. I’ve been writing about my experiences as a teen girl, as a little girl, my experiences with gender and sexuality and medical intervention, and envisioning a future. The show sort of queers time. It reflects on the past, and it holds the present full of contradictions, and it envisions the future of the manifestation of the dad that I will hopefully be.
Kate Bornstein: Kelindah embodies the MAGA right’s worst nightmare. When they talk about “the trans ideology” and “trans is destroying the idea of men and women,” that’s Kelindah — and doing it with such grace! You have so much, you do.
When you say “Daughter to Daddy,” you’re talking about literal fatherhood, but do you also mean Daddy in a kink sense?
K.B.S.: 100%. That’s another thing that connects me and Kate. That’s where the experience of embodying the energy of Daddy began for me in queer and trans community, both in a kinky way and also in a weird family way. In the kink sense, I see embodying the energy of Daddy as grounded, taking up space, but in an intentional way.
How does kink relate to gender and performance for you both?
K.B.S.: Kink was a huge way that I came to understand my gender. Initially, one way that I claimed my masculinity was like, “Look how much pain I can take.” There was an element of trying to prove myself there. But there was also an element of wanting to experience pain consensually as a way of connecting to presence, and also to reclaim ways in which my body had been made to feel not my own when I was a young girl. All the non-consensual sexual experiences that I had — just really putting those into my own hands and practicing really good consent and aftercare around it was re-patterning for me.
