Kate Bornstein speaking at reunion.

Kate Bornstein is a failure as man and as a woman.

She’s in her sixties and has been talking openly about her life as a trans person.

I studied some of her performance work and writings at university in my first year. She blew my mind. Imagine a boy from the Middle of Nowhere Wiltshire trying stuff out at university, discovering who I am, what the world is and then a lecturer plonks Kate Bornstein in front of me and says “Read”.

I like where she says “do anything it takes to make your life more worth living”. I also like how she says the F word and then asks for permission to say it.

Kate talks the language of theatre which is something I’m very familiar with. One of the greatest lessons I was taught was how to die on stage and get used to it. I remember in my second year of my degree we performed in Alfred Jarry’s King Ubu. I played the King of Poland but my character was killed fairly early on. I then switched coats and played someone else who was equally dispatched. I stood right up and popped on an eye patch, reversed my coat and became someone else who was quickly killed. I died around thirty times during the one play in various ways dispatched by various methods. Once I got over the initial discomfort of feeling “Gosh, I don’t get any character development” I got into the idea of just dying and from that I began to get over my fear of things going wrong on stage.