theater

"Born in the wrong body": A transgender high school student writes winning monologue

Professional actors will perform the monologues of 18 students at the Adrienne Theater through Friday. Hunter McKee's is one of them.

Students involved in Philadelphia Young Playwrights programs take the stage.
From Philadelphia Young Playwrights

“You feel so hopeless and helpless and you just want to rip yourself apart and take away all of the things that you’ve been cursed with. Wide hips, tits, the voice of a prepubescent 12 year old, vagina, a face that just screams feminine, and the list goes on. But there’s nothing you can do about it.”

Those are the words of 15-year-old Hunter McKee, a student at the Academy at Palumbo, from his monologue “One Hundred Sleepless Nights,” one of the 18 winning monologues being showcased as part of the Young Voices Monologue Festival, which continues through Friday, March 28.

Philadelphia Young Playwrights partners with InterAct Theatre Company for the festival each year, and it features student monologues performed on stage by professional actors at The Playground at the Adrienne Theater.

McKee, along with many other students, submitted his monologue, which was chosen by a panel to be performed at the festival. 

“Transgender is when you don’t identify with the gender you’re assigned at birth,” said McKee when we spoke on the phone last week. “I appear as a girl to other people, I don’t look like a boy. I usually don’t bother to tell people I identify as a boy. You can’t always really tell if someone is transgender.”

About two years ago, McKee told his friends he was trans.

“I wrote it down on a piece of paper and shoved it at them,” he said. It said simply, “I’m a boy.”

His friends at the time were supportive, McKee said. But being a high school student, he faced painful backlash and misunderstandings that he discusses in his monologue.

“…makes you want to trash your entire bed room and tell all of the assholes who promised that they would listen and that they would care then they turn right around and tell you that you’re a liar and ask stupid questions like, ‘How could you be something you don’t know anything about?’ or ‘What research have you done on this?’ like it’s a fucking religion of some sort, and my all time favorites, ‘That’s not very transgender of you’ and ‘That’s not how a real boy would act.’”

The “promised that they would listen” is referring, McKee said, to his friends who disregard his transgenderedness.

“People refer to me as “she,” they act like it’s not there. I don’t like being called a she. They are aware of it, but they don’t respect it,” he said.

The monologue reflects that, where McKee writes: “…those stupid boys who just unintentionally mock you…they don’t have to worry about being called by the wrong pronoun.”

McKee said he doesn’t feel he has a lot of support networks when it comes to being transgender, and the monologue was his attempt to speak for that community and channel his pain into writing.

He’s long been a writer, even at a young age, but said he wouldn’t have wanted to be the one to get on stage and read his monologue.

For the festival, the students’ work is assigned a professional director, dramaturg and actor. The actor assigned to McKee’s piece, Tasha Milkman, brought the piece to life, he said. He watched her perform it last week.

“It was great, because when we first ran through, it was like ‘eh.’ Then, [seeing it] on stage, you get a different feeling,” he said.

The winning monologues are all intriguing glimpses into the lives of young people and many, like McKee's, deal with some rather heavy topics, like race, depression, body image, and a parent with an alcohol problem.  

McKee says he wants to continue to write stories and plays as they occur to him, but doesn’t necessarily think his work is going to change the minds of those who don’t respect or understand transgender individuals. The last line of his monologue expresses that many people simply just can't understand the feeling of being born in the wrong body. 

“I don’t really think it’s anything anybody can do,” he said. “It’s not going to change people’s opinions about trans people.”

Maybe not, but to see a young person channeling his struggles with confronting an essential truth about himself into creative work, well, that’s really something.

Young Voices Monologue Festival, through Friday, March 28, various times, $10 (student matinees free, reservation required), The Playground at the Adrienne Theater, 2030 Sansom St., 215-665-9226, http://phillyyoungplaywrights.org/