SCORCH // Prime Cut Productions

‘My body is a weird black hole I drag around with me’

Amy McAllister plays the gender-curious teen Kes in Stacey Gregg’s monologue revealing society’s lack of understanding towards gender fluidity.

Based on the real case of Justine McNally, Scorch shows the law’s gender binaries when Kes, born female but uncomfortable in her gender so presenting herself as male to a girl she meets online, is accused of gender fraud and sexual abuse. In the eyes of the law a woman can’t rape another woman, as according to the Sexual Offences Act 2003, the penetration can only be done with a penis. Where the law stands on the concept of being gender fluid with regards to accused rape is unclear due to its rarity.

Language is also questioned in Scorch as we learn queer slang, with ‘cute boi’ meaning a biologically female person who presents themselves in a boyish way, often genderqueer. Though the internet provides a safe place to explore or hide gender, when real life romance crashes and burns, Kes is dropped into a seething pile of accusations and assumptions. When the press get a hold of Kes’ story they call her ‘lesbian’, automatically defining her gender as well as her sexuality. They label her before she’s decided, without providing her with a choice.

McNally called herself ‘Scott’ when presenting herself online, forming a relationship over several years with a young girl. Gayle Newland is another accused case of gender fraud. Calling herself ‘Kye’, Newland insisted the woman she had sex with wear a blindfold, and would penetrate her with a prosthetic penis. Newland’s justification was that she was body-conscious, but in preventing her partner from seeing her strap-on, she hid her biological identity. Gavin Haynes writes of women such as Newland and McNally, ‘Theirs were attempts to push back against the physical realities of the world in which they found themselves at an almost atomic level.’ The law is not up-keeping with more modern, fluid understandings of gender. When McNally was taken to court, her judge called her deception ‘selfish and callous’, rather than attempting to understand her reasoning and questioning her gender identity.

Kes’ family’s views aren’t made entirely clear, and the details of the court case yearn to be explained, but Scorch brings to light the lack of support for people going through a gender identity crisis. It is an area that is far too under-researched, and Scorch reveals this lack of understanding, urging us to do something about it.

- KW

Scorch was on at 18.05 at Summerhall through August 28. - https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/scorch

Sexual Offenses Act 2003 http://tinyurl.com/zkjnx3o

Justine McNally: http://tinyurl.com/oeomtxk

Queer slang http://tinyurl.com/36jxfr

Is the law on rape sexist?: http://www.blmsolicitors.co.uk/2014/03/is-the-law-on-rape-sexist/

BBC rape briefing: http://tinyurl.com/zjn2hl7

Raped by a woman: http://www.marieclaire.com/culture/a19495/women-raped-by-women/

A forum for expressing gender curiosity: http://emptyclosets.com/forum/gender-identity-expression/154319-gender-curious.html

Understanding your gender identity: http://teenhealthsource.com/giso/understanding-sexual-orientation-gender-identity/

Gayle Newland http://www.theweek.co.uk/65251/what-the-gayle-newland-sex-deceit-case-means-for-transgender-people

Strap-on dildo morality http://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/justine-mcnally-scott-gemma-barker-strap-on-dildo-morality

There’s been a modest but welcome uptick in the media’s ability to report sensitively on transgender issues, recently. Outspoken campaigners like journalist Paris Lees have helped dispel some of the very worst cliches of tabloid outrage, celebrities like Caitlyn Jenner have brought a new glamour to trans life, and Stonewall have finally added the ‘T’ in LGBT into their consciousness-raising remit.

But the case of Gayle Newland was too complex and too unusual for newspapers to attempt anything like tact. 19-year-old Newland developed a male online personal and built up a long online friendship, then relationship, with a woman. They met up on multiple occasions, and the woman wore a blindfold during their sexual encounters - before pressing charges for sexual assault when she discovered she’d been ‘tricked’. Following the Newland case, legal observers have pointed out its serious potential ramifications for transgender people: if they don’t disclose their trans status, they could be liable for charges of sexual assault through deception.

Stacey Gregg’s Scorch is directly inspired by the case. But where Newland’s voice has necessarily remained silent, Gregg presents the story entirely from Kes’s point of view. Kes is naive, in love, and incapable of understanding how badly their actions hurt the girl they forms a relationship with. Kes’s life online is a rich community full of resources, help and support for trans teenagers - they make assuming a new gender identity feel natural, and normal. But in the world Kes lives in, it’s anything but: “I feel like an alien”, Kes says.

In one particularly moving passage, Kes reels off all the completely legal ways people can deceive their partners: by hiding the fact they’re married, by giving a false identity, or even just by saying they love them when they don’t. It’s a passage that shows the intricacies of human relationships and gender identities, and the bluntness of the laws designed to govern them.

Newland didn’t claim a trans identity in court. And nor does Kes. In an interview, Gregg has stated that although Scorch intersects with trans questions, it’s a piece that “boils down to something that’s actually much more mundane, which is just misogyny.”  The responses Kes faces from family and friends highlight the fact that trans men are often either invisible, or mistrusted, in a world that’s suspicious of attempts to claim masculinity.

Away from the crystal-clear transformation narratives in mainstream media, gender identity is more murky. Gregg’s piece shades in all its intricacies, and shows how difficult a place the world is for teenagers who aren’t ready to choose their own identity, outside the world of video games.

- AS

Scorch was on at the Edinburgh Fringe, Aug 5-28 https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/scorch

Interview with Stacey Gregg in the Irish Times http://www.irishtimes.com/culture/stage/stacey-gregg-on-gender-identity-and-the-theatre-s-gutting-lack-of-women-1.2424367

Impact of Gayle Newland case on trans rights http://www.theweek.co.uk/65251/what-the-gayle-newland-sex-deceit-case-means-for-transgender-people

Increased risk of mental health issues in transgender young people  https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/hsph-in-the-news/transgender-youth-at-risk-for-depression-suicide/

ANYTHING THAT GIVES OFF LIGHT // The TEAM & National Theatre of Scotland

Two Scotsmen and an American woman walk into a bar and... The set-up for fringe stalwarts the TEAM's collaboration with the National Theatre of Scotland might sound jokey, but that's not how the action or fiercely political argument plays out. All three characters are experiencing an identity crisis of sorts, and seek brittle refuge in each other as they attempt to navigate or make sense of their disquietude. One of the Scottish men is sunk in toxic fury following the twin referenda of Independence and EU membership; the other no longer knows how to connect to the land of his birth, having lived in London for years; while the American woman is plagued by anxiety related to climate change.

The question that roils across the stage is: what constitutes identity? When the three first start chatting, it's innocuous stuff: whiskey and cinema, commodities and popular culture. But their road trip in a caravan to the west coast of Scotland is also a journey deeper into history, to the events that scar the land and seep into a country's consciousness. What they find in history, inevitably, is violence: in Scotland, the Highland Clearances, during which small-scale farmers were forcibly evicted from their land; mirrored in the Appalachians, home of the American woman, by the mass clearance of native Americans – enacted in part by the Scottish diaspora. This intertwining of roots is underscored by the presence of a live band, the Bengsons, who dress like clans women and play songs redolent of both landscapes.

The events re-enacted might seem to have no direct connection with the trio on stage – except that all three of them benefit from the exploitative capitalist structure that violence brought forth. Can the dedicated Scotsman really claim Adam Smith as a national hero, when the philosopher was the architect of the modern free market, and “threw the left-wing on the pyre” by giving them hope of a sympathetic liberalism? The fact that his friend works in London finance is a wedge between them; asked why he's so angry, he replies, reasonably, that it's because: “our political system is sick”.

In her book Depression: A Public Feeling, academic Ann Cvetkovich gives a cogent argument for tracing the roots of individual depression back to “histories of colonialism, genocide, slavery, legal exclusion, and everyday segregation and isolation that haunt all of our lives”. Anything That Gives Off Light brings the ghosts of those histories to crude and noisy life; the characters might not be exorcised of their grief by it, but they at least find a new accommodation with each other.

- Maddy Costa

Anything That Gives Off Light is on at 19.30 at the Edinburgh International Conference Centre until 26 August. See venue for accessibility information - http://www.eif.co.uk/2016/light#.V73Ji45LUfo

On identity crises among adolescents and adults: https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/fulfillment-any-age/201203/are-you-having-identity-crisis

Poet Harry Giles on identity and writing in Scots: https://harrygiles.org/2014/04/17/hou-writin-in-scots-maiters-tae-me/

How to fix America's identity crisis: http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/07/a-new-american-melting-pot-214011

On depression as a response to anti-blackness: http://www.forharriet.com/2016/03/depression-is-political.html#axzz4I9SB3Wsn

Choosing action over despondency: http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2015/05/dont-give-angry-population-hard-govern-depressed-population-easy

Ann Cvetkovich's website: http://www.anncvetkovich.com/

DOUBTING THOMAS // Grassmarket Projects

Doubting Thomas is ostensibly about Glasgow's criminal underworld, but it's also about the consequences of childhood trauma and neglect, and it's about rehabilitation. Written and performed by Thomas McCrudden with support from the cast, it is the true story of his violent past, detailing his time both in and out of prison.

As well as reenacting scenes from his life, McCrudden explores the roots of his offending, investigating how and why someone might become criminally dispossessed. He says: 'When I was growing up I wasn’t shown love, and that created not just a man without a conscience or empathy. It created a monster.' He also talks about how he was always wearing a mask, and it was only when he found the courage to remove it that he was able to change.

McCrudden's stories of life in prison include descriptions of desperate young men unable to read or write, and several bloody suicide attempts. In Doubting Thomas, prison is not a place where people are empowered to turn their lives around; it is a place of violence and fear, full of young men let down by mainstream education who have found the only way they can prove themselves is through crime.

Research by the University of Strathclyde's Interventions for Vulnerable Youth service has explored the links between childhood trauma and offending. Consultant Clinical and Forensic Psychologist Dr Lorraine Johnston says: 'We see some children dismissed as attention seeking or manipulative. But 75-85 per cent of them have significant histories of trauma. Understanding their behaviour as a response to that can be the key.'

The Grassmarket Project was founded in 1990 by Artistic Director Jeremy Weller, who focuses on putting real life stories on stage. There is often only one professional actor in the cast, with the rest of the parts played by the people who actually experienced them. The act of creating and performing the play is a kind of catharsis, a way to confront one's demons and potentially move on. Doubting Thomas is performance as rehab. (HB)

Doubting Thomas is on at Summerhall (venue 26) at 19:20 until 28 August: https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/doubting-thomas

'Mental Health and Prisons': http://www.who.int/mental_health/policy/mh_in_prison.pdf

'Prison is not working – it’s time for a rehabilitation revolution': http://www.halsburyslawexchange.co.uk/prison-is-not-working-its-time-for-a-rehabilitation-revolution/

'Domestic violence a trigger for three quarters of violent young offenders': http://www.heraldscotland.com/news/homenews/14329830.Domestic_violence_a_trigger_for_three_quarters_of_violent_young_offenders/

'Understanding the Cycle, Childhood Maltreatment and Future Crime': https://www.princeton.edu/~jcurrie/publications/Understanding%20the%20CycleChildhood.pdf

Positive Prison, Positive Futures: http://www.positiveprison.org

Prison Reform Trust: http://www.prisonreformtrust.org.uk

The Howard League for Penal Reform: http://howardleague.org