{"http:\/\/dx.doi.org\/10.14288\/1.0444187":{"http:\/\/vivoweb.org\/ontology\/core#departmentOrSchool":[{"value":"Education, Faculty of","type":"literal","lang":"en"},{"value":"Educational and Counselling Psychology, and Special Education (ECPS), Department of","type":"literal","lang":"en"}],"http:\/\/www.europeana.eu\/schemas\/edm\/dataProvider":[{"value":"DSpace","type":"literal","lang":"en"}],"https:\/\/open.library.ubc.ca\/terms#degreeCampus":[{"value":"UBCV","type":"literal","lang":"en"}],"http:\/\/purl.org\/dc\/terms\/creator":[{"value":"Cook, Christina Olivia MacLeod","type":"literal","lang":"en"}],"http:\/\/purl.org\/dc\/terms\/issued":[{"value":"2024-07-22T17:00:49Z","type":"literal","lang":"en"},{"value":"2024","type":"literal","lang":"en"}],"http:\/\/vivoweb.org\/ontology\/core#relatedDegree":[{"value":"Doctor of Philosophy - PhD","type":"literal","lang":"en"}],"https:\/\/open.library.ubc.ca\/terms#degreeGrantor":[{"value":"University of British Columbia","type":"literal","lang":"en"}],"http:\/\/purl.org\/dc\/terms\/description":[{"value":"The research presented in this dissertation draws on research-based theatre (RbT) to create a\r\nplayscript. The playscript explores two overarching narrative strands: (1) auto-narratives from\r\nChristina\u2019s coming out as a nonbinary transgender woman while undertaking graduate studies in\r\ncounselling psychology; (2) narratives from the author\u2019s grandmother and mother\u2019s experiences\r\nin doctoral programs in the 1940s and 1970s, respectively. Through the playscript, Christina\r\nconsiders the methodological possibilities that emerge when research-based theatre is applied\r\nwithin counselling psychology to explore auto-narratives of graduate school and transitioning.\r\nFurthermore, Christina examines the methodological options that arise from a trans-informed\r\napproach to RbT creation. A critical commentary and thematic analysis accompany the\r\nplayscript, providing multiple entry points for knowledge translation.","type":"literal","lang":"en"}],"http:\/\/www.europeana.eu\/schemas\/edm\/aggregatedCHO":[{"value":"https:\/\/circle.library.ubc.ca\/rest\/handle\/2429\/88665?expand=metadata","type":"literal","lang":"en"}],"http:\/\/www.w3.org\/2009\/08\/skos-reference\/skos.html#note":[{"value":"RESEARCH-BASED THEATRE IN COUNSELLING PSYCHOLOGY:  CENTERING TRANS WAYS OF KNOWING  by  Christina Olivia MacLeod Cook M.A., The University of British Columbia, 2018 B.F.A, Concordia University, 2005   A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF  DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE AND POSTDOCTORAL STUDIES (Counselling Psychology)  THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA (Vancouver)  July 2024  \u00a9 Christina Olivia MacLeod Cook, 2024  ii  The following individuals certify that they have read, and recommend to the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies for acceptance, the dissertation entitled:  Research-Based Theatre in Counselling Psychology: Centering Trans Ways of Knowing  submitted by Christina Olivia MacLeod Cook in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Counselling Psychology  Examining Committee: George Belliveau, Professor, Department of Language and Literacy Education,  University of British Columbia Co-supervisor William Borgen, Professor, Educational and Counselling Psychology, and Special Education, University of British Columbia Co-supervisor  Joe Salvatore, Professor, Department of Music and Performing Arts Professions,  New York University Steinhardt Supervisory Committee Member Ishu Ishiyama, Associate Professor, Educational and Counselling Psychology, and Special Education, University of British Columbia University Examiner Stephen Heatley, Professor, Department of Theatre and Film,  University of British Columbia University Examiner Dan Harris, Research Professor, School of Education Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology External Examiner  iii  Abstract  The research presented in this dissertation draws on research-based theatre (RbT) to create a playscript. The playscript explores two overarching narrative strands: (1) auto-narratives from Christina\u2019s coming out as a nonbinary transgender woman while undertaking graduate studies in counselling psychology; (2) narratives from the author\u2019s grandmother and mother\u2019s experiences in doctoral programs in the 1940s and 1970s, respectively. Through the playscript, Christina considers the methodological possibilities that emerge when research-based theatre is applied within counselling psychology to explore auto-narratives of graduate school and transitioning. Furthermore, Christina examines the methodological options that arise from a trans-informed approach to RbT creation. A critical commentary and thematic analysis accompany the playscript, providing multiple entry points for knowledge translation.    iv  Lay Summary  Christina Cook\u2019s dissertation research explores how counselling psychology scholars can use theatre as research. This dissertation includes a research-based playscript illustrating the possibilities of theatre-as-research. This playscript includes autobiographical narratives of Christina\u2019s experiences coming out as a trans woman and transitioning gender expressions while a graduate student in counselling psychology, as well as family narratives from Christina\u2019s mother and grandmother, who also completed graduate degrees, in the 1940s and 1970s, respectively. This playscript exemplifies how scholars can utilize theatre as research within counselling psychology to explore autobiography and trans ways of knowing. v  Preface  I identified and constructed the research questions, designed the research work, performed data generation and analysis of research results, and synthesized the material for broader insights and implications included in this dissertation.  \u2022 An Ethics Certificate for this research was obtained from the UBC Behavioural Research Ethics Board, Certificate Number: H22-03565. \u2022 A portion of Chapter 2, related to the research-based theatre, is in press. Cook, C., Belliveau, G., Lea, G., Shigematsu, T. (In press). Research-based theatre. In Palgrave Encyclopedia of the Health Humanities. I was the lead author of the manuscript and oversaw the editing process.  \u2022 Heather McIntyre, my cousin, conducted and audio recorded the interview with my grandmother, Patricia MacLeod, in the early 2000s.   vi  Table of Contents  Abstract ......................................................................................................................................... iii Lay Summary ............................................................................................................................... iv Preface .............................................................................................................................................v Table of Contents ......................................................................................................................... vi List of Tables ............................................................................................................................... xii List of Figures ............................................................................................................................. xiii List of Abbreviations ................................................................................................................. xiv Glossary ........................................................................................................................................xv Acknowledgements .................................................................................................................. xviii Dedication .....................................................................................................................................xx Chapter 1: Introduction ................................................................................................................1 1.1 Before We Begin: Notes on Language ........................................................................... 5 1.1.1 Gender Talk ............................................................................................................ 6 1.1.2 Trans Ways of Knowing .......................................................................................... 8 1.1.3 Auto- Terms: Auto-narratives, Autobiography, and Autoethnography .................. 8 1.2 Background: Theatre as Research, Counselling Psychology, and Absent Voices ......... 9 1.2.1 Absent Voices in Counselling Psychology Practice and Research ......................... 9 1.2.2 Qualitative Research in Counselling Psychology ................................................. 13 1.3 RbT as an Alternative to Traditional Qualitative Approaches in Counselling Psychology ................................................................................................................................ 15 1.4 Trans and Queer Theatre: Creating Transformation ..................................................... 17 vii  1.4.1 Queer Theatre ....................................................................................................... 17 1.4.2 Trans Theatre ........................................................................................................ 18 1.5 Transformations: Trans-informed RbT Playwriting ..................................................... 20 1.6 Is This Research Transing Counselling Psychology Scholarship? ............................... 22 1.7 Research Questions ....................................................................................................... 23 1.8 Research Contribution .................................................................................................. 24 Chapter 2: Literature Review .....................................................................................................26 2.1 Narrative Turn ............................................................................................................... 28 2.2 Research on Narrative Conceptualizations of Identity ................................................. 29 2.3 Autoethnographic Turn ................................................................................................. 32 2.3.1 Autoethnography in Counselling Psychology Literature ...................................... 36 2.4 RbT Turn: Theatre as Research .................................................................................... 39 2.4.1 RbT ........................................................................................................................ 39 2.4.2 Paradigmatic Stances for ABR and RbT ............................................................... 41 2.4.3 Research-based Theatre and Counselling Psychology ......................................... 45 2.4.4 Trans-informed RbT .............................................................................................. 48 2.5 Trans Theatre ................................................................................................................ 49 2.5.1 Embodied Fiction as Autobiography .................................................................... 52 2.5.2 Narrative Nonlinearity .......................................................................................... 54 2.5.3 Genre Agnosticism ................................................................................................ 55 2.6 Research Related to Trans Graduate Students in Counselling Psychology .................. 57 2.7 Gender-Based Violence and Transmisogyny ................................................................ 59 2.8 Research on Adult Trans Individuals\u2019 Relationships with Family of Origin ............... 61 viii  2.9 Research Contribution .................................................................................................. 62 Chapter 3: Research Approach ..................................................................................................64 3.1 Research Paradigm ........................................................................................................ 66 3.2 Research Design Overview ........................................................................................... 69 3.3 Artist-Scholar as Instrument and Embracing Subjectivity: Reflexivity and Interpretation in RbT and TA ................................................................................................... 71 3.4 Artist\/Scholar Positionality Statement .......................................................................... 75 3.5 Data Generation ............................................................................................................ 77 3.5.1 Auto-writing: Primary Data Generation .............................................................. 77 3.5.2 Interview Transcripts: Secondary Data Source .................................................... 78 3.6 Data Analysis Summary: RbT & TA Blend ................................................................. 79 3.7 Data Analysis Step-by-Step: The Analytic\/Aesthetic Process Up Close ...................... 81 3.7.1 Playwriting from Transcripts: Familiarization .................................................... 81 3.7.2 Playwriting from Transcripts: Data Reduction & Abstraction ............................ 81 3.7.3 Playwriting Auto-Texts: Data Reduction through Postcard Writing ................... 83 3.7.4 Play Development Workshops and Subsequent Drafts ......................................... 85 3.7.5 Invited Play Readings and Subsequent Drafts ...................................................... 87 3.7.6 Theme Creation and Revision ............................................................................... 88 3.7.7 Process Postcards: Process-Focused Analytic\/Aesthetic Memos ........................ 88 3.8 Scientist-Partitioners, Artist-Scholars, and the Ethics of RbT Playwriting .................. 89 3.8.1 Confidentiality on Stage and Processes of Informed Consent in RbT .................. 89 3.8.2 But What About My Electrologist? Ethically Including Others in Staged Auto-Narratives ............................................................................................................................. 91 ix  3.8.3 Perspectives of a Counselling Psychology RbT Playwright on Personal Biases . 92 3.8.4 Centring an Ethic of Trans Care .......................................................................... 93 3.8.5 Would My Grandmother Want to be in This Research-Based Play? .................... 95 3.9 Evaluating RbT Playwriting ......................................................................................... 97 Chapter 4: Postcards to My Younger Transexual Self, Ages 0-119, A Playscript ...............100 4.1 Prologue: Postcards to the Reader .............................................................................. 100 4.1.1 An \u2018Outdated\u2019 Title ............................................................................................. 103 4.1.2 Character Names ................................................................................................ 104 4.1.3 Work-in-Progress ................................................................................................ 107 4.2 Postcards to My Younger Transexual Self, Ages 0-119 ............................................. 108 4.2.1 [Book I: Away from Here & Now.] .................................................................... 112 4.2.2 [Book II: The Chemistry of Familiar Things.] .................................................... 128 4.2.3 [A Leaflet: Discipline Phantasies.] ..................................................................... 138 4.2.4 [Book III: Ways Home.] ..................................................................................... 145 4.2.5 [Book IV: \u2026Bringing Up Herself.] .................................................................... 153 4.2.6 [Book V: Postal-Parts.] ....................................................................................... 162 4.2.7 [Book VI: You Will Go to the Moon.] ............................................................... 172 4.3 Epilogue: A Postcard for You ..................................................................................... 179 Chapter 5: Insights from a Playscript on Embodying Transness in a Doctoral Psychology Program ......................................................................................................................................180 5.1 Thematic Analysis ...................................................................................................... 181 5.2 Theme One: Maternal & Academic Narrative Dis\/inheritance. ................................. 183 5.2.1 Maternal Narrative Dis\/inheritance. .................................................................. 183 x  5.2.2 Narrative Inheritance and Trans Daughters ...................................................... 186 5.2.3 Academic Narrative Inheritance ......................................................................... 188 5.2.4 Reflexively Engaging with Theme One ............................................................... 191 5.3 Theme Two: Embodied Fictions Beyond the Body .................................................... 192 5.3.1 Postcards Can Time Travel: Metaphorical Patterns of Meaning Making ......... 193 5.3.2 Rescripting Onstage: Affirming, Interpersonal Fictions, and Therapeutic Rescripting .......................................................................................................................... 194 5.4 Theme Three: Care as Aesthetics of Fragmentation and Choice ................................ 197 5.4.1 Fragmentation ..................................................................................................... 198 5.4.2 Choice ................................................................................................................. 200 5.4.2.1 Sharing Moment: Beyond the Stage Lights. ................................................... 201 5.4.2.2 Sharing Moment: Who Reads the Postcards? ................................................. 203 5.4.2.3 Sharing Moment: Trans Joy (No Pressure). .................................................... 205 5.5 Conclusion .................................................................................................................. 206 Chapter 6: Discussion ................................................................................................................207 6.1 RbT and Counselling Psychology ............................................................................... 207 6.1.1 Narrative Inheritance and Disinheritance .......................................................... 208 6.1.2 Embodied Re-Storying: Fictional Possibilities ................................................... 209 6.1.3 Aesthetic Choices for Consent ............................................................................ 210 6.2 Trans Informed RbT ................................................................................................... 211 6.2.1 New Meanings Concerning Nonlinearity on Stage ............................................. 211 6.2.2 Fictional Imagery as Sites of Analysis and Knowledge Sharing ........................ 212 6.2.3 Boldly Engage with Unconventional Theatre Aesthetics .................................... 213 xi  6.3 Implications for Clinical Practice ............................................................................... 214 6.4 Study Limitations ........................................................................................................ 215 6.5 Directions for Future Scholarship ............................................................................... 216 6.6 Final Curtain ............................................................................................................... 217 References ...................................................................................................................................219 Appendices ..................................................................................................................................258 Appendix A: List of Plays by Trans Playwrights ................................................................... 258 Appendix B: Interview Script ................................................................................................. 260  xii  List of Tables  Table 1: Characteristics of NI, autoethnography, TA, and RbT. .................................................. 73 Table 2: Evaluative Criteria for RbT Playwriting. ........................................................................ 97 Table 3: Theme Definitions and Example Excerpts. .................................................................. 182  xiii  List of Figures  Figure 1: Postcards to Myself ......................................................................................................... 4 Figure 2: Process Memo ............................................................................................................. 100 Figure 3: Postal Routes ............................................................................................................... 112 Figure 4: Implicit Bias Is a\u2014 ...................................................................................................... 128 Figure 5: My Practicum Supervisor Is\u2014 .................................................................................... 145 Figure 6: Bubbles in the Head .................................................................................................... 153 Figure 7: I Am a Fully-Fledged Psychologist ............................................................................. 162 Figure 8: Postcards, Postcards, Postcards 2022-2023 ................................................................. 172 Figure 9: Process Memo ............................................................................................................. 201 Figure 10: Process Memo ........................................................................................................... 203 Figure 11: Process Memo ........................................................................................................... 205  xiv  List of Abbreviations  2SLGTBQIA+ \u2013 Two-Spirit, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, Intersex, and Asexual; the plus refers to the countless identities not explicitly named or given a letter in the acronym ABR \u2013 Arts-based Research APA \u2013 American Psychiatric Association. Note the American Psychological Association is also mentioned. This text only uses APA as an abbreviation for the American Psychiatric Association. DSM \u2013 The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Various editions are mentioned in the text, marked by Roman numerals (e.g., DSM-III) ImRs \u2013 Imagery rescripting NI \u2013 Narrative Inquiry RbT \u2013 Research-based Theatre TA \u2013 Thematic Analysis    xv  Glossary  Character: In a playscript, any role played by an actor. Characters may be human or nonhuman. An actor may play multiple characters.   Costume Design: The design and use of actors\u2019 costumes in a production. The playwright may specify some costume elements in stage directions or lines of dialogue, but many costume choices are left to the discretion of the director and designer. Costume design may be literal, for example, a uniform for a character who works as an employee at a specific company, and metaphorical or symbolic, through the colour and texture of the material. Dialogue: A line or lines spoken by actors in a script. Dialogue may also refer to exchanges between two or more characters in a script (see also monologue).  Direct Address: An actor addresses the audience directly, speaking directly to them. Alternatively, actors might speak their lines to each other and not acknowledge the audience.   Double Casting\/Dual Roles: An actor plays more than one character. Dramaturg: An artist who facilitates new play development and whose role may include research, editing, leading play development workshops, and supporting the work of playwrights, actors, directors, and designers.  Dramaturgy: The craft of facilitating the development of a new play. Dramaturgy may also refer to the theory and practice of theatre-making in general or specific commitments in theatre-making, as in trans or queer dramaturgies. As Cattaneo (2021) writes, dramaturgy \u201ckeeps the whole in mind\u201d (p. 13), referring to a \u201cwhole\u201d script and its development, \u201cwhole\u201d productions and theatre experiences they offer audiences, as well as \u201cwhole\u201d artistic communities in terms of shifting the centre to unheard voices, forms, and narratives.  xvi  Fourth Wall: Actors speak their lines as if the audience is not there and do not directly address the audience. Performance grounded in strict realism \u2018respect the fourth wall\u2019. The name refers to the invisible fourth wall of a stage set. For example, if a room is represented on stage, it may have three walls present, the back wall and sides, but a fourth wall is missing so the audience can see the actors.   Lighting Design: The design and use of stage lighting in a production. The playwright may specify some lighting design elements in the script, such as blackouts, when all the lights in the theatre dim or snap to black, but many lighting choices are left to the discretion of the director and designer. Lighting may be literal, such as dim lights in the evening, and metaphorical, speaking to the emotional tone of the script or characters on stage.  Linear Narratives: A play\u2019s narratives are linearly presented to the audience. Lines: Any words an actor speaks in a script (see also dialogue).  Magic Realism: A story with fantastical or magical elements as part of its narrative. Mainstream Theatre: Regional theatre productions at established theatre companies, as well as plays produced in major theatre centers or scripts that originated with productions in these centers.  Monologues: A speech in a script spoken by one character. Non-linear Narratives: A play\u2019s narratives are presented to the audience non-linearly. For example, the play\u2019s narrative timeline could be fractured, and the audience may piece it together. Play\/Script Development: A new play might be developed over several years before receiving a first production. Playwriting: The craft of writing a play.  Playscript\/Play\/Script: The written document a playwright creates for production. xvii  Production: When a playscript is produced, it is rehearsed and performed for an audience. Reading: A script is read for an invited or public audience. There are usually no production elements, such as costumes, props, sets or lighting in a reading. The stage directions may be read along with the actors\u2019 lines to clarify the action the audience would see on stage in a fully staged production. Readings are often a component of a new script development process.   Realism: A play that strives for representation of only what might happen in \u2018the real world.\u2019   Set Designs: The design and use of sets or physical or metaphorical elements of a play\u2019s settings in production. The playwright may specify some set elements in stage directions or lines of dialogue, but many set choices are left to the discretion of the director and designer.  Sets may be literal or metaphorical and symbolic.  Solo Show: A play performed by one actor.  Scenes: Playwrights may break a script into sections in various ways. Scenes are short play sections that may be unified by place, time, location, characters, themes, or other grouping methods.  Stage Directions: Descriptions written by the playwright that explain the action on stage or what the audience would see or hear if they were watching a fully staged play production.  Staging: Getting a play \u2018up on its feet\u2019 or rehearing how actors will perform a play.        xviii  Acknowledgements  My heartfelt and abiding gratitude to my colleagues, friends, loved ones, and chosen family who supported me as I undertook doctoral studies and arts-based scholarship that, five years ago, I would have brushed aside as impossible.   I thank Dr. George Belliveau for believing in my work even when I felt unsure of myself, inspiring me to push the boundaries of what research can look like, and helping me find an artist-scholar community in academia.   Thanks to Dr. William Borgen for encouraging my desire to advocate and defy conventions and consistently demonstrating faith and understanding in this arts-based research process.   Thank you to Joe Salvatore for offering me the artful space to ask questions and re-examine my playscript drafts in ways that only ever created playful, generative possibilities.   Numerous artists and artist-scholars contributed their talents to the development of the playscript across several workshops. I thank them all. Joanna Garfinkel, the play\u2019s dramaturge, is a tireless champion of this script and has worked side-by-side with me to move it from a first draft to the version included here. I have so much gratitude for having found an artistic kindred spirit in Joanna.  xix  My deep gratitude to the women in my family: My Mom, for her fierce love and her generosity in sharing stories. I am so lucky that you are my mother. My Grandma, for taking part in an audio-recording her memories and for gifting them to the next generation. I am grateful to be your granddaughter. To my cousin, Heather McIntyre, I am grateful that you had the foresight to interview and document our grandmother\u2019s narratives.   The playscript included in this dissertation was developed with support from the UBC Research-based Theatre Lab, the Canada Arts Council, the BC Arts Council, the Playwrights Theatre Centre, the frank theatre company, and the City of Vancouver.  My profound thanks, always, to Scott Button: We split a veggie burger over a decade ago, and in the years since his love has only ever taught me to be a better artist and better human. My heart and my forever gratitude.  And to you, the reader: For me, writing is a journey towards love. Thank you for embarking on this journey with me.   xx  Dedication  For the girls.  For matrilinealities.    1 Chapter 1: Introduction  These years, weaving a body out of words, unravelling it again, as if my life  were just material, as if I\u2019d get  it right sometime. -Cat Fitzpatrick, \u201cSix Women I\u2019m Not\u201d, Glamourpuss  What if you wrote postcards to yourself for an entire year?  What if it was the year that you came out as a trans woman in your counselling psychology graduate program?  And what if you turned these postcards into a play?  These questions are invitations to my dissertation, in which I embraced playwriting as a research process.  Research-based Theatre (RbT; Belliveau & Lea, 2016) is an arts-based research (ABR) methodology1 that has amassed considerable literature in the past two decades across social  1 Some scholars argue for the term art-based rather than arts-based research (McNiff, 2011). In my dissertation, I have chosen arts-based (Leavy, 2018, 2020) to acknowledge the plurality of artistic specializations, particularly within the art form of theatre, which brings together writing, acting, design, music, and dance. Although arts-based research is \u201can acceptable alternative explicitly recognizing all fine arts disciplines\u201d (McNiff, 2011, p. 386), McNiff remains \u201cwary of separating the arts from one another as we see throughout education at all levels\u201d (p. 386).   2 science, education, and health disciplines. Scholars taking up RbT bring theatre-making into specific phases of a research process or centre theatre through an entire research design2. RbT has come to be regarded as an innovative and accessible strategy for knowledge translation and exchange (Jarus et al., 2022; Kontos et al., 2020; Kuhlmann et al., 2023; Nichols et al., 2022) and a collaborative research approach for working with a broad range of communities, including healthcare professionals with disabilities (Jarus et al., 2022), military veterans (Balfour & Hassall, 2022; Belliveau, Lea, et al., 2020; Spring, 2022), adult learners accessing drop-in education programs (Cook & Borgen, 2020), patients with dementia (Kontos et al., 2020), and patients with traumatic brain injury (Kontos et al., 2012)3. However, RbT and other ABR  2 While the term research-based theatre places the word \u2018research\u2019 before \u2018theatre\u2019, as an artist-scholar engaged in this methodology, I do not take this to mean that this approach privileges research over theatre. Alternatively, the term might emphasize theatre, as \u2018theatre\u2019 is highlighted as the final word. But rather than read a hierarchy in the word order, I view \u2018based\u2019 as a bridge. This bridge signals the possibility and the interdependency of scholarship and theatre-making in an RbT process. 3 It is not my intention to convey a universal uptake of ABR and RbT terminology within academic settings. There are many terms for processes of scholarship\/artmaking, and these terms are context dependent. ABR and RbT appear in education, social sciences, and health disciplines. These terms may be less common in fine arts faculties or theatre departments. I learned to be a theatre artist and took my first playwriting course as an undergraduate in a fine arts faculty. While I am referring to my work as RbT here, this is a term I do not use with my artistic    3 approaches remain underutilized in counselling psychology (Ponterotto et al., 2017). Although methodological guides for RbT have been published (Belliveau & Lea, 2016), an articulation of the approach for counselling psychology researchers is lacking. My dissertation research addresses this gap by considering methodological possibilities for counselling psychologists who wish to engage in RbT. My examination of theatre-as-research builds on the well-established qualitative research traditions within counselling psychology as a specialization (Sinacore et al., 2011) and calls to explore ABR methodologies (Chamberlain et al., 2018). This dissertation explores how artist-scholars can utilize theatre in counselling psychology research practices and possibilities for trans-informed RbT. As an illustration of RbT methodological possibilities within counselling psychology, my dissertation has an example research-based playscript at its center. Writing this playscript is the primary research process I have undertaken; indeed, from an RbT perspective, the play is the research. The playscript and the research process are indistinguishable as the script was simultaneously a form of data generation, analysis, and synthesis developed through an artistic process. While such a research process may seem unfamiliar to counselling psychology scholars, photovoice provides examples of artistic practice-based research in counselling psychology literature (Bardhoshi et al., 2018; Wells & Hunt, 2021). Furthermore, in education, art-as-research doctoral dissertations are becoming more commonplace (Bickel, 2023; Sinner et al., 2006). The playscript, which I share  collaborators. My work is \u2018research-based theatre,\u2019 and it is equally simply \u2018theatre\u2019; this dissertation documents a process of research-playwriting, and I draw on similar approaches whenever I am playwriting. While language across these disciplines varies, our theatre practices are often shared.     4 in Chapter 4, features narratives of my experiences coming out as a trans woman and transitioning gender expressions while a graduate student in counselling psychology and other autobiographical narratives related to my transness. The play\u2019s text consists mainly of postcards I wrote to myself over one year in graduate school (Figure 1).  Figure 1: Postcards to Myself Postcards to Myself  Note. A selection of the postcards I wrote to myself over one year in graduate school. I situate my dissertation in a transdisciplinary space between counselling psychology, trans studies, and theatre. According to Dolan (2005), theatre offers \u201ca place to scrutinize public meanings\u201d (p. 6). In addition to considering how counselling psychologists can employ theatre-as-research approaches and develop a trans-informed RbT, a third goal of the playscript is to   5 scrutinize discipline-specific meanings assigned to transness while, \u201ceven if through fantasy\u201d (p. 6), embodying alternative meanings.  In this chapter, I set the stage for my research, broadly defining the landscape of qualitative methodologies in counselling psychology and how RbT can enable the centering of trans voices in our specialization\u2019s research, assessment, and clinical practice. I conclude the chapter with my research questions and the specific contributions I offer through this dissertation. 1.1 Before We Begin: Notes on Language Trans, nonbinary, and gender nonconforming refer to individuals whose gender identity differs from a gender designation assigned at birth and those whose gender identities or expressions defy binary classifications or cisnormative understandings. In this dissertation, I employ trans as a shorthand for the above.  I want to avoid becoming tangled in bounded definitions of these terms. I use trans expansively, following Stryker\u2019s (2017) definition as \u201cmovement across a socially imposed boundary away from an unchosen starting place\u201d (p. 1). This expansive definition encourages us to consider the possibilities of trans beyond the boundaries of oppression. Gill-Peterson (2018) writes that trans, \u201cas it has been theorized in transgender studies \u2026 mark[s] a political distinction from medical or pathological meanings that have accrued to the term \u2018transgender\u2019 in recent years\u201d (p. 8).    6 If you identify as trans, I invite you4 to replace my chosen words with whatever language fits you. If you don\u2019t identify as trans, I invite you to consider if you have ever pushed back against how others have perceived your gender expressions or if you have knowingly or unknowingly crossed norms and expectations associated with your gender. If the answer is \u2018yes,\u2019 perhaps there is transness in your experience after all.    1.1.1 Gender Talk In 2019, I embarked on my counselling psychology doctoral studies and came out as trans in my second year. Trans woman, nonbinary, and queer are words I use to describe myself currently. As Butler (1999) writes, \u201cI am not outside the language that structures me, but neither am I determined by the language that makes this \u2018I\u2019 possible.\u201d (p. xxvi). My language choices reflect my other identities: I am a white, able-bodied graduate student with middle-class privileges in an urban centre in Western Canada. Gender-nonconforming individuals with other positionalities and in other communities may not resonate with any of the above identity terms. As the novelist and playwright Camila Sosa Villada (2022) writes:  Down below the equator, right at the end of the world, we banded together to dig up the word travesti. It had been decorously buried under terms that were completely alien to us. People were calling us trans women, transexuals, or transgender, and even mentioned  4 In this paragraph, I speak directly to the reader and make this switch at several other points in the dissertation. This switching paves the way for the direct addresses in my playscript, in which characters talk directly to the audience. The second person also emphasizes an arts-based approach, in which playwriting builds a bridge between artist-scholar and reader.   7 conditions such as gender dysphoria and sexual dissidence. Once again Northern academics was being thrust upon us while down here, we were busy surviving. (p. ix) Our ways of discussing gender are always culturally and historically situated (Stryker, 2017). From a social constructionism perspective (Braun & Clarke, 2022; Burr, 2003), our language related to gender is not only contextual; language and social interaction produce what we can know about gender (Burr, 2019; Butler, 1999). A good example of this socially bound knowledge is the term cisgender (Stryker, 2017). The editors of the Oxford English Dictionary gave the term an entry in 2015 following its newly widespread use (Martin, 2015), but it was an obscure term mere decades ago, at the turn of the century (Stryker, 2017). Few people would have described themselves as cisgender or cis in 2001, but in the North American cultural and historical context in which I am writing this, using the term to create a binary between cis and trans is commonplace (Stryker, 2017). How will our use of cisgender and other terms change and influence gender knowledge in the coming decades?  Our language for gender changes quickly (Stryker, 2017). If you read this in a few years, you might consider my language dated and perhaps even offensive. I welcome these language changes and transformations. Knowing the cultural and historical etymology of words relating to gender diversity is essential for counselling psychologists, as is reflexively considering how we employ these words. Cisgender is a helpful term because it names gender identities that align with categories individuals were assigned at birth rather than positioning these identities as \u201cunmarked norms\u201d (Stryker, 2017, p. 13). However, as mentioned above, the rigid use of cisgender \u201ccan foster another kind of gender binary, cis- versus trans-\u201d (p. 13). Rather than using cis as a distinct category, Stryker recommends asking \u201chow somebody is cis \u2026 and how they are trans\u201d (p. 13).    8 Furthermore, as Stryker articulates, \u201chowever [people] are cis or trans, [all] are subjected to non-consensual social gendering practices that privilege some and discriminate against others\u201d (p. 14). Rather than starting from the assumption of cis as the \u2018norm\u2019, what if we adopted trans as the \u2018norm\u2019? What if, like Stryker\u2019s definition above, our socially constructed understanding of trans was expansive enough to include anyone who ever crossed into a new gender identity or new forms of expression? \u201cWe all change our genders\u201d (Bornstein, 2013, p. 20). These changes may be daily: expression of gender at work versus home or out with friends. These changes may also happen over different periods in a lifespan: the gender of a child is expressed differently than that of an adult. From this perspective, rather than a cis\/trans binary, maybe we are all trans.  1.1.2 Trans Ways of Knowing I draw on the phrase trans ways of knowing throughout my dissertation. Trans ways of knowing are not uniform and homogenous, as exemplified by the diverse language different gender-nonconforming individuals and communities utilize (Stryker, 2017; also, see Alabanza (2018) for a description of gender diverse language from around the world as part of a playscript). Trans ways of knowing refer to the expansive, embodied knowledges of gender nonconforming communities that are individual, hyperlocal, and more broadly collective (Steinbock, 2021). These understandings lead to specific aesthetic interpretations and artistic practices, such as non-linearity as a feature of trans theatre (Baig et al., 2021). I explore trans ways of knowing and trans theatre further in section 1.4 and in Chapter 2.  1.1.3 Auto- Terms: Auto-narratives, Autobiography, and Autoethnography I have used the terms auto-narratives, autobiography, and autoethnography throughout this text, as drawing on all these terms supported expansive possibilities and transdisciplinary communication with my artist and research collaborators. Autoethnographers position their   9 methodology as separate from autobiography, with a key difference being the emphasis on ethno- or focus on the cultural and broader theoretical relevance of the shared personal narrative (Adams et al., 2022). However, autoethnography is likely not a term familiar to theatre artists, public audiences, or trans writers exploring personal narratives who are not engaged in university spaces. During workshop sessions on the playscript, I would often refer to the stories in the playscript as auto-narratives. When I talk with trans community members and others after sharing playscripts at public readings, I use words like autobiography. I choose to employ these terms to invite collaborative connections across disciplines and beyond academic spaces. 1.2 Background: Theatre as Research, Counselling Psychology, and Absent Voices Goldstein et al.\u2019s (2023) RbT work The Love Booth and Other Plays includes the following text: \u201cWhile the American Psychological Association agreed to delist homosexuality from the DSM in 1973, gender dysphoria became a psychiatric diagnosis in the fifth edition of the DSM 40 years later in 2013\u201d (p. 85). The following sections provide context for my study by offering brief backgrounds on counselling psychology\u2019s historic relationship with the trans community and traditional qualitative research in counselling psychology.  1.2.1 Absent Voices in Counselling Psychology Practice and Research While the American Psychological Association (2022) and Canadian Psychological Association (2022) have recently released statements in support of trans individuals\u2019 right to self-determination in gender-affirming care and the necessity of such care, the perspectives of trans, nonbinary, and gender nonconforming individuals are still largely missing from counselling psychology practice and scholarship (Hayward & Treharne, 2021). First, I consider the absence of trans voices in clinical assessment for gender-affirming care access.    10 In many jurisdictions, trans individuals who need or want gender-affirming interventions access this care through clinical assessment. Trans clients may seek these assessments from a counselling psychologist, and as Budge (2015) observes, rarely do \u201cpsychotherapists find themselves in the role of gatekeeper to medically necessary treatments\u201d (p. 287), except with their trans clients. I hesitate to dedicate a section of my introduction to care access, as the assessment process often emphasizes dysphoria and transnormativity: meeting clinically recognized descriptions of trans and nonbinary identities and criteria for care (Riggs et al., 2019). I would rather skip right to calls toward trans liberation. But assessments have informed many trans clients\u2019 interactions with counselling psychologists and our specialization\u2019s overall relationship with trans communities for decades (Riggs et al., 2019). It is also an essential background context for my research-based play. A monologue from my playscript in Chapter 4 includes the following lines describing my assessment experience seeking affirming care. The words \u2018stick[ing] to what we rehearsed\u2019 refer to trying to fit assumptions of transnormativity, while \u2018always\u2019 and \u2018often\u2019 refer to my responses to assessment questions around dysphoria:  how do we get  to the good parts  if we don\u2019t  stick  to what  we rehearsed?  Always often always often always  now somewhere  in the province  there\u2019s a file    11 with my name on it\u2014  probably  my old name  probably  my old gender  marker with a diagnosis of   \u2018Gender Dysphoria in Adults  (Code F640)\u2019  Nearly 45 years ago, the American Psychiatric Association (APA) formalized clinical assessment of trans individuals seeking gender-affirming care in their third edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-III-R; APA, 1987;  Drescher, 2010). The DSM-III, first published in 1980 and revised in 1987, was the first edition of the manual to include a diagnostic category related to trans clients, transsexualism. Scholars (Drescher, 2010; Stryker, 2017) credit Benjamin (1954) with popularizing the term transsexual in North American medical literature. Benjamin, an endocrinologist and sexologist, first articulated an approach to assessing trans patients in North America in the 1950s and 1960s. Benjamin\u2019s language and assessment approach influenced the diagnostic category that the APA created in DSM-III in the 1980s (Velocci, 2021). The fourth edition of the DSM included transsexualism as a renamed category: gender identity disorder. Decades later, Stryker (2017) called the APA\u2019s \u201cformal depathologization of transgender identity\u2026 a momentous milestone for trans people\u201d (p. 195). Stryker refers to the clinical language change marked by the fifth edition of DSM (DSM-5; APA, 2013), which revised the name and criteria for the diagnostic category again, from gender identity disorder to gender dysphoria. This change distinguishes between the client\u2019s identity, which is not a disorder, and the clinically relevant symptoms of dysphoria, which could require therapeutic, social, legal, or medical intervention.    12 The APA (2013b) released a statement to explain the change, which acknowledges that diagnostic categories influence \u201chow people see themselves and how we see each other \u2026 [and] these terms can also have a stigmatizing effect\u201d (p. 1). The statement goes on: \u201cPart of removing stigma is about choosing the right words\u201d (p. 2); however, changing language does not repair relationships with previously stigmatized trans clients and the trans communities they belong to. Nor does \u2018choosing the right words\u2019 take responsibility for harm inflicted by the clinician\u2019s previous language and conceptualizations. Furthermore, the general phrasing of \u2018how people see themselves \u2026 [and] each other\u2019 fails to acknowledge that clinicians are people too, who may employ biased language intentionally or unintentionally. APA\u2019s statement falls short of apologizing for its historical involvement in stigmatizing trans lives. As far as I am aware, no psychiatric or psychology associations in North America have offered an official apology for their historic discrimination of trans individuals and communities.  The cultural and historical relativism of the diagnostic category now called gender dysphoria, as well as the category\u2019s temporariness and ephemerality, are apparent in its repeatedly changing name, which transformed alongside the changing cultural awareness and acceptance of trans individuals in North America (Stryker, 2017). The APA\u2019s (2013b) statement recognizes that some were pushing for removing the category from the DSM altogether. However, medical insurance often only covers gender-affirming care if there is a diagnosis, and an assessment process that results in a diagnosis is a part of gatekeeping systems which trans clients must navigate across jurisdictions in North America and many parts of the world (Serano, 2016). The legislative differences across regions related to trans care points to the politicalness of these assessment practices. For example, as of 2022, those living in British Columbia do not need any assessment to change their gender marker on their foundational identity documents   13 (Service BC, 2022), but people in other provinces, such as Prince Edward Island, do need an assessment (Department of Justice and Public Safety, 2019). Overall, the medical model, focusing on identifying symptoms requiring intervention (Wampold & Imel, 2015), has influenced trans care assessment, leaving little room for trans perspectives (Stryker & Currah, 2014). Assessment is only one of the services a counselling psychologist may provide to a trans client (Budge, 2015), and recently, counselling psychologists have contributed studies focused on affirming trans psychotherapy (Chang & Singh, 2016; Matsuno, 2019). However, the perspectives of trans, nonbinary, and gender nonconforming communities are often absent from our research literature (Hyde et al., 2019; Riggs et al., 2019) and clinical training (Hayward & Treharne, 2021). This absence has not gone unnoticed by trans studies scholars. Stryker and Currah (2014) define the entire discipline of trans studies in opposition \u201cto the medico-juridical and psychotherapeutic frameworks \u2026 [and] previously existing research agendas that facilitate the framing of transgender phenomena as appropriate targets of medical, legal, and psychotherapeutic intervention\u201d (p. 4). In other words, in opposition \u2013 at least in part \u2013 to counselling psychology\u2019s research literature and clinical assumptions. Stryker and Currah state that trans studies center \u201cpoststructuralist and postmodernist epistemologies\u2026 [and] the lives of people interpellated as being transgender\u201d (p. 4), making a distinction between studies in which trans individuals are participants, and a research team interprets and distills their perspectives, and studies in which trans people themselves are creating the scholarship. 1.2.2 Qualitative Research in Counselling Psychology Counselling psychologists have championed diverse qualitative methodologies in their contributions to the broader psychology discipline\u2019s literature. While psychology, in general, has   14 \u201cbeen criticized for predominantly following the hypotheticodeductive method [emphasis added]\u201d (Sinacore et al., 2011, p. 283), within Canadian counselling psychology, \u201ca range of qualitative approaches and critical perspectives is apparent\u201d (p. 283), including \u201cdescriptive and interpretive methods used to study individuals (e.g., narrative, phenomenology, feminist autobiography) and social processes (e.g., grounded theory, action theory)\u201d (p. 283). However, RbT and other ABR approaches are often absent in counselling psychology research. This is the case despite the presence of theatre as a research methodology in education and other health disciplines for more than 25 years (Colantonio et al., 2008; Gray et al., 2000; Rossiter et al., 2008; Salda\u00f1a, 1998, 1999, 2008). Susan L. Morrow\u2019s (2005) writing on qualitative research in counselling psychology suggests one possible reason for this:  I continue to wrestle with my own latent postpositivist tendencies as well as my desire for credibility in my profession, at the same time yearning to throw caution to the winds and explore new venues with such outrageous names as \u2018ethnographic fiction.\u2019 (p. 250)  Morrow could have just as easily referenced RbT instead of ethnographic fiction. However, articulating and exploring empirical ABR approaches does not mean throwing caution to the wind regarding research ethics or trustworthiness, as I explore in Chapter 3. Moreover, by drawing on RbT, counselling psychologists can continue expanding collaborative methodological possibilities that centre forms of knowledge and perspectives previously excluded from the discipline\u2019s literature (Baer et al., 2019). Next, I offer an introduction to counselling psychology assessment and research with trans communities.   15 1.3 RbT as an Alternative to Traditional Qualitative Approaches in Counselling Psychology I am a trained theatre artist. In relation to creating RbT, I refer to practitioners and artist-scholars interchangeably. I define my own practice as that of an artist-scholar (Bickel, 2023; Weigel-Doughty, 2002), where artistry and scholarship are united. Although RbT can benefit from theatre artist involvement (Belliveau & Lea, 2016; Salda\u00f1a, 2018; Shigematsu et al., 2021), artistic backgrounds or access to theatre artists are not required for counselling psychology researchers undertaking RbT. However, like skill development in any qualitative research approach (Clarke & Braun, 2013), developing proficiency in bringing theatre-as-research into your scholarly work takes committed practice. A review of the numerous RbT projects I cite in this dissertation can provide inspiration and ideas for how to begin merging theatre and research in your work.  According to McNiff (2017), \u201cthe commitment to spanning art and psychology generates inevitable creative tension, especially when one maintains a primary identity as an artist\u201d (p. 23). ABR traditions such as RbT move beyond traditional qualitative approaches to interweave art and scholarship (Belliveau, Cox, et al., 2020; Belliveau & Lea, 2016; Lea et al., 2011; Shigematsu et al., 2021; Shigematsu et al., 2022), offering theatre artist-scholars the opportunity to explore new epistemological and axiological considerations; as well as unique possibilities for collaborative inquiry and pedagogy (Irwin et al., 2018). In RbT, theatre creation is the research process: for example, data is generated and analyzed through script writing; or theatre audiences may participate in knowledge exchange events featuring dramatizations of study results (Belliveau & Lea, 2016; Shigematsu et al., 2022).   16 For McNiff (2018), the tension between art and research is generative in its boundary crossing: \u201cABR helps to dissolve artificial disciplinary boundaries and further concentration on ways of knowing and the creation of methods of inquiry based on an effort to design the best approach to addressing particular questions and issues\u201d (p. 24). RbT, as an embodied ABR methodology, offers possibilities for a transdisciplinary exploration that creates a new space and movement between trans studies and counselling psychology. RbT enables trans artist-scholars to centre trans knowledge in theatre creation and performance, answering back to the centuries of sexualization, fetishization, criminalization, and othering in media, academic, medical, and therapeutic spaces (Stryker, 2017), dwelling in theatre\u2019s live narrative form to express calls towards trans joy (Beischel et al., 2022), which for me, in my artistic practice, may be indistinguishable from trans rage (Stryker, 1994). Furthermore, research-based plays allow \u201copenings through which audience members [can] co-construct understandings\u201d (Lea et al., 2011, p. 11), creating a dialogic space between trans researchers, clinicians, artists, and trans community members.  This collaborative dialogic space speaks to contemporary understandings of transdisciplinary research (Hughes, 2022), which explore practices inherited from lineages of transfeminist scholars, researchers, artists, and activists. Transdisciplinary researchers contest common assumptions about what academically sanctioned data looks like, who can generate it and what happens next once the data is generated (Pascal, 2011). Trans-, as a prefix to disciplinary, suggests movement. Collaborators from various specializations come together to expand beyond what already exists: a new space of knowledge outside the boundaries of any of the disciplines involved (Hughes, 2022; Woodbridge, 2015).    17 1.4 Trans and Queer Theatre: Creating Transformation As mentioned above, I wrote my research-based play in dialogue with other ABR and artistic work from the theatre discipline. I now turn to an introduction of trans theatre.  Tillis (2020) describes theatre as \u201can intentional artistic exchange between performers and audiences\u201d (p. 15). Alongside the work of actors, directors, and other theatre artists and technicians, this broad description encompasses:  Performances of \u2018pure\u2019 music (e.g., street-corner busking and orchestral performances), \u2018pure\u2019 dance (e.g., pole dancing and some modern dance), circus and variety acts (e.g., jugglers and magicians), athletic displays (e.g., martial arts demonstrations), and at least some ritual (e.g., the Catholic Mass). (p. 16)  Such an inclusive definition allows us to consider how theatre artists who have faced systematic discrimination, such as trans and queer artists, create theatre in and beyond recognized theatre venues and systems. Furthermore, \u201cin our twenty-first-century cultural moment\u201d (Steinbock, 2019, p. 26) in North America, only \u201ccertain trans characters are inundating\u201d popular media (p. 26). We must consider where artists who continue to face exclusion from this media due to racism, ableism, classism, and transnormativity are producing their work and strive to witness these offerings while actively seeking to make traditional theatre systems more equitable.   1.4.1 Queer Theatre In the twentieth century, queer theatre developed partially in reaction to the stereotypical and prejudicial portrayal of queerness in mainstream theatre (Campbell & Farrier, 2015). According to Campbell and Farrier (2015), \u201cwhat makes \u2026 [theatre] queer is complex and contingent, reliant on the interrelationship between makers, venues, processes and audiences\u201d (p. 2), and underground queer theatre was produced in a wide variety of styles, merging numerous   18 performance traditions and genres. In the 1980s and 90s, nuanced portraits of 2SLGTBQIA2+ communities staged by queer theatre artists caught the attention of mainstream theatre in North America. Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes, by the playwright Tony Kushner (1995), is viewed by some scholars as a turning point for queer theatre in terms of mainstream acceptance (Campbell & Farrier, 2015). Since its premiere in 1991, the script has won a Pulitzer Prize, and theatre companies have produced it worldwide. In Canada, similar mainstream acceptance of queer theatre can be seen in the productions of plays by Michel Tremblay (1998), Tomson Highway (1989), and Daniel MacIvor (2006). Canadian theatre companies have also championed queer work as part of their mission, for example, Buddies in Bad Times, founded in Toronto in 1979 (Vipond, n.d.). Importantly, these turning points focused on accepting specific queer stories and particular queer identities, often deemed acceptable based on other privileged identities of the artists involved or the characters depicted in these plays (Campbell & Farrier, 2015). Theatre artists and scholars continue to call for a \u201cshifting the center\u201d (Gunn, 2023, p. 211) of queer theatre to be more inclusive of narratives of queer women and people of colour. Furthermore, artists and scholars have also questioned whether acceptance on mainstream stages can lead to anything but the homogenization of queer narratives (Campbell & Farrier, 2015).  1.4.2 Trans Theatre If certain aspects of queer theatre achieved mainstream acceptance by the late 1990s, a similar turning point in the history of trans theatre has yet to occur. Trans, nonbinary, and gender nonconforming playwrights remain underproduced in Canada (Drake, 2016). As suggested by the lists of published plays by trans authors in Appendix A, it is still possible to read all the plays   19 published in English by publicly out trans playwrights because there are relatively few. Publishing aside, trans theatre is a vibrant aesthetic tradition which informs my work.  Keyes et al. (2021) suggest that \u201cdefining or putting strict borders around \u2018trans theatre\u2019\u2026 might not even be a useful project to undertake\u201d (p. 1). I am also not interested in gatekeeping trans theatre or further isolating trans artists from mainstream theatre through siloing. However, mainstream theatre offers numerous examples of scripts which include trans characters that centre a cisgender assumptions (Keyes et al., 2021): examples of such work include Hosanna (Tremblay, 1991), I Am My Own Wife (Wright, 2005), Rent (Larson, 1997), and Hedwig and the Angry Inch (Trask, 2000). These playscripts are examples of the cis gaze, which centers cisgender assumptions and anxieties regarding trans lives, portraying characters who experience physical pain, mental health symptoms, trauma, or premature death and, in general, reinforcing a pathologizing of transness (Keyes et al., 2021).  As mentioned in Section 1.1, I do not want to reify a cis\/trans binary when discussing a cis gaze. Such a binary \u201calign[s] cis- with the cultural politics of normativity \u2026 and trans- with notions of transgression\u201d (Stryker, 2017, p. 13). Cis is not a synonym for normativity, and transnormativity is not an oxymoron. Assumptions of normativity exist across all genders, and engaging with these assumptions reflexively can encourage us to consider limiting beliefs we may hold about ourselves and others. Considering trans theatre, it is worthwhile to consider how a cis gaze, which lacks embodied knowledge of trans experience, interpolates trans narratives through cis values and cis embodied experiences, which may include a shock and preoccupation with medical gender affirmation procedures or whether a trans person \u2018passes\u2019 as cisgender. As Bey (2021) writes of Black trans narratives on stage, \u201ctrans lives in all their nuances and complexity, all their vicissitudes, are still often eclipsed by popular mythologies of extravagant   20 balls and surgeries\u201d (p. 389). Trans theatre allows us to encounter \u201cthe complexity of trans\u201d (p. 389) lives, plural, rather than a single \u201ctransnormative depiction\u201d (p. 389).  Providing alternatives by centring a trans gaze requires proposing specific commitments to trans theatre as an area of specialized artistic creation and knowledge. Writing at the intersection of cinema and science, Steinbock (2019) challenges us to develop \u201can appreciation for how trans subjects narrate and represent their lives and thereby mold the available conceptual models of gendered embodiment\u201d (p. 27).  Keyes et al. (2021) drew on three metrics when creating their anthology of trans plays: trans authorship, central trans character(s), and scripts that offer \u201cexperiences of trans humanity that move beyond a central focus on surgeries and death\u201d (p. 1). Keyes et al. also describe \u201ca preoccupation with temporality as a complex experience through which trans lives must be investigated and embodied\u201d (p. 2) as a feature of trans theatre. I consider these and other possible attributes of trans theatre as part of Chapter 2, in a review of plays by trans authors. In the next section, I delve into trans theatre and RbT in partnership.  1.5 Transformations: Trans-informed RbT Playwriting  Several trans scholars have critically engaged with theatre and performance to support theory-building and new positionalities in trans studies. In the early 1990s, Stryker (1994) published a \u201ctextual adaptation\u201d (p. 237) of a performative retelling of Frankenstein (Shelley, 2012 [1818]), and several decades later, Chu (2019) investigates gender and trans identity using Valerie Solana\u2019s play Up Your Ass as a starting point. Bornstein\u2019s (2016) memoir\/manifesto Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women, and the Rest of Us includes her play Hidden, which was first performed in 1989. The work of these scholars indicates that trans studies, as a discipline,   21 welcomes the methodological possibilities present in theatre-as-research and provides a foundation for trans-informed RbT.  In addition, working in transdisciplinary spaces resonates with RbT, as described in this selection from a poetic monologue by George Belliveau (Cook et al., 2020):   Research-based Theatre opens up possibilities  In the intersection of research and theatre new meanings emerge   New ways of understanding unfold. (p. 57) My dissertation research expands artist-scholar options by considering a trans-informed approach to RbT playwriting. If I write a play in a hybrid space between counselling psychology, trans studies, and theatre, how might playwriting practices serve empirical research (Shigematsu et al., 2021)? How might practices borrowed from the drama classroom (Fels & Belliveau, 2007), rehearsal hall (Lea, 2012), or workshop floor (Belliveau & Sinclair, 2018) support us? And what practices specifically belong to transdisciplinary RbT creation when informed by a trans ethic of care (Malatino, 2020) and trans ways of knowing? What might trans as RbT creation look like?  Alongside my auto-narratives (Adams et al., 2022; Poulos, 2021) of coming out and transitioning gender expressions while a counselling psychology graduate student, the script includes narratives from my grandmother and mother about their experiences in the academy and their transitions to and from graduate studies in the 1940s and 1970s. My grandmother completed a Ph.D. in biochemistry in the midwestern United States in the late 1940s. Almost thirty years later, my mother achieved a Ph.D. in Pharmacology at a University in Western Canada. Their narratives offer relational and intergenerational perspectives that inform my dissertation\u2019s research-based play, allowing me to draw resonances across generations of women   22 in my family and various life transitions. Moving beyond narratives of finite change, which mask \u201cthe complex temporalities of [gender] transition\u201d (p. 646), as Malatino (2019) writes, my research project offers an invitation to consider how assumptions of linearity and stability fail to represent the messiness of numerous kinds of transitions and identities in our contemporary personal (Malatino, 2020) and professional lives (Butterfield et al., 2010).  1.6 Is This Research Transing Counselling Psychology Scholarship? Artists and educators who are queering performance (Dolan, 2005) or queering theatre pedagogies (Campbell, 2020) draw on queer theory scholarship and, in their work on stage and in the drama studio, converse with \u201cthe public sphere from outside its enforced norms, and through the critical stories they tell, help to dislodge its assumptions\u201d (Dolan et al., 2005, p. 60-61). Halberstam (2019) describes a queer methodology as:  A scavenger methodology that uses different methods to collect and produce information on subjects who have been deliberately or accidentally excluded from traditional studies of human behavior. The queer methodology attempts to combine methods that are often cast as being at odds with each other, and it refuses the academic compulsion towards disciplinary coherence. (p. 13) In this dissertation, I am inspired by Halberstam\u2019s description of a scavenger methodology and Jones and Harris\u2019s (2018) Queering Autoethnography. Jones and Harris write that \u201cas a method of intervention in autoethnography, queering practices \u2026 [disrupts] by creating dissonance around what passes as \u2018normal\u2019 and \u2018normative,\u2019 appropriating and assembling languages, texts, and beliefs, and ways of living and loving in radical and liberating ways\u201d (p. 4). In their Academic Liner Notes to the ABR project Queer Sonic Cultures, Truman and Shannon (2018) write of activating \u201cqueer as both a noun and a verb in [their] scholarship\u201d (p. 60). Likewise, I   23 activate trans as a noun and verb. However, Chu and Drager (2019) would argue against the word \u2018transing\u2019 RbT, or any scholarly practice, as transing and queering may appear synonymous, failing to differentiate between trans and queer ways of knowing.  I stand with past, present, and future artist-scholars who draw on trans as broadly encompassing actions, practices, and ways of being apart from the dominant; and referring to ways of knowing championed by gender diverse communities in particular (Truman & Shannon, 2018). I follow trans scholars who have proposed trans in and of itself as a methodology (Raun, 2014; Stryker et al., 2008; Weil, 2017). Weil (2017) writes: The critical potential of trans* theorizing exceeds the milieu in which it is often articulated... Within trans* studies, this discussion has come to revolve around the use of the asterisk to visually indicate the potential for prefixing trans to any number of suffixes, including but not limited to gender, and to signal the possibility of expansive capacities harbored within existing assemblages of terms and concepts. (p. 12) 1.7 Research Questions My study addresses the following research questions: (1) What methodological possibilities emerge when RbT is applied within counselling psychology to explore auto-narratives of transitioning in graduate school? How can RbT approaches that centre trans ways of knowing contribute to centring trans voices in counselling psychology? (2) What methodological possibilities emerge from a trans-informed approach to RbT creation?   24 1.8 Research Contribution Dolan (2005) describes the theatre as \u201ca place where people come together, embodied and passionate, to share experiences of meaning-making and imagination that can describe or capture fleeting intimations of a better world\u201d (p. 3). Considering the methodological possibilities suggested when I utilize RbT within counselling psychology allows my research to contribute to the diverse methodological options within counselling psychology\u2019s tradition of presenting alternatives to the hypotheticodeductive model.  While increasing numbers of trans performers and artists are becoming featured in popular media (Stryker, 2017), there remains a dearth of narratives by and for trans communities. Furthermore, although academic disciplines, such as counselling psychology, are working to center trans voices in their research literature, research by and for trans communities needs much more support. Trans artists and researchers who explore artistic scholarship offer a vital space to tell trans stories. In particular, sharing stories based on memoirs and autobiography answers back to continued othering and pathologizing with trans joy (Beischel et al., 2022), trans rage (Stryker, 1994), community building (Malatino, 2020), and liberation (Singh, 2016). The RbT playwriting process I share here aims to contribute to arts-based scholarship created by trans, nonbinary, and gender-nonconforming scholars and artists. There are countless ways to cross, live between, or move beyond the gender binary. I offer my playscript and dissertation as one possibility among many trans experiences. This dissertation and its narratives explore the \u201clocal manifestations\u201d (Campbell & Farrier, 2015, p. 27) of my transness. I work in theatre and counselling psychology, areas where I can publicly identify as trans, and provincial and federal human rights codes specifically include protections for transgender community members like me. As a professional playwright, I create theatre in an urban centre in Canada as   25 part of an arts community in which local companies have programmed trans narratives into mainstage seasons in recent years. Many trans artists writing and performing theatre face multiple burdens of cisgenderism, racism, ableism, and classism, among other barriers (Clifford, 2019; Leal, 2021). Just as my research content is not generalizable, any trans-informed RbT practices described in this dissertation occur in a specific geographical and academic context and may not be transferable, applicable, or appropriate in others. Again, I am proposing one local manifestation of a trans-informed RbT practice, and I hope my dissertation research is joined by many more.  In the next chapter, I review research literature from counselling psychology, education, and health disciplines to define RbT further and consider how artist-scholars have utilized it in various fields, while considering how RbT is connected to traditions of narrative inquiry (NI) in counselling psychology. Chapter 2 also includes my review of art and scholarship by trans theatre artists. Finally, this second chapter considers research related to trans graduate students and adult trans individuals\u2019 relationships with their family of origin, central topics of my playscript.  In Chapter 3, I describe my methodology for writing the playscript, as well as my approach for creating the critical commentary that accompanies the playscript. Chapter 4 is the latest draft of my playscript. A critical, self-reflexive commentary of the playscript comprises Chapter 5. In Chapter 6, I offer methodological possibilities for counselling psychologists who want to engage with RbT and contribute to developing RbT as a research methodology by providing recommendations for trans-informed RbT.      26 Chapter 2: Literature Review As we weather the backlash that threatens to erase our existence, we look towards our artists. -Morgan M. Page, Forward, NONE OF US IS YET A ROBOT:  Five Performances on Gender Identity and the Politics of Transition   Theatre is a form of storytelling, and as Bochner and Herrmann (2020) write, \u201cStories give meaning to our lives. They become our equipment for living\u201d (p. 286). The stories we tell about ourselves and the stories we don\u2019t tell or only tell silently, the stories we cannot bring ourselves to speak for fear of how their speaking might change us or our self-expressions or how others react to and interpret our self-expressions. Storytelling is always an exchange, emerging in a hyperlocal context and told with language and practices that may have been created this year on social media, a few decades ago in a blog, or centuries past, all presuming a certain shared knowledge (Bochner & Herrmann, 2020; Bruner, 1990). Theatre is also public, and theatre performance occurs in community; the art form depends on embodied, live, narrative sharing, and just as embodied, just as live audience witnessing. My research considers how RbT can provide dramatized \u2018equipment for living\u2019 and new methodological possibilities for counselling psychologists, and what a trans-informed RbT practice may look like.  RbT is an ABR approach (Leavy & Chilton, 2020; McNiff, 2011). Education scholars Sinner et al. (2006) state that ABR \u201cdraws from the creative arts to inform and shape social science research in interdisciplinary ways, thus redefining methodological vehicles\u201d (p. 1226) in various disciplines. Since the 1970s, \u201ccreative researchers forged synergistic blends of art and science\u201d (Leavy & Chilton, 2020, p. 604), and these combinations have included embodied performing art practices, such as dance (Blumenfeld-Jones, 1995), music (Ledger & Edwards,   27 2011), poetry (Galvin & Prendergast, 2016), and theatre (Salda\u00f1a, 1999). According to Leavy and Chilton (2020): With this wave of methodological development came multiple terms for these [arts-based] practices. Variations in focus and nomenclature arose \u2026 and this has led to confusion about the differences between art \u2026 as a means to produce data, as a means to analyze data, as a means to represent data, and\/or multiple varieties and combinations of these. (p. 604-605) My scholarship is indebted to a\/r\/tography, an ABR methodology, which takes place in the meeting spaces between art, research, and teaching, centring what, typically, \u201cis left out of sight, what is hidden from sight\u201d (Irwin, 2003, p. 70). The typographical presence of two obliques in a\/r\/tography calls attention to the relationships between art, research, and teaching, broadly defined to include formal and informal practice-based explorations (Triggs et al., 2014). Inquiry, then, is not a synonym for research in a\/r\/tography but rather understood as a fluid space where artists, researchers, and teachers are in continually evolving relation to one another. The typographic idiosyncrasies also invite stepping outside dominant academic conventions (Leggo, 2012).  In my dissertation, I am utilizing RbT to generate, analyze, and represent data by writing a play to consider the methodological possibilities that emerge when RbT is applied within counselling psychology to explore auto-narratives of transitioning in graduate school. Furthermore, I am investigating processes in which RbT can lift and bring forward trans voices in counselling psychology, and vice-versa, routes through which trans ways of knowing can enrich RbT.    28 As my process is focused on research-based playwriting, it is tied to narrative traditions in qualitative approaches that are likely familiar to counselling psychologists (Arvay, 2003; Creswell et al., 2007). I first consider these narrative traditions in my literature review, to set the stage for exploring the unique methodological possibilities that RbT offers in the later chapters of this dissertation. Additionally, my dissertation positions auto- or self-writing as a rich component of RbT for counselling psychology researchers, and I review recent literature on autoethnography by counselling psychologists. I then engage with literature related to RbT in counselling psychology and examples of trans theatre, reflecting on the specific aesthetic features explored by trans artists. Finally, to provide context for the topic of my research-based play and situate this methodological approach, I review studies related to trans graduate students in counselling psychology, as well as scholarship related to trans adults\u2019 relationships with their families of origin.  2.1 Narrative Turn Lea (2016) has pointed to connections between RbT and narrative traditions. Scholarship relating to Narrative Inquiry (NI) in counselling psychology can provide a bridge to theatre-as-research. Bochner and Herrmann (2020) remind us that before the 1980s, narrative had yet to enter the discipline of psychology\u2019s gates. The authors write, \u201cthe term narrative had no recognizable status in psychology either as a methodological orientation or as a topic of research\u201d (p. 288). This is similar to where RbT finds itself today in relation to psychology\u2019s literature. But before the end of the twentieth century, a narrative turn was present in psychology, driven by \u201cthe desire for a more human and justice-focused social science and the rejection of the correspondence theory of truth\u201d (Bochner & Herrmann, 2020, p. 289). These are the same values   29 that drove a greater openness toward qualitative research approaches more broadly in psychology (Polkinghorne, 2007).  Polkinghorne (1988), an early advocate of narrative qualitative research in psychology, reminds us that narrative is active. Polkinghorne (2015) goes so far as to consider narrating intrinsic to human goal-directed behaviour and cognitive schemas observable in human development as early as infancy. Unfortunately, this goal-directed, linear progression view of narrative can limit the diversity of possible story structures to conform to Eurocentric biases and narrative expressions traced back to Aristotle (trans. 1967). Nonetheless, Polkinghorne\u2019s (2015) thesis that narratives are universal human expression and also comprehensible only through hyper-local language and culturally-specific cognitive schemas is a foundational assumption of NI rooted in a social constructionism paradigm (Burr, 2003). Although in opposition to essentializing views of a self, social constructionism does not do away with the concept of self. Instead, selves are viewed as culturally, historically, and socially constructed through narratives (Burr, 2003). 2.2 Research on Narrative Conceptualizations of Identity  Exploring narrative conceptualizations of identity in counselling psychology can broaden standard definitions of gender identity and gender expression while situating life stories research, individuals\u2019 personal narrative processing, and autobiographical reasoning in dialogue with normative cultural narratives related to trans lives and experiences. I define and explore these concepts below.  In the mid-1980s, while qualitative researchers were taking a narrative turn, McAdams (2020) proposed a narrative conceptualization of individual identity, which describes \u201cidentity as an internalized and evolving narrative which provides a person\u2019s life with a sense of meaning,   30 coherence, and temporal continuity\u201d (p. 2650). The narrative conceptualization of identity emphasizes (1) narrative processing, channelling thoughts into \u201cstoried accounts of past events that range from brief anecdotes to fully developed autobiographies\u201d (Singer & Bluck, 2001, p. 92), (2) autobiographical reasoning, or active, goal-based interpretation of autobiographical memories (Singer & Bluck, 2001), and (3) archetypical narratives, such as myths, for their influence on an individual\u2019s narrative identity (McAdams, 2020). McAdams (2020) suggests that common, reoccurring narrative arcs have become touchstones of narrative identity in the Global North, including redemption, or reframing of a negative outcome into one with positive implications for self-development or relationship with others (McAdams & McLean, 2013).    There is limited counselling psychology literature on narrative identity in adult transgender women in graduate school. Hammack and Cohler (2009), working from McAdam\u2019s narrative identity conceptualization, emphasize the importance of considering wider cultural norms and queer culture in the narrative identity development of queer individuals, particularly the importance of master narratives and narrative engagement. McLean et al. (2017) define master narratives as \u201cculturally shared stories that provide guidance for how to belong to, and be a good member of, a given culture; they are useful frameworks that guide personal story construction\u201d (p. 94). Narrative engagement, according to Hammack and Cohler (2009), ensures we do not view narrative identity as a solely internal process but an interactive and contextual one: \u201cAs individuals navigate the discursive waters of a given social ecology, as they come to recognize the meaning of the social categories of identity available to them in a given cultural context, they must make decisions (conscious or otherwise)\u201d (p. 13). Researchers have considered master narratives and narrative engagement among gender identity development in cis college students (McLean et al., 2017), concluding that their participants negotiated master   31 narratives on gender privately and may have lacked opportunities to challenge the assumptions of these narratives. The authors recommend viewing gender identity \u201cin a much broader setting that allows an understanding of the processes by which individuals learn about, challenge, and accept notions of gender into their identities, particularly as these identities relate to power structures in society\u201d (p. 102). Building on this perspective, a broader view of gender expression is related to the process by which individuals learn how to express a particular gender in any given cultural context and challenge how others interpret specific aspects of their expression.  Master narratives associated with transgender identities may be sensationalized and pathologized, assuming an essentialized gendered self that is achievable only through affirmation granted by medico-juridical and psychotherapeutic institutions (Amin, 2014; Miss\u00e9, 2022). Master narratives may mobilize \u201c\u2018nature\u2019 on behalf of oppression\u201d (Barad, 2015, p. 413) positioning transness as less than natural, ignoring all the ways nature is \u201cforever transitioning and transforming itself\u201d (p. 403). Notably, Susan Stryker (1994) declares, \u201cthe transsexual body is an unnatural body\u201d (p. 238), self-determined and self-manifested. Stryker does so to affirm the sameness of all bodies: all of us are self-determined corporal composites, whether our years of self-manifestations are through adornments, dental care, laser hair removal or surgeries.  Other master narratives promote the \u2018born this way\u2019 and \u2018the wrong body\u2019 archetypes (Miss\u00e9, 2022). These narratives are prominent in psychology\u2019s historical diagnosis of trans lives. The narratives hold that trans individuals were born in the wrong body, and the severity of the resulting dysphoria determines which gender-affirming treatment options are accessible. The wrong body narrative resonates with some trans individuals, and gender-affirming care that ameliorates dysphoria is life-saving (Austin et al., 2022). The issue here is that dysphoria becomes a criterion for access to care, and self-determination, choice, or a movement towards   32 even greater gender affirmation in the absence of dysphoria may not meet the requirements for access (Miss\u00e9, 2022).  In their qualitative investigation of the narrative identities of two trans women, VanOra and Ouellette (2009) state that rather than being \u201cinvolved in the quest for a single kind of self, one having to do with gender, they are actually engaged in creating many different kinds of selves\u201d (p. 109). Katz-Wise and Budge (2015) propose an interplay between cognitive and interpersonal processes in mid-life transition narratives of trans women, which included \u201cfeeling like an outsider\u201d or the \u201cself as not aligning with socially prescribed norms\u201d (p. 161). The outsider narrative suggests an exchange between master narratives on cisgender normativity and the individual narrative identity of the trans women participants. The authors\u2019 research suggests this outsider narrative shifted over the participants\u2019 transitions, not in relation to medico-juridical and psychotherapeutic treatment, but rather due to continued intrapersonal and interpersonal processes.   Importantly, master narratives on cisnormativity differently impact nonbinary individuals. As Barsigian et al. (2020) point out, \u201cthere is no way to \u2018pass\u2019 as a genderqueer person because society does not [often] recognize the existence of genders other than woman or man.\u201d In other words, master narratives for nonbinary and gender nonconforming identities do not exist within cisnormative cultural contexts.  2.3 Autoethnographic Turn  I now consider autoethnography in the counselling psychology literature, as I position RbT\u2019s potential to support embodied, artistic expressions of researcher autobiography as a significant opportunity for counselling psychology artist-scholars.     33 Similar to Polkinghorne, Bruner (1987) urged psychology scholars to consider auto-narrating and explore \u201cwhat we do when we construct ourselves autobiographically\u201d (p. 12). Equally important from a social constructionism perspective, what roles do others play in self-construction through narrative? Bruner (1990) sums up this view with the metaphor of a net: the wider circle of people \u2026 in whom [we confide] might also be complicit in our narratives and self-constructions. Might not the complicit circle, then, be something like a \u201cdistributed Self\u201d, much as [our] notes and looking-up procedures become part of one\u2019s distributed knowledge. And just as knowledge thereby gets caught in the net of culture, so too Self becomes enmeshed in the net of others. (p. 114) Bruner\u2019s (1991) image of the self being entangled in a net of others takes a dark undertone, as Bruner goes on to consider how \u201c\u2018enforced\u2019 conceptions of Self might be used to establish political or hegemonic control by one group over another\u201d (p. 114), suggesting implications for how narratives that align with a gender dysphoria diagnosis may legitimatize some trans life-stories at the expense of others. Riessman (2008) traces the narrative turn in qualativate research partly to the rifeness of obligations to narrate autobiographically in dominant cultural spaces and institutions in the Global North in the twentieth century. Zussman (2000) termed these obligations autobiographical occasions:  those moments\u2014including job, credit and school applications, confessions both religious and criminal, reunions of various sorts, diary writing, the display of photo albums, and therapies of various sorts\u2014at which [we] are encouraged and, at times, required to provide accounts of [our]selves. These are the moments at which narrative and social structure meet. (p. 5)   34 Zussman goes on to emphasize that these moments are not entirely controlled by social structures nor by the utterer of the autobiographical. Occasions draw attention to the fact that although we may have various opportunities to engage in autobiographic storytelling over a lifetime, this type of storytelling is still removed from our everyday. Furthermore, Zussman\u2019s (2000) language highlights the importance of social interactions in how we may narrate autobiographical transitions anew across multiple contexts: \u201cSociety\u201d does not mandate autobiographical narratives but probation officers do and so, too, do therapists, priests, social workers, children, parents, and teachers, each for different purposes and each in different forms. (p. 7) Beginning in the 1980s, scholars trained in ethnographic approaches began exploring \u201cconfessional and impressionist textual forms\u201d (Poulos, 2021, p. 8). Auto-narratives became present in a new way as part of academic research with the emergence of autoethnography. Autoethnography as a methodology revolves on the researcher writing personal accounts, or in collective\/collaborative autoethnography, several researchers (Poulos, 2021). In autoethnography, the personal stories are only the first step. The researcher draws on their autobiographical narratives to \u201cprovide contextualized \u2026 accounts\u201d (R\u00e5bu et al., 2021, p. 110) that are theoretically significant to the researcher\u2019s cultural context, communities, or identities.  Autoethnography is defined as \u201cthe \u2018auto\u2019, or self; the \u2018ethno\u2019, or culture; and the \u2018graphy\u2019, or representation\/writing\/story\u201d (Adams et al, 2022a, p. 3): self-culture-writing.   In both RbT and autoethnography, the writing\/creating process and the eventual product are intertwined rather than separate. Many narrative inquiry studies \u201cdo not produce analyses in a storied form\u201d (Bochner & Herrmann, 2020, p. 301), depending instead on more traditional qualitative analysis methods such as thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006). However,   35 autoethnography lends itself to being analyzed narratively, that is, through the tools of a writer (Poulos, 2021). Writing and editing narratives become a means for data generation and analysis in autoethnographic work. Autoethnography research is diverse, and the methodology is non-prescriptive in terms of the form personal narratives take and how researchers analyze and share these narratives. For example, performance autoethnography explores personal narratives and various meanings of performance and performativity. Performance autoethnography brings together theorists in communication studies, performance studies, autoethnography, and theatre and takes the form of numerous types of performance text, including poetry and plays, and performances beyond text-based work (Denzin, 2018).  Autoethnodrama is more specific than performance autoethnography in that it prescribes that an auto-narrative will be presented as a play or dramatic work (Salda\u00f1a, 2011). Salda\u00f1a (2018) defines autoethnodrama as \u201can autobiographical cultural story in play script format intended for performance\u201d (p. 196). Salda\u00f1a differentiates autoethnodrama from autoethnography by way of intent, writing \u201cautoethnodramatic monologues are somewhat comparable to the development of autoethnographic texts, but the intent is to stage and perform the work rather than simply write or read aloud one\u2019s personal story\u201d (Salda\u00f1a, 2018, p. 186). But Salda\u00f1a\u2019s words may glide over aspects of the distinction that staging a dramatic work creates, such as the interpretation of multiple artists (designers, directors, dramaturge). Even a one-person show is never the result of a single writer\/performer. All autoethnodrama is, to a certain extent, a kind of collective autoethnography.  Wright (2018) highlights that auto-writing can have therapeutic and research purposes in the counselling psychology discipline. Wright states that although \u201cautoethnography is a useful   36 part of the repertoire of social science research \u2026 [it] is not for the fainthearted\u201d (p. 296). Wright explains that much \u201cof my writing goes into cupboards \u2026 a private outpouring and not for anyone else\u2019s eyes. Do the unique and emotionally powerful insights of autoethnographic accounts make it worth the anguish of risking publication? Sometimes\u201d (p. 296).  2.3.1 Autoethnography in Counselling Psychology Literature Recently, studies in counselling psychology have utilized autoethnography and collective autoethnography to explore narratives from counselling psychology doctoral students, faculty members, and clinicians. I explore some of these studies below.  Drawing on collaborative autoethnography, Yang et al. (2022) explored personal narratives related to authenticity among six doctoral students in a counselling psychology program in the United States. Some therapeutic orientations highlight therapist authenticity as a critical aspect of the therapy process and the therapist\u2019s ongoing professional development. This study explores the conflicting messages students narrated receiving around authenticity during their training. Students in this study individually wrote and then collectively edited and thematically analyzed personal stories of being encouraged to be authentic in clinical training spaces. At the same time, the traditional power hierarchies of their other academic requirements demanded less authenticity and more standardization. One theme identified in the study explored \u201csocietal identities [of the participating autoethnographers] that facilitate or inhibit the expression of authenticity\u201d (p.8). In this theme, the authors explored differing privileges of authenticity across intersecting identities and contexts related to the authors\u2019 graduate training. Like Poulos (2021), the authors describe \u201cwriting [as] a primary method of inquiry\u201d in their autoethnography. However, they provide a limited exploration of how collectively sharing auto-  37 narratives as a part of their method influenced their analysis and little explication of how they arrived at their \u201cnarrative\u201d (p. 6) articulation of these themes.  Hargons et al. (2017) use collaborative autoethnography to narrate autobiographical moments related to pursuing leadership opportunities as female students in counselling psychology doctoral programs in the United States. The authors draw on thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006) to work with their narratives. The authors propose several themes and conclude that \u201cfuture orientation, determination, and fostering connection\u201d (Hargons et al., 2017, p. 1031), as well as contextual availability of \u201copportunities\u201d (p. 1031) and \u201cmentoring\u201d (p. 1031) support female student leadership in counselling psychology.  Another collaborative autoethnographic study (Consoli et al., 2022) involves seven faculty members in counselling psychology programs within the United States narrating their journeys from international graduate students to professors. The authors write, \u201cto the relative extent that there is no external gaze (the researcher and researched are one and the same), autoethnography may be particularly useful for the study of populations \u2026 that may be misunderstood, misrepresented, and otherized\u201d (p. 800) in the literature. Working with the collected auto-narratives, the research team drew on an iterative thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006) led by two of the team members. One of the themes identified explored \u201cmentoring as a tool for success in academia \u2026 [and] demands engaging with the mentee\u2019s personal life issues\u201d (p. 895). Autoethnography has also been utilized within counselling psychology as a means of studying the narratives of clinicians. Scholars drew on collective autoethnography to explore the narratives of mental health professionals working in various countries during the COVID-19 pandemic (Jurcik et al., 2021). Although the scholar\u2019s analysis method is not explicitly stated,   38 they created themes from their autoethnographic data. In another study, Mason and Reeves (2018), used autoethnography combined with data gathered from editorial or opinion articles in professional publications to explore narratives of working as a therapist in England\u2019s National Health Service. The authors of this study also engaged with thematic analysis as their means of data analysis.  R\u00e5bu et al. (2021) present therapists\u2019 narratives of personal therapy through collaborative autoethnographic. The authors advocate that auto-narratives are \u201cable to provide a distinctive source of evidence that both complements and extends findings based on other research approaches\u201d (p. 124). The authors suggest that the methodology supports self-awareness through thorough re-telling and re-examining and offers the opportunity of connecting self to larger communities.  Harvey and Kotze (2022) use performance autoethnography to explore \u201cexperiences of \u201cotherness\u201d in the context of the discipline of psychology \u2013 specifically in South Africa \u2013 to understand some of the ways in which we collude with, and challenge, the compulsory aspects of [professional] identity we fail to inhabit\u201d (p. 2). These authors present their autoethnography using the conventions of playwriting, breaking different scenes of dialogue and monologues into three separate acts, each titled with a theme from their research. The authors\u2019 writing process transforms their narratives into the dramatic form of a play, which becomes their primary method of analysis.   The above scholarship suggests the potential for advocacy and critical scholarship that can come from researchers putting their embodied personal narratives on stage. My research builds on autoethnographic scholarship in counselling psychology that explores narratives from the specialization\u2019s graduate students (Hargons et al., 2017; Yang et al., 2022). In my review, I   39 found no previous autoethnographic studies in counselling psychology exploring personal narratives related to trans identity and expression. My study addresses this gap in the literature by exploring embodied researcher auto-narratives through RbT playwriting.   2.4 RbT Turn: Theatre as Research I now turn to RbT, offering a brief review of the history of this methodology and exploring its presence in counselling psychology scholarship to date.  If the NI approaches I explored above represent a \u201cblurred genre\u201d (Geertz, 1983, p. 7), not neatly resolvable into a research methodology as understood in academic institutions in the Global North (Pascale, 2011; Pascale, 2018), the same can be said for theatre-as-research. In the early 2000s, Riessman (2008) recognized autoethnography and ABR as alternatives to \u201cdistant and formulaic\u201d (p. 193) academic writing but suggested that \u201cmost social science audiences expect something more\u201d (p. 193). The expectations to which Riessman refers are academic demands of validity and clear, in-depth methodological guides that other scholars can take up. These expectations have informed the development of RbT over the last two decades.  2.4.1 RbT Although the term Research-based Theatre appeared earlier (Mienczakowski et al., 1996), it was not until the 2000s that scholars began offering specific descriptions of RbT processes (Gray et al., 2000; Mitchell et al., 2006; Rosenbaum et al., 2005). The 2010s saw these initial offerings formalized for use across disciplines (Belliveau & Lea, 2016). For example, RbT scholars proposed a spectrum of research-based plays with differing commitments across artistry and scholarship continuums (Beck et al., 2011). This dynamic methodology is now defined by four core commitments: (1) to honour participant\/collaborator narratives (Lea et al., 2020), (2)   40 theatre aesthetics (Shigematsu et al., 2021), (3) to pedagogy and advocacy (Baer et al., 2019), and (4) to ethics and evaluation (Nichols et al., 2023).  RbT is among numerous terms artists and scholars use for the interweaving of theatre and research. Other methodologies and artistic approaches that blend theatre and research include research-informed theatre (Goldstein, 2013; Gray & Kontos, 2018), applied theatre (Balfour & Freebody, 2018), documentary theatre (Forsyth & Megson, 2009), ethnodrama\/ethnotheatre5 or autoethnodrama (Salda\u00f1a, 2011), performance auto\/ethnography (Denzin, 2018), and verbatim theatre (Salvatore, 2017; Vachon & Salvatore, 2022). Theatre unites all these approaches, and some of these terms are used interchangeably by scholars, for example, research-informed\/research-based theatre (Gray, 2023; Gray & Kontos, 2018). However, several of these approaches differ in their historical development, epistemological standpoint on combining theatre and empirical scholarship, and aesthetic commitments.  For example, ethnodrama\/ethnotheatre are terms historically tied to ethnography and the methodological practices and assumptions originally popular in anthropology (Salda\u00f1a, 2011; Suzuki et al., 2005). Ethnodrama\/ethnotheatre are \u201cchosen [by artist-scholars] as representational and presentational methods of ethnographic fieldwork\u201d (Salda\u00f1a, 2011, p. 13). Autoethnodrama  5 Salda\u00f1a (2011) defines ethnodrama as a research-based playscript and ethnotheatre as a research-based production or performance. Salvatore (2017) writes that these are  \u201cacademic terms \u2026 for scholars and researchers working within certain paradigms. Mainstream theatre artists \u2026 who use interview transcripts, field notes, and print and media artifacts to create their work, generally do not describe their work as \u2018ethnodrama\u2019or \u2018ethnotheatre\u2019\u201d (p. 268). The same can be said for all of the theatre-as-resaerch terms in this chapter.    41 developed from ethnodrama\/ethnotheatre traditions but features a playwright\u2019s personal narrative. Documentary theatre typically draws on various primary and secondary sources in script creation (Forsyth & Megson, 2009). In contrast, a verbatim theatre script is created entirely from the words of interview transcripts, with no fictionalized dialogue (Vachon & Salvatore, 2022). Within RbT projects, artist-scholars may borrow from documentary and verbatim theatre approaches, among other theatre-making strategies. For example, RbT projects might consider fiction as an analytic and knowledge exchange tool, using puppetry (Cook & Borgen, 2020), song (Goldstein et al., 2023), or dance (Kuhlmann et al., 2023) to analyze and convey research narratives to audiences. As another example, RbT may focus on the auto-narratives of the artist-scholars involved, place the auto-narratives of the playwright\/theatre artists alongside that of other participants or narratives from other sources, or not include auto-narratives at all (Shigematsu et al., 2021). As a methodology, RbT represents a malleable rather than rigid positioning of theatre practices within research designs. As such, RbT is sometimes utilized only for a specific portion of a research process. For example, transforming previously analyzed transcripts into a theatre script to support knowledge translation of research results with audiences. Theatrical practices may also be incorporated into data generation and analysis and comprise the whole of a research design (Belliveau & Lea, 2016).  2.4.2 Paradigmatic Stances for ABR and RbT While acknowledging the differences between theatre-as-research approaches can help us refine these methodologies, in advocating for preferred terminology, scholars may inadvertently dismiss other theatre approaches to research. For example, Linds and Gee (2023) advocate for the term theatre-based research, which they define as embracing a workshopping model of play   42 development, in which artists develop a piece collaboratively, instead of the term RbT, which they conclude solely dramatizes interview data. Transforming a transcript into a monologue is only one approach RbT scholars draw on, and workshopping for RbT play development is a common practice (Belliveau & Lea, 2016; Belliveau, Lea, et al., 2020). Capstick (2023) prefers ethnotheatre because of the term\u2019s prefix ethno and its implication of research protocols and paradigmatic stance associated with ethnography, and suggests this is missing from RbT, stating the name is \u201cnot informative about the nature of the research in question or the methodological commitments underpinning the approach\u201d (p. 6).  However, paradigm and methodological commitments become clearer when considering RbT in relation to onto-epistemological perspectives in ABR more broadly. As Rosiek (2018) writes \u201cart is a means by which we sensitize ourselves to new possibilities of experience. \u2026 it is simultaneously epistemological and ontological in its ambitions\u201d (p. 32). Furthermore, McNiff (2017) warns, \u201cif we view artistic inquiry exclusively as yet another form of qualitative research, it will be subsumed by the language and operational assumptions of the social sciences together with fixed methods that contradict the creative process\u201d (p. 29). Scholars and artists engaging in ABR and autoethnography are among those whose work offers new or renewed ethico-onto-epistemological possibilities (Barad, 2007). The paradigms supporting their work are committed to artmaking (McNiff, 2017), the researcher\u2019s personal autobiography (Adams et al., 2022), and even love (Landry, 2018). These renewed ethico-onto-entomological possibilities are not meant to replace well-established ontological and epistemological positions (Adams et al., 2022; Pascale, 2018), but coexist with these positions, creating space for a \u2018yes, and\u2026\u2019 dialogue with these positions.    43 Halberstam\u2019s (2019) description of queer as a \u201cscavenger\u201d (p. 13) methodology is an onto-epistemological position with ethical implications for ABR. Barad (2015), writing on TransMaterialities, articulates this scavenger position by citing Stryker\u2019s (1994) one-person performance retelling of Frankenstein (Shelley, 2012 [1818]). Although Stryker does not specifically categorize this work as ABR, its borrowing and repurposing of Shelley\u2019s novel from the early 1800s for trans liberation and scholarship in the 1990s clearly fits within McNiff\u2019s (2017) definition of ABR, or \u201cthe decision to use art as a way to respond to particular questions and issues that may involve varied disciplines\u201d (p. 24). Stryker\u2019s repurposed Frankenstein performance positions the materiality of a trans self as self-created from disparate parts; through affirming procedures or other practices of embodied expression, but also through a reclaiming and repurposing of language that expands the possibilities of knowing and doing gender (Barad, 2015).  Rosiek (2017, 2018) suggests Barad\u2019s concepts of agency, materialism, and diffraction\/intra-action can offer paradigmatic insight for ABR. Barad\u2019s theorizing may also be particularly helpful for artist-scholars exploring trans ways of knowing (Barad, 2015). Barad positions agency as \u201cnot something someone has, or something instantiated in the form of an individual agent\u201d (Kleinman & Barad, 2012, p. 77) but as \u201cenactment\u201d (p. 77) or \u201ctransformation\u201d (Pratt & Rosiek, 2023, p. 901). Barad advocates viewing agency as a nonhuman characteristic too, and in this view, \u201cit is through specific agential intra-actions [emphasis added] that the boundaries and properties of \u2018individuals\u2019 within the phenomenon become determinate and particular material articulations of the world become meaningful\u201d (p. 77). Intra-action, rather than \u2018interaction\u2019, implies Barad\u2019s conceptualizations of active nonhuman agency (Barad, 2015; Kleinman & Barad, 2012; Rosiek, 2017).     44 Barad\u2019s statement \u201cimaginings are material\u201d (Barad, 2015, p. 388) has several meanings: they are material neurons firing, and they are also agential, as in, they have the power to transform on multiple levels, electrochemically in the brain, transforming physical and affect across the body. Barad articulates a connection between \u201cthe materiality of imagining together with the imaginative capacities of materiality\u201d (p. 388) as a trans way of knowing that allows self-creation and new possibilities of relating to our transness: \u201cWhat would it mean to reclaim our trans* natures as natural? Not to align ourselves with essence, or the history of the mobilization of \u2018nature\u2019 on behalf of oppression?\u201d (p. 413).   For Barad (2014), \u201cdiffraction\/intra-action\u201d (p. 168) is a \u201ccutting together-apart (one move) in the (re)configuring of spacetimemattering\u201d (p. 168) a \u201cdiffering\/differencing\u201d (p. 168). Barad considers all research a process of temporarily \u2018differencing,\u2019 of cutting away from otherwise interconnected material and phenomena in pursuit of certain insights while acknowledging such differencing forgoes numerous other ways of knowing a phenomenon. Barad\u2019s writing is truly transdisciplinary, uniting quantum physics with trans studies and feminist perspectives. The quote below speaks as much about physics as it does ABR and illustrates that no real separation exists between the subject and object of inquiry:  Subject and object, wave and particle, position and momentum do not exist outside of specific intra-actions that enact cuts that make separations \u2013 not absolute separations, but only contingent separations \u2013 within phenomena. \u2026 Difference is understood as differencing: differences-in-the-(re)making. Differences are within; differences are formed through intra-activity, in the making of \u2018this\u2019 and \u2018that\u2019 within the phenomenon that is constituted in their inseparability (entanglement). Indeed, this is a point just as much about electrons with one another as it is about onto-epistemological intra-actions   45 involving humans. Subjectivity and objectivity are not opposed to one another; objectivity is not not-subjectivity. (p. 175) In ABR, differencing may take the form of selecting one art form over another, one artistic style over another, or even one image over another: in ABR, plurality exists at every stage of the process (McNiff, 2017). Playwriting from a dataset yields a distinct kind of differencing from sculpting from the same data. Still, the differencing is not absolute or final: the same image may appear in both, but this image may intra-act with an audience differently depending on whether they are seated in a dark theatre or walking around a sculpture in a gallery.  The artist-scholar makes no claim for objectivity in art-making; like Barad\u2019s subject and object, wave and particle, position and momentum, there is no absolute separation between the artist-scholar and the arts-based research they create, and like Frankenstein, the arts-based creation has agency in that it can transform the artist-scholar in the making, or through the intra-action of artist scholar, material, and research as artistic expression (McNiff, 2017). For arts-based researchers in general, and RbT in specific, these ethico-onto-epistemological commitments point to ethical commitments of agency and materiality in nonhuman parts and unions of parts. The art, in this case, a play script, is material and agentic. Furthermore, as artist-scholars, we commit to understanding that self-construction\/self-birth\/transformation is not an exclusively trans project: we are all a self-made \u201cpatchwork\u201d (Barad, 2015, p. 393; Stryker, 1994). 2.4.3 Research-based Theatre and Counselling Psychology   Researchers have called for further diversifying qualitative methods in counselling psychology, including utilizing theatre as research (Ponterotto et al., 2017). Counselling psychologists may have at least passing familiarity with some theatre-based techniques, for   46 example, role play and enactments as therapist training strategies or clinical interventions (Bayne et al., 2021; Frantzich & Fels, 2018), and some therapeutic approaches explicitly utilize theatre, such as psychodrama (Schellhammer, 2020) and therapeutic enactment (Westwood et al., 2010). Furthermore, specific theatre approaches, such as playback theatre, have been studied for their therapeutic potential (Gonzalez et al., 2022).  Regarding theatre as a methodology, counselling psychology scholars have begun exploring RbT over the last decade. For example, several previous studies draw on theatre as a methodology or therapeutic approach, and sometimes both, for working with military veterans (Ali et al., 2020; Balfour, 2019; Balfour & Hassall, 2022; Lea et al., 2020). Below, I focus on one of these projects, Contact!Unload.  The play Contact!Unload results from a multiyear collaboration between counselling psychology researchers and clinicians, RbT scholars, theatre artists, and military veterans (Belliveau et al., 2019; Belliveau, Lea, et al., 2020; Lea et al., 2020). This collaborative playmaking process explored the narratives of veterans\u2019 transitions home and documented their participation in a trauma-informed group therapy process called therapeutic enactment (Westwood et al., 2010). Contact!Unload suggests several contributions RbT studies can make to the counselling psychology literature. Firstly, as an expressive, arts-based approach, the RbT methodology may have clinical therapeutic relevance (Belliveau, Lea, et al., 2020). Several veterans who participated in writing, rehearsing, and acting on stage, describe how RbT provided the opportunity to continue engaging in a therapeutic process (Belliveau et al., 2019). Secondly, Contact!Unload suggests RbT studies may offer a flexible and accessible theatre-based approach to data generation and analysis for counselling psychology researchers. Many scenes were developed and refined through direct collaboration with the veterans based on   47 their narratives (Belliveau, Lea, et al., 2020), effectively combining data generation, analysis, and member checking.  Finally, Contact!Unload illustrates the knowledge exchange and mental health literacy (Kutcher et al., 2016) opportunities created by RbT that can support counselling psychology scholarship. Through the dramatic narratives presented by the play, audience members reported being engaged and emotionally impacted by the theatre piece while learning about posttraumatic stress symptoms and therapeutic options for those who have served in the military (Nichols et al., 2022).  As another example, for my MA research in counselling psychology, I created an RbT play with community members in Vancouver\u2019s Downtown Eastside, exploring their personal stories of learning experiences. The play was written and performed by adults accessing ongoing education opportunities, and these collaborators built the set, props, and puppets, and collectively engaged in scriptwriting. This research suggests that RbT may support group creation, relationship building, and feelings of empowerment for community members as they narrate their own stories (Cook & Belliveau, 2018; Cook & Borgen, 2020; Cook et al., 2019). Studies exploring theatre-as-research have often focused on theatre\u2019s potential for impactful knowledge mobilization and exchange (Gray & Kontos, 2018; Jarus et al., 2022; Kontos et al., 2020; Michalak et al., 2014; Nichols et al., 2022). For example, Michalak et al. (2014) found participants reported attitude changes after viewing a production designed to impact bipolar diagnosis discrimination. Similarly, Kontos et al. (2020) present RbT as a strategy for addressing the stigma faced by dementia patients. This literature suggests theatre is an impactful knowledge exchange strategy. However, an underdeveloped area of RbT literature is an accessible guide and detailed description that counselling psychology scholars can engage   48 with that explores the diverse ways to use theatre to generate and analyze data. My study addresses this gap by focusing on playwriting strategies as analysis tools in the research process, particularly in a trans-informed approach to RbT creation.  2.4.4 Trans-informed RbT A trans-informed approach to RbT must reckon with a tension that George (2014) describes all trans performers facing, which is \u201cthe demand to make a spectacle of transgender visibility\u201d (p. 278) for mass consumption. Uhlig (2021) responds to this tension by offering a genderqueer clown autoethnodrama, described as a \u201cstory and research of (un)becoming genderqueer\u201d (p. 223). Uhlig\u2019s autoethnodramatic exploration is deeply rooted in a specific place and time, drawing parallels between the unbecoming of gender, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and what remains after these transformations. Uhlig (2021) quotes from scholars like Susan Stryker directly in the autoethnodrama\u2019s text as part of a character\u2019s lines, which places the work in dialogue with other trans scholarship. Does the actor playing the clown speak out the citation? Would anyone, save an academic audience, know what to make of the citation if the actor did? Uhlig provides no answers, creating a text \u201cwith troublesome questions\u201d (p. 235), including: \u201cHow could you put this drama on a stage? Should this drama be put on a stage?\u201d (p. 236) As part of another study, Baer et al. (2019) offer an article illustrating their verbatim theatre and Theatre of the Oppressed work with undergraduate students at the University of Toronto. The theatre pieces described by the authors focus on the experiences of parents who identify as 2SLGTBQIA+, and the article explores ways to act against heteronormativity and cissexism through performance, witnessing, and \u201cstartling empathy\u201d (Baer et al., 2019, p. 418). Drawing on Brecht\u2019s writings on theatre, the authors define \u201cstartling empathy\u201d (Baer et al., 2019, p. 418) as empathy that moves audiences from an acquiescent form of witnessing, in   49 which an audience member may feel their own emotions stirred by a play\u2019s characters and narratives, but leave these emotions behind once the lights come up, to a witnessing of protest, where feelings remain present in the audience after the play and inspire action. The authors define one of their primary goals as creating witnessing\/protest experiences for undergraduate theatre students. In another article emerging from the same research project, Owis and colleagues have already begun to form a specific framework for 2SLGTBQIA+ informed RbT (Owis et al., 2023) by proposing a slow ethic of care, defined as \u201can intentional process in which we sit with moments of discomfort and re\/act slowly to dilemmas to make ethical decisions in our work by centring care work\u201d (p. 3). The authors describe their understanding of care work as \u201ca form of care that exists in queer and trans communities\u201d (p. 3).  The next section of my literature review focuses on trans theatre. As I investigated a trans-informed approach to RbT, I considered aesthetic commitments exemplified in the work of trans, nonbinary, and gender nonconforming theatre artists.  2.5 Trans Theatre I include trans theatre practice in my literature for review for three reasons. Firstly, audience responses to RbT suggest that audience members partially evaluate RbT plays for their aesthetic achievements (Jarus et al., 2022; Nichols et al., 2022). Secondly, scripts by trans theatre artists offer within-group explorations of trans narratives and communities, providing a resource and essential insights for counselling psychologists working with trans clients or research participants. Finally, RbT practitioners sometimes engage in their arts-based scholarship without specifying the theatre traditions they are drawing on. Theatre is a rich and diverse art form with numerous genres, practices, and aesthetic philosophies (Cattaneo, 2021). RbT practitioners can   50 be inspired by various theatre artists or works. For example, the absurd realism of Taylor Mac\u2019s (2015) Hir, which strives for verisimilitude even as it embraces farce, is very different than the surrealist, nonsensical lyricism of Gertrude Stein\u2019s (1922) plays. When RbT scholarship cites influencing theatrical genres and works, the aesthetic choices artist-scholars make in their research-based plays are supported and more deeply understood as part of a specific theatre lineage. The lineage I draw on for my research-based play is trans theatre.  Trans theatre artists make \u201cwork for trans communities instead of about trans communities\u201d (Drake, 2016, p. 56). According to Baig et al. (2021), the work of trans theatre artists \u201coften reflects the potential to disrupt any preconceived notions of what theatre needs to \u2018be\u2019 and what theatre needs to \u2018look like\u201d\u2019 (p.66). Much of trans theatre pushes the boundaries of what it means to embody character and narratives on stage, centering trans ways of knowing that expand beyond fixed selves and identities, linear progressions, and traditional theatre binaries like audience\/performers, scripted\/improvised, and chronologically linear\/non-linear narratives. Based on my review of published trans plays available in English, I highlight three features of trans theatre: \u2022 Embodied fiction as autobiography \u2022 Narrative non-linearity \u2022 Genre agnosticism  Although from a counselling psychology perspective, a list of aesthetic features may at first appear esoteric, from an RbT perspective, the lists point to practical elements of craft: for instance, what is the necessary amount of information to convey to an audience to make a non-linear storyline in a research-based play legible? Furthermore, aesthetic choices have analytic and therapeutic implications.    51 As quoted in Chapter 1, Keyes et al. (2021) suggest that \u201cdefining or putting strict borders around \u2018trans theatre\u2019 \u2026 might not even be a useful project to undertake\u201d (p. 1). In my review, I am less interested in delineating the boundaries of trans theatre than in considering how trans ways of knowing can inform the craft of playwriting and how the craft of playwriting is uniquely suited to communicate trans ways of knowing.   Before considering embodiment and fiction in trans theatre auto-narratives, I want to consider the relevance of embodiment in counselling psychology and trans studies. Counselling psychology places an emphasis on embodiment, investigating the \u201cembodied\u201d (Manafi, 2010, p. 23) aspects of the therapeutic relationship, as well as embodied supervision practices with counsellor trainees (Panhofer et al., 2011; Stella & Taggart, 2020). Although emphasized to different extents among various therapeutic orientations (Gonzalez et al., 2022; Neimeyer, 2014; Rogers, 1989), embodied exchanges can be prioritized alongside verbal material in talk therapy and supervision (Milton, 2010).  In trans studies, embodiment has multiple definitions. It may refer to assemblages of the body, the whole physical body, and also expansive embodied knowledge of transness that is individual, hyperlocal, and more broadly collective (Steinbock, 2021). According to Malatino (2020), the trans studies literature has emphasized \u201cthe interface of trans embodiment with the medical-industrial complex\u201d (p. 39) while overlooking \u201ceveryday acts of interpersonal recognition\u201d (p. 39) where trans embodiment is legible\/illegible. Moving beyond \u201cthinking through\u201d (p. 39) embodiment to making art via embodiment, RbT is uniquely positioned to explore the interpersonal embodiment of fictions and autobiography.   52 2.5.1 Embodied Fiction as Autobiography Keyes et al. (2021) describe trans theatre as involving embodied investigations of trans lives. Numerous scripts by trans authors explore autobiography through embodied fiction (Alabanza, 2018; Clifford, 2017; Deen, 2018; taddei, 2022). For example, the writer kai fig taddei (2022) describes their play Duecentomila as \u201cthis thing that\u2019s not biographical but not not biographical. This unruly, unfinished me thing\u201d (p. 1) in which characters who are continents apart meet in an imagined, theatrical space. Jo Clifford\u2019s (2017) Eve contains autobiographical narratives told through audience direct address and imagined letters to herself before she transitioned, a conceit I take up and transform from letters to postcards in my playscript in Chapter 4. The published script of Mashuq Mushtaq Deen\u2019s (2018) Draw the Circle introduces the play by way of a letter to the playwright\u2019s mother, in which Deen writes: \u201cWhen I see you a year later, my voice deep and resonant, my goatee neatly trimmed, you look at me with such disgust\u201d (p. 5). Deen describes the script as \u201ca mostly autobiographical version of real events. Artistic license has (occasionally) been taken for the sake of structure and story arc. The footnotes are all true to the best of my knowledge\u201d (p. 11). In the script, Deen acknowledges that his parents refused to read a copy or attend a reading of the script and that the play likely contains narratives they would not want Deen to share publicly.  Travis Alabanza (2018) describes their autobiographical play BURGERZ as \u201carchiving the pain in our reality\u201d (p. vii), investigating an assault the playwright experienced in 2016 as \u201can emblem for so many other incidents, deaths, acts of violence and harm, that the trans and gender nonconforming community have to face every single day\u201d (p. vii). The play is a solo show, and Alabanza first performed it in London, United Kingdom, in 2018. In the play\u2019s first moments,   53 the character of Travis describes the assault: a burger is thrown at them alongside a transphobic slur. The assault occurred in public, and Travis says, \u201cI think over a hundred people saw and no one did anything\u201d (p. 7). Travis makes a burger on stage, and this process and the burger itself become an extended metaphor for a rigid gender binary, cisnormativity, transphobia, and transmisogyny. At certain points, Travis confronts groups or individuals from the audience. For example, to the white people watching, they say, \u201cto think it is only trans people that are misgendered is the whitest way to think about bodies. Black bodies have known what it means to be de-gendered, hyper-gendered, misgendered\u201d (p. 33).  In addition, Travis asks for volunteers from the audience at different points in the script, asking for a cis white man and, later, a woman. These volunteers are given lines to speak in the script and specific actions to perform on stage. The man helps Travis make the burger, followed by the woman, who throws the burger at Travis, \u201cnot to hurt you again, but to acknowledge that I hurt you before\u201d (p. 6). This embodied re-staging of an auto-narrative suggests the potential therapeutic value of fiction in rescripting auto-narratives.  Imagery and fiction are utilized in several ways in a therapeutic process, for example, as a resource for emotional regulation, such as imagining a safe place, or as part of an exposure hierarchy, in which progressively greater anxiety-provoking images are recalled for systematic desensitization (Arntz, 2012). In imagery rescripting (ImRs), a therapist guides a client \u201cto imagine the [dysregulating] memory or image as vividly as possible \u2026 in the here and now, and next to imagine that the sequence of events is changed in a direction that the person desires\u201d (Arntz, 2012, p. 190). Various versions of ImRs are utilized across multiple therapeutic modalities, including cognitive behavioural therapy, Gestalt therapy, and psychoanalytic therapy (Arntz, 2012; Edwards, 2007), as well as group therapy approaches, such as therapeutic   54 enactment (Lea et al., 2020). One constraint of ImRs in traditional talk therapy is the limitation of verbally rescripting the image in a client\/therapist exchange (Westwood & Wilensky, 2005). BURGERZ aligns with theatre-based therapeutic work for individuals with trauma histories (Westwood & Wilensky, 2005), and offers an alternative by allowing possibilities for embodied, fictional re-staging that is witnessed by an audience or other group members. I will explore the therapeutic potential of embodied fictions further in subsequent chapters.   2.5.2 Narrative Nonlinearity Keyes and colleagues (2021) describe trans theatre as involving \u201ca preoccupation with temporality\u201d (p. 2). Trans experiences are artistically rendered on stage as time slips, time folding, and non-linearity (Keyes et al., 2021). Non-linear narratives are not unique to trans theatre (Smiley, 2005) but are employed for different aesthetic purposes through a lens of trans ways of knowing. Non-linear trans theatre encourages a movement away from pathologizing trans time and chrononormativity, a term Freeman (2010) defines as \u201cthe use of time to organize individual human bodies toward maximum productivity\u201d (p. 3). Halberstam (2005) traces conceptions of queer time to the 1980s and the AIDS pandemic, and states that queer time \u201cis not only about compression and annihilation; it is also about the potentiality of a life unscripted by the conventions\u201d (p. 2) of cis\/heteronormativity.  An example of chrononormativity from the counselling psychology research literature is the bottlenecking hypothesis (Schmidt & Nilsson, 2006; Scott et al., 2011). This hypothesis suggests that trans individuals may face \u201ca bottleneck when it comes to career development because so much of their psychological resources are taken up with identity development\u201d (McFadden & Crowley-Henry, 2016, p. 71). The theory has received mixed research support, and researchers have argued that bottlenecking creates a monolithic and pathologizing view of   55 career identity development for trans individuals, which assumes all trans individuals will struggle with acceptance and public disclosure of their transgender identity in equal ways (Morris & Lent, 2023). Trans plays like Jo Clifford\u2019s (2019) The Gospel According to Jesus, Queen of Heaven and Travis Alabanza\u2019s (2018) BURGERZ jump backwards and forwards in time, or exist outside of time, refusing chrononormativity in the way their narratives are structured.  2.5.3 Genre Agnosticism  Trans theatre artists push against conventional theatre by defying genre expectations (Bakhtin, 1987) and practicing genre agnosticism, freely borrowing from various literary genres and art forms. For example, a playscript usually contains several types of text: monologues or dialogues and stage directions, and possibly song lyrics and music. Additional kinds of text defying expectations can lead to new ways of exploring theatrical works. Deen\u2019s (2018) playscript contains autobiographical footnotes and the footnotes \u201care not meant to be part of the performance but are an addition to this published version of the text\u201d (p. 11); they provide autobiographical commentary solely for the script\u2019s readers. Furthermore, the forward and afterward to the published script are letters Deen sent to his parents. Similarly, Alabanza\u2019s (2018) BURGERZ is part auto-narrative, part cooking show. The sides of a giant box on the stage are removed to reveal a kitchen for burger-making.  Clifford\u2019s (2019) solo show, The Gospel According to Jesus, Queen of Heaven, is a sermon-esque one-person show that Clifford explains was born from asking herself questions like, \u201cWhat if Jesus came back to earth here and now \u2026 as a trans woman like me? What would she say? What would she do?\u201d (p. xii) Clifford\u2019s (2019) preparation for each performance includes baking bread, which she shares with the audience during the show, and at another point   56 in the script, the audience members light candles with Clifford as she performs in an otherwise darkened theatre. Like BURGERZ, the audience is drawn from a passive witnessing role by these interactions, and, as in BURGERZ, Clifford utilizes direct address throughout her script, speaking to the audience. Clifford\u2019s text highlights the potential intimacy of direct address with her script\u2019s poetic lines offered as a sermon, communion, and prayer.  Clifford describes beginning to write plays exploring trans ways of knowing and experience in the 1990s, stating, \u201cI needed to write something for myself\u201d (p. vii), and \u201cI had to perform myself \u2026 [to] help me heal the abuses of the past\u201d (p. vii). Clifford first performed the show in Glasgow. The play\u2019s week-long run drew protests covered in the local news media (Campsie, 2009; Williams, 2009), audience members passed by transphobic protest placards to enter the theatre, and police officers were stationed in the theatre for Clifford\u2019s safety (Clifford, 2019). Nearly ten years later, during a two-year tour of Brazil, during which the script was performed for thousands of audience members, the production team faced bans, protests, and death threats. The play could no longer be toured in Brazil safely once Jair Bolsonaro was elected president, and he derided the play in a social media post (Miller, 2018).  Clifford speaks of creating two productions of the show: \u201cone for theatrical spaces, and one of everywhere else. We can now perform the show absolutely anywhere\u201d (p. xxi). Clifford\u2019s commitment to adapting to traditional and non-traditional venues speaks to enabling accessibility through performance location, a commitment shared by RbT scholars. Furthermore, Clifford speaks of the play\u2019s reach, starting from the play\u2019s initial production. 150 people saw the play\u2019s first run in 2009, and the protests each night drew as many as 300, reaching many more through news coverage. Clifford writes that because the show \u201ccaptured the attention of hundreds of thousands \u2026 I felt the show needed to continue\u201d (p. xvii). This commitment to a broad reach   57 speaks to RbT\u2019s goals of making research accessible to more than those who would access traditional research outputs like journal articles.  2.6 Research Related to Trans Graduate Students in Counselling Psychology  I will now focus on reviewing literature that provides background material for the subject matter of my playscript. My dissertation dialogues with previous scholarship suggesting the need for further research focusing on trans graduate students (Goldberg, Kuvalanka, & dickey, 2019). The existing research suggests trans graduate students \u201care expected to succeed and even excel under remarkably sub-optimal circumstances (e.g., while coming out, accessing gender-affirming services, and so on)\u201d (Knutson et al., 2022, p. 462). Furthermore, there is a growing awareness in psychology that trans graduate students face unique challenges within the discipline. In 2019, the American Psychological Association\u2019s Graduate Students Subcommittee on Sexual Orientation and Gender Diversity published \u201cA Guide for Supporting Trans and Gender Diverse Students\u201d, writing that \u201cour committee feels that this guide is a timely and necessary resource to provide a safe learning environment for trans and gender diverse (TGD) students who continue to be marginalized\u201d (p. 2). Trans graduate students face challenges related to graduate program location, mentorship, disclosure, and safety and mental health concerns (Goldberg, 2021).  Written over 15 years ago, one of the earliest studies I reviewed that included trans graduate student experiences was a qualitative survey with responses from 25 graduate students in the United States (McKinney, 2005). Study participants expressed that (1) faculty members were not educated about trans issues, (2) campus mental health services were not trans-competent, and (3) student insurance did not cover trans-related medical costs. As Beemyn (2019) writes in the book Trans People in Higher Education, \u201cdepending on one\u2019s perspective,   58 there has been either significant change or little change regarding the inclusion of and support for trans people in higher education over the past twenty years\u201d (p. xi).  Goldberg, McCormick, et al.\u2019s (2021) study on graduate school program choice among trans students suggests some participants chose programs based on clear campus support for trans students and trans-inclusive student health insurance. Other participants acknowledged putting their academic goals and program choice ahead of their comfort and safety concerns about the larger regional community where a graduate program is located. In an interview-based qualitative study, trans graduate students from various disciplines also pointed to few trans faculty members and the dearth of trans-competent mentorship for trans graduate students (Goldberg, Matsuno, et al., 2021).  Working from survey responses from trans and gender-nonconforming graduate students, primarily in the United States, Goldberg\u2019s (2019) study includes reports of ongoing misgendering, gender binary language, and stress related to disclosing gender identity. In another 2021 study led by Goldberg (Goldberg, Matsuno, et al., 2021), participant responses indicated that transitioning impacted participants\u2019 graduate school experiences and career development by creating additional financial burdens for those pursuing gender-affirming medical care.  Research suggests that trans students in different academic disciplines may face different barriers, such as STEM disciplines (Maloy et al., 2022) compared to philosophy (Dembroff, 2020). I was unable to find research focused on trans students in psychology. My study contributes to this gap by using RbT as an accessible knowledge-sharing method for my auto-narratives as a nonbinary trans woman in counselling psychology graduate studies.    59 2.7 Gender-Based Violence and Transmisogyny The literature related to the experiences of trans graduate students also emphasizes that trans graduate students are not a homogenous group that faces identical barriers, reflecting literature on cissexism (Tan et al., 2020) and its diverse impacts on different trans, gender nonconforming, and nonbinary identities. For example, trans women graduate students may face unique challenges and burdens in relation to misgendering and managing gender expression due to gender-based violence and transmisogyny (Arayasirikul & Wilson, 2019; Boe et al., 2020).  Gender-based violence \u201cis committed against someone based on their gender identity, gender expression or perceived gender \u2026 [and] encompasses a range of behaviours, not all of which meet the threshold of criminal behaviour\u201d (Cotter & Savage, 2019, p. 3) including nonconsensual behaviour in public, at work, or online, as well as sexual and physical assault. Cisgender women and trans people are more likely to experience gender-based violence in Canada (Cotter & Savage, 2019; Jaffray, 2020). Trans people in Canada are more likely than cisgender Canadians to have experienced violence and face harassment in public, online, and at work, including verbal discrimination based on identity or not conforming to binary gender expectations (Jaffray, 2020). Gender-based violence must also be understood in the context of racism. For example, trans people of colour in Canada are more likely to experience discrimination and violence (Chih et al., 2020). Transmisogyny (Serano, 2021) is an important theoretical concept related to gender-based violence enacted against trans women and other trans femme individuals. \u201cTransmisogyny has increasingly been used as shorthand for any prejudice expressed toward trans women, regardless of content\u201d (Serano, 2021, p. 3). However, when Julia Serano first defined the term in the early 2000s, transmisogyny referred to discrimination based \u201con sexist presumptions about gender   60 expression\u201d (p. 2). Serano\u2019s definition specifically connects transmisogyny to the \u201cscrutiny\u201d (p. 2) and assumptions of \u201cartificiality\u201d (p. 2) surrounding feminine gender expression. Serrano also links the definition to biased attributions of \u201csexual motives\u201d (p. 3) and sexualizing trans women.  Transmisogyny, like gender-based violence, can refer to overt or covert nonconsensual verbal or physical harassment experienced by trans women. For example, the policing of trans women\u2019s gender expression (i.e., \u2018that\u2019s not how a woman would act\u2019), repeatedly not using the correct pronouns, misgendering nicknames, or deadnaming (i.e., \u2018hey, man\u2019), and violence perpetrated against trans woman all are an example of transmisogyny. As a construct, transmisogyny provides a means to discuss structural inequities and gender-based violence that specifically target trans women, trans femme, and other individuals who face discrimination due to the intersections of misogyny, transphobia, queerphobia, and cissexism. Furthermore, transmisogyny impacts the wider 2SLGTBQIA+ community and beyond. Serrano (2021) states that \u201cwhile trans women are certainly targets of transmisogyny, any person who is perceived as, or presumed to be a feminine or feminized \u2018male\u2019 may be subjected to these same derogatory, pathologizing, and sexualizing attitudes\u201d (Serrano, 2021, p. 3).  A growing body of scholarship on transmisogynoir (Whipple, 2021) focuses specifically on transmisogyny and the experiences of Black trans women. Krell (2017) critiques Serano\u2019s theorizing, writing that Serano\u2019s \u201cscholarship elides race and class and allows white middle-classness to stand in as a universal, greatly diminishing the capacity of transmisogyny to describe the oppression(s) that trans women of color, and Black women in particular, face\u201d (p. 232). If Serano and other scholars writing on transmisogyny include \u201cgenders of the participants \u2026 given in detail, while their race and class identities go unnamed\u201d (p. 232), Krell argues \u201cthat this silence is both undergirded by and productive of the invisibility of women-of-color feminisms   61 generally and trans women of color in trans feminisms specifically\u201d (p. 232-233). Transmisogynoir is an essential concept for clinicians and researchers in counselling psychology to engage with. Although my research does not specifically address transmisogynoir or racism, I strive to articulate various aspects of my identities and privileges to prevent assumptions of universality.  2.8 Research on Adult Trans Individuals\u2019 Relationships with Family of Origin Another important area of research to review as background for the play\u2019s narrative is the relationship adult trans individuals have with their parents and families. According to White Hughto et al. (2015), \u201crejection by one\u2019s family of origin is common among transgender people and may be enacted through physical assault as well as through less overt means such as lack of support around gender expression\u201d (p. 225). Analysing interviews with trans women of colour from the United States, Koken et. al (2009) report themes such as \u201c\u2018My mother\u2014she was there for me\u2019: Parental Warmth and Affection\u201d (p. 857) and \u201c\u2018You\u2019re not a fucking girl\u2019: Parental Hostility\u2013Aggression\u201d (p. 857). Based on a sample of trans adults with a cis sibling from Canada and the US, trans participants reported less family support than their siblings (Factor & Rothblum, 2007). Furthermore, family support may be a particular challenge for trans women. Davey et al.\u2019s (2014) comparison study of trans and cis social support and well-being included trans women reporting less social support and family support than other genders surveyed (trans men, cisgender men, cisgender women). In a more recent survey study (Fuller & Riggs, 2018), nonbinary participants reported the lowest family support.  Peer and family support is a key factor in trans mental health (Fuller & Riggs, 2018; von Doussa et al., 2020). Without family or social support, some trans people may delay transitioning   62 for years or even decades (Fabbre, 2014; Katz-Wise & Budge, 2015; von Doussa et al., 2020; White Hughto et al., 2015). von Doussa and colleagues (2020) state that some trans people might be \u201cprotective of relationships with the family of origin and\/or the families they have created while living in their assigned gender (as partners, parents, siblings) \u2026 to the detriment of their gender expression\u201d (p. 281). Taken together, these authors suggest a complex bi-directional influence of family support in the pursuit of gender-affirming social and medical changes.     Researchers have found a relationship between family support and reduced suicide risk based on a sample of trans participants from Ontario, Canada (Bauer et al., 2015) and family support and reduced impact of discrimination experiences based on an online survey of trans adults in the United States (Fuller & Riggs, 2018). Bauer et al. (2015) point out that family support is an intervenable factor, and the authors conclude \u201cthe importance of parental support for gender identity among adults, suggesting a need for all-ages family interventions\u201d (p. 13). 2.9 Research Contribution My research contributes new methodologic possibilities to counselling psychology literature, research on trans graduate students, and the literature related to the RbT methodology. I undertook a counselling psychology-specific approach to RbT for my auto-narratives of gender transitioning while a counselling psychology graduate student. I transitioned as an adult, as I approach mid-life, and my narratives also explore my relationship with my family members. Throughout my research-based playwriting process, I considered what possibilities I could propose for trans-informed RbT. In addition, based on the research reviewed above, trans graduate students report interacting with therapists who lack training for working with trans individuals. To address this need, I draw clinical implications from my playscript to supplement other affirming guidelines for working with trans clients (Anzani et al., 2019; Budge, 2015;   63 Chang & Singh, 2016; Matsuno, 2019). In the following chapter, I describe the research process I undertook. In Females (2019), Chu writes, \u201cgender exists, if it exists at all, only in the structural generosity of strangers\u201d (p. 38). Chu\u2019s words avoid an artificial binary between trans and cis genders but refer to all possible genders and emphasize intra-actions (Barad, 2015, 2014) of both human (strangers) and nonhuman elements (structures). Chu\u2019s quote, along with the epigraphs throughout this dissertation, are texts from trans artists and authors that I have held close to my heart while engaged in this scholarly\/artistic process. McNiff (2017) suggests that boundary crossing of ABR not only allows interconnections across disciplines presumed to be disparate from one another by transforming research practices into art creation, but also offers \u201ca motivational source of transformation\u201d (p. 25) for artist-scholars themselves. I embarked on this playwriting process open to the possibility of my transformation through engagement in this RbT process, and I return to the topic of transformation through RbT in Chapters 5 and 6.    64 Chapter 3: Research Approach I\u2019ve always relished the act of transformation.  -Vivek Shraya, People Change  For counselling psychology artist-scholars engaging in RbT, our literature offers few examples of positioning theatre-as-study-design within our specialization\u2019s research paradigms (Haverkamp & Young, 2007). I intend Chapter 3 to express my methodological approach and serve as an example of articulating RbT with a paradigmatic position that bridges counselling psychology, trans studies, and ABR methods. Although Salda\u00f1a (2011) urges the research-based playwright to \u201cstop thinking like a social scientist and start thinking like an artist\u201d (p. 117), I agree with McNiff (2011), who writes \u201cjust as artists and scientists share many qualities, the same applies to art-based research, which generally involves an integration of scientific aspects\u201d (p. 387). I see many similarities between the RbT playwriting framework and process I describe in this chapter and those familiar to many qualitative researchers in counselling psychology.  If \u201cthe most basic definition of qualitative research is that it uses words as data\u201d (Clarke & Braun, 2013, p. 4), this definition can easily include theatre-as-research, particularly if we understand words or text \u201cas any coherent complex of signs\u201d (Bakhtin, 1987, p. 103), including theatre and other art forms. RbT \u201cis shaped by both the form of theater, as an embodied, gestural, spatial, imaginative multi-dimensional art form \u2026 and the traditions of research surrounding knowledge production, specifically qualitative research\u201d (Gray, 2023, p. 314). Like other ABR (Leavy, 2020; McNiff, 2011), RbT complicates several \u201cpostpositivist-leanings\u201d (Braun & Clarke, 2022, p. 272) by suggesting a subjective artistic process can be a form of rigorous data generation, analysis, and findings dissemination.    65 My dissertation research draws on RbT as a dynamic methodological space where I can restory (Neimeyer, 2014; Ollerenshaw & Creswell, 2002) my narratives navigating a psychology graduate program as a trans woman. I do so holding my research questions in mind: What possibilities emerge when RbT is applied within counselling psychology to explore auto-narratives of transitioning in graduate school? How can RbT approaches contribute to centring trans voices in counselling psychology? What possibilities emerge from a trans-informed approach to RbT creation? As established in Chapters 1 and 2, artist-scholars have suggested that theatre-as-research is particularly suited to centring forms of knowledge and perspectives previously excluded from educational and social science research (Baer et al., 2019). Taking this assertion further, I contend that theatre aesthetics can uniquely center trans ways of knowing in research. Simultaneously, trans ways of knowing can push the boundaries of research-based theatre and what it means to embody trans narratives and characters on stage.  Artist-scholars may design theatre as a research process in many ways and interlace different aspects of theatre-making in their study design, including performance (Salda\u00f1a, 1998), playwriting (Shigematsu et al., 2021), or audience evaluation (Nichols et al., 2022). For my project, I have concentrated on playwriting. My dissertation falls within what Lea (2012) calls the playwright-centred approach to RbT development, \u201ccharacterized by the adaptation of data into a script by a single playwright\/researcher\u201d (p. 64).  The playscript I wrote provides the material through which I engage with the following research questions: What methodological possibilities emerge when RbT is applied within counselling psychology to explore my auto-narratives of transitioning in graduate school? What methodological possibilities emerge from a trans-informed approach to RbT creation?   66 In the following sections, I first describe: 1. The paradigm underpinning my research-based playwriting. 2. An overview of my research design. 3. The significance of reflexivity and interpretation in my research design. I then offer:  4. An artist-scholar positionality statement.  5. Data generation and data sources description.  As the RbT playwriting analysis process may be unfamiliar for many counselling psychology researchers, I also provide the following: 6. A summary of my analysis process and 7. Step-by-step analysis procedures.  I conclude the chapter by considering: 8. Ethical tensions in RbT playwriting and  9. Evaluation of RbT plays. The ethical tensions and evaluation criteria I consider are specifically relevant to trans artist-scholars staging personal stories. 3.1 Research Paradigm Previously, I applied RbT and thematic analysis (TA) to narrate individual and group experiences of a drop-in adult education program (Cook & Belliveau, 2018; Cook & Borgen, 2020; Cook et al., 2019). In this application of RbT, I dwelt in the \u201cexperiential\u201d (Braun & Clark, 2022, p. 159), and I dramatized adult learners\u2019 transcripts as if their language was communicating \u201ca more or less transparent window into \u2026 [their] social worlds\u201d (p. 159). Numerous other artist-scholars (Goldstein, 2013; Salda\u00f1a, 2008) have used theatre-as-research as   67 a window to experience via language, which can be particularly important if the experiences are those of individuals and communities are underrepresented in research literature (Braun & Clark, 2022). In my present study, I operate from an epistemological position of social constructionism (Burr, 2003; Burr, 2019). Belliveau and Lea (2016) point to the relevance of this epistemology for RbT in their examination of Bakhtin\u2019s concept of utterances or speech acts. All utterances are unreproducible due to the everchanging social context, making any reproduction of an utterance \u201ca new, unrepeatable event in the life of the text, a new link in the historical chain of speech communication\u201d (Bakhtin, 1987). Theatre is also unrepeatable: even when actors present the same play night after night, each performance happens live and will be different.   I apply a critical\/ideological research paradigm (Haverkamp & Young, 2007; Ponterotto, 2005), which aligns with theatre-as-research practices exemplified by scholars in trans studies (Bornstein, 2016; Stryker, 1994; Uhlig, 2021). A critical-ideological paradigm, as defined within the counselling psychology discipline, is a paradigm of \u201ctransformation, one in which the researcher\u2019s proactive values are central to the task, purpose, and methods of research\u201d (Ponterotto, 2005, p. 129). \u201cChallenging dominant social structures or meaning systems and facilitating empowerment\u201d (Haverkamp & Young, 2007, p. 268) is the transformation researchers seek within this paradigm. Rather than a single unified theory, critical theories refer to numerous stances (Ponterotto, 2005), including queer theory and critical transgender theory. According to Stryker (2006), critical transgender theory works to destabilize conceptualizations of \u201cgender merely as a social, linguistic, or subjective representation of an objectively knowable\u201d (p. 9) biological binary. Such conceptualizations can conceal transphobia, transmisogyny, and transnormativity behind a supposedly post-positivist or realist neutrality (Braun & Clarke, 2022).   68 This critical stance seeks to draw attention to power structures demanding stable \u201clinguistic, social, and psychical categories of \u2018gender\u2019\u201d (Stryker, 2006, p. 9) and a \u2018real word\u2019 \u201creferential anchor that supports them\u201d (p. 9) while offering epistemologic and paradigm shifts in which gender diversity and nonconformity \u201ccan be understood as morally neutral and representationally true\u201d (p. 9). Transgender critical theory connects:  Anti-transgender violence \u2026 to other systemic forms of violence such as poverty and racism. This intellectual work is intimately connected to, and deeply motivated by, sociopolitical efforts to stem the tide of anti-transgender violence and to save transgender lives. (Stryker, 2006, p. 9) My \u201cideographic\u201d (Ponterotto, 2005, p. 128) RbT playscript offers a \u201cdescriptive and detailed\u201d (p. 128) exploration of a single case, auto-narratives I wrote over a year of gender transition while a counselling psychology graduate student. As Ponterotto (2005) writes of counselling psychologists working from a critical-ideological paradigm, I \u201cadmittedly hope and expect [my] values\u201d (p. 133) as a trans woman \u201cinfluence the research process and outcome\u201d (p. 133), and perhaps, transform me in the process of art\/research creation (McNiff, 2017).  By centering theatre as research, RbT allows me to engage with some posthumanist invitations (Pratt & Rosiek, 2023), such as those articulated by Barad (2014, 2015) and reviewed in Chapter 2 that suggest a kind of nonhuman agency in the intra-actions of any material, for example, the raw data, or art\/research created from it, and the ABR practitioner. Theatre and other ABR approaches offer \u201cmultiple possibilities for analysis, relation, and consequent action\u201d (Pratt & Rosiek, p. 900) without attempting a \u201ctotalizing synthesis of these possibilities\u201d (p. 900). RbT artist-scholars may engage with article writing alongside performing in a play, but   69 neither is \u201centertained as an objective\u201d (p. 900) final word on the topic of inquiry. For social science researchers, Pratt and Rosiek (2023) suggest posthumanist inquiry:  Involve[s] establishing ontological, affective, ethical, and political-solidarity relations with a topic or phenomena against a backdrop of other possible and sometimes incommensurable relations while not seeking to reconcile this indeterminacy or synthesize the plurality. Such analyses invite the reader [or audience or artist-scholar] into different intra-actions within a topic of study. (p. 900) Pratt and Rosiek (2023) suggest a spectrum of possible engagement with posthumanist approaches and that \u201cretaining familiar practices of representation\u201d (p. 899) or other features of standard social science research presentation, such as a stepped progression through research question, to analysis, to findings, may maintain \u201cthe legibility of this scholarship\u201d (p. 899) while still making possible new \u201cpresent and future relations\u201d (p. 899). Similarly, McNiff (2017) argues that traditional research designs in social sciences can be combined with arts-based practices in generative new ways that foster transformation of those involved.   3.2 Research Design Overview RbT offers numerous possibilities for data generation, analysis, and mobilizing and exchanging knowledge (Belliveau & Lea, 2016; Shigematsu et al., 2021). For McNiff (2017), ABR can \u201crespond to problems in unique and pragmatic ways\u201d because artist-scholars \u201care not \u2026 constrained by fixed and sanctioned protocols\u201d (p. 24). There is no single step-by-step RbT procedural process, and many artists could create many different plays from the same data set or source material (Belliveau & Lea, 2016; Belliveau & Sinclair, 2018; Campana & Amin, 2023; Shigematsu et al., 2022).   70 While RbT plays can stand independently, I complement my playscript with a critical commentary, as recommended by Belliveau and Lea (2016). This commentary, which I present in Chapter 5, offers a reflexive Thematic Analysis (TA; Braun & Clarke, 2021). Neither TA nor RbT needs to be supplemented with other strategies to support rigour or analysis. Therefore, I am not combining these approaches due to what either lacks but because of what they can achieve when utilized side by side.  Braun and Clark (2021) emphasize fluidity and contextuality in their reflexive TA rather than \u201ca narrow reading\u201d (p. 330) of how to apply various TA steps. Combining playwriting RbT and TA in a single research project creates a \u201cmethodological mash-up\u201d (Braun & Clarke, 2021, p. 336) that draws on the shared strengths of both approaches. My rationale for combining RbT and TA is that these approaches allow me to create an inductive analysis of the narratives I hold with care, including my own (Braun & Clarke, 2021; Owis et al., 2023). RbT and TA are theoretically flexible because neither mandate scholars working from specific theoretical orientations, but both are compatible with social constructionism and a critical-ideological paradigm (Belliveau & Lea, 2016; Braun & Clarke, 2022).   I inform my RbT and TA processes with trans ways of knowing and an ethic of trans care concerned with action that centres affirmative, embodied trans storytelling. At the same time, RbT and TA allow me to locate my narratives within counselling psychology discourses on trans lives, which are at turns problematic and affirming (Anzani et al., 2019; Malatino, 2020; Riggs et al., 2019; Serano, 2016; Stryker, 2017). I also use RbT and TA to create multiple knowledge-sharing entry points. You may favour the narrative exploration offered by the playscript in Chapter 4, prefer to read a description of themes from the data and their relevance to my research   71 questions in Chapter 5, or find both illuminating. Whatever your reaction to the following two chapters, I hope you feel invited into this work.  3.3 Artist-Scholar as Instrument and Embracing Subjectivity: Reflexivity and Interpretation in RbT and TA The descriptor reflexive, according to Braun and Clarke (2022), \u201cemphasizes the importance of the researcher\u2019s subjectivity as an analytic resource [in TA], and their reflexive engagement with theory, data and interpretation\u201d (p. 330). The authors contrast their reflexive TA method with thematic analyses that prioritize \u201cdemonstrating coding reliability and the avoidance of \u2018bias\u2019\u201d (p. 334). In reflexive TA, \u201cmeaning and knowledge are understood as situated and contextual\u201d (p. 334). \u201cPositivist markers of quality\u201d (p. 334), such as theme development early in the analytic process, working with a fixed codebook, and requiring a group of researchers for coding consensus or measuring between coder agreement, \u201care quite different from reflexive TA\u201d (p. 334).  Reflexive TA and RbT playwriting emphasize the researcher or artist-scholar\u2019s central role in interpretation, casting the artist-scholar as instrument. Playwrights may speak of a script \u2018coming to them\u2019 through inspiration, and researchers may describe \u201cthemes \u2018emerging\u2019 or being \u2018discovered\u2019\u201d (Braun & Clarke, 2006, p. 80). Still, neither account is sufficient for a reflexive TA or ABR process, as they exclude or \u201cden[y] the active role the researcher always plays\u201d (Braun & Clarke, 2006, p. 80) in shaping the narrative presented. The playwright\u2019s dynamic, subjective creation process shapes the play in theatre-as-research creation, and the researcher\u2019s active, personal interpretation shapes the themes reported in reflexive TA. In both approaches, the researchers\u2019 subjectivity is integral \u201crather than a must-be-contained threat to [study] credibility\u201d (p. 335).    72 The importance of subjectivity in the analysis also suggests that different researchers would find different themes in the same data, and other playwrights would create other plays, aligning with the social constructionism epistemology of this project. A helpful analogy might be that research-based plays and reflexive TAs are not lemons picked from a tree but lemon squares (one of my grandmother\u2019s specialties): even if we are following the same recipe and use the same ingredients, we could end up with different squares when we finish baking, and there are many ways to make lemon squares.  More importantly, the data reduction process in these approaches is not analogous to picking lemons from a tree or buying them at a store but making the lemons. In other words, even at the data reduction stage, we are making meaning and interpreting (Braun & Clarke, 2023). Although Salda\u00f1a (2011) has stated, \u201cwe don\u2019t really \u2018write\u2019 ethnodramas, we adapt the stories told to us\u201d (p. 116), this perspective minimizes the active role of the playwright. Elsewhere Salda\u00f1a (2011) uses language like \u201c[piece] together\u201d (p. 71) to describe the research-based playwriting process, which is more active but still suggests monologues and dialogues appear in the data ready for the playwright\u2019s arrangement into script form (Braun & Clarke, 2022). As a playwright engaging in research, I am writing a story on to my data, and this is an integral component of this process. To engage in this process reflexively, I need to articulate my positionality (Braun & Clarke, 2022) as an artist-scholar. Table 1 captures common characteristics across NI, Autoethnography, TA, and RbT.   73 Table 1: Characteristics of NI, autoethnography, TA, and RbT.  Narrative Inquiry Autoethnography Reflexive Thematic Analysis Research-based Theatre Initial Data Generation -Text-based, for example, interview transcripts -Transcripts from other sources (television script) -Other forms of text (webpage copy, archival testimonies, etc.) -Text-based, for example, researcher writing auto-narratives -Other forms of text (journal entries, personal documents, etc.)  -Text-based, for example, interview transcripts -Transcripts from other sources (television script) -Other forms of text (webpage copy, archival testimonies, etc.) -Theatre-based (many include fictional\/metaphorical representation); embodied and artistic exploration that may be undertaken by one or more trained artists, artist-scholars, or participant-collaboratorsa -Text-based, for example, interview transcripts -Transcripts from other sources (television script) -Other forms of text or stimuli for creationb (webpage copy, archival testimonies, music, poetry, photos, etc.)  Iterative Data Analysis Process -Data set reduction, selection, and analysis via restorying and theme identification -Coding and theme identification may be part of analysis   - Data set reduction, selection, and analysis via editing and refining auto-narratives  -Theme identification may be part of analysis   -Data set reduction, selection, and analysis via coding, theme identification -Data set reduction, selection, and analysis via theatre-based strategies (workshopping, writing, rehearsal) -Restorying narratives may be part of analysis -Coding and theme identification may be part of analysis     74  Narrative Inquiry Autoethnography Reflexive Thematic Analysis Research-based Theatre -Member Checking, adjusting restorying -Member checking is not needed -Member checking, adjusting themes -Member checking, further reworking of script or performance elements  Results sharing, findings presentations -Restoried narrative sharing\/theme sharing via journal article or other published text -Narrative sharing\/theme sharing via journal article or other published text -Theme sharing\/insight sharing via journal article or other published text -Theatre performance\/script-reading\/talk-back between artists and audience -Restoriedc narrative sharing\/theme sharing via journal article or other published text - Theme sharing\/insight sharing via journal article or other published text  Note. Although TA is included in the above table alongside NI, autoethnography, and RbT, Braun and Clarke (2022) specify that TA is not a methodology but a collection of strategies for data reduction and analysis. I have chosen to include TA in the table with other methodologies as a means of illustrating the resonances between all the research strategies I include in this dissertation.  a Not all RbT projects will involve trained artists, artist-scholars, and participant-collaborators (a term emphasizing the possibility for research participants to take part in RbT creation). RbT project teams should be created to meet the unique objectives of each study. b RbT may dramatize auto-narratives, transcripts, or other text but does not necessarily rely exclusively on text-based data. Other possible data sources include images or visual artwork, music, or a research question as stimulus for a collaborative development\/workshop\/rehearsal of a new theatre piece.  c Restorying, to story again, story differently, or create \u201ca story-in-progress\u201d (Arvay, 2003, p. 172) may happen at multiple levels in RbT: in a playscript, rehearsal, and performance.   75 In choosing to engage in reflexive TA and RbT specifically, the flexibility of these approaches allows me to fluidly engage with strategies from NI and autoethnography as well. For example, I drew on autoethnographic approaches in generating auto-narratives I could script into a play. I described the specific way I combined reflexive TA and RbT for this study in section 3.6. 3.4 Artist\/Scholar Positionality Statement Regarding personal relevance, I relate to and am related to all aspects of my research dataset. Whether it is my grandmother\u2019s audio recordings, conversations with my mother, or postcards sharing auto-narratives, the dataset comprises texts from my life. The research topic is intimately tied to my transness and the profession to which I have dedicated 11 years of university education.  My training and experience with RbT include supporting the development of research-based plays as a graduate student and employing the methodology in my master\u2019s thesis. This project marks the first time I am drawing on RbT to explore such personal material. I have a personal, academic, and clinical stake in this research topic. From an early age, I had a sense of transness, although I struggled to articulate it for decades. From an early age, I was drawn to counselling psychology, as captured in a monologue excerpt from the playscript in Chapter 4: [Postcard to My Younger Transexual Self, Age 12]  channel 28  5 pm monday-to-friday commitment   startrek: thenextgeneration\u2014reruns  your favourite character  Deanna Troi ship\u2019s counsellor  you are going to grow up  to BE  D. Troi    76 therapist to a starship  Despite my early interest, it took decades for me to arrive in a psychology classroom after having already started two other careers.  My playwriting avoids the transphobic \u201cnarrative tropes of trans depiction or joke-worthy gender failure\u201d (Bey, 2021, p. 389) familiar in plays written from a cis gaze by embracing my subjectivity and focusing on my embodied experience as a trans woman. I am also not interested in writing a play that reinforces transnormativity, or positions a character based on me as a representation of normativity. As a white trans woman, I engage in RbT playwriting centred on stories from my life with an awareness that \u201cwhat passes for trans representation\u201d (Bey, 2021, p. 389) in popular media \u201cis often white trans life\u201d (p. 389), or \u201cthe typical offerings \u2026 of whiteness and spectacularized femininity\u201d (p. 389). Reflexively, I want to engage with the tension of embodying staged narratives that \u201cstand in for the totality of [a trans\u2019] demographic\u201d (p. 389), which audiences may construe as indicating only \u201ca certain kind of trans life as viable\u201d (p. 389).   I disrupt transnormativity by integrating the specificity of my auto-narratives across numerous life transitions: coming out while a counselling psychology graduate student, transitioning in mid-life, troubling conceptions of gender expression within my discipline, and interrogating explicit and implicit forms of transmisogyny in academia. The specifics of the auto-narratives I am exploring make for a better play and discourage any generalizing impulses audiences watching my story might have.  The above illuminates some of the positionality from which I write my research-based play and create a TA. In the following sections, I describe my data generation\/sources, how I wrote a play from the data, and drew themes from the playscript.   77 3.5 Data Generation  Qualitative researchers in counselling psychology are likely used to a section on participants as part of a research design description. Participants are often called collaborators in RbT. In my dissertation, I refer to participant-collaborators to differentiate them from artistic collaborators.  I am playwriting auto-narratives from my life. I am the primary participant-collaborator. Another participant-collaborator is my mother, and I describe the informed consent process below. As this study draws on my narratives, I engaged data generation methods from autoethnography (Poulos, 2021), alongside conducting and transcribing audio-recorded interviews. My data corpus includes the following:  (1) Primary data source: Auto-writing;  (2) Secondary data source: Interview transcripts with my mother and grandmother. Through the scriptwriting process, I explore two overarching narrative strands. The primary strand consists of autobiographical narratives of transitioning my gender expression and publicly expressing my trans identity while undertaking graduate studies in counselling psychology. The secondary strand consists of stories from women in my family detailing their experiences in academia.  3.5.1 Auto-writing: Primary Data Generation Writing is a data generation method in autoethnographic studies (Poulos, 2021). In this RbT playwriting process, following practices standard among autoethnographers, I engaged in regular, weekly writing practices focusing on narrating moments, memories, and reflections from transitioning my gender expression while a graduate student in psychology. I wrote these \u2018free-  78 writes\u2019 in the first person and gave myself the objective of focusing on body-based, emotion-based, or sensory-based components of the narrative (Poulos, 2021). I did not mean these writings to be factual or uncontestable accounts of past events. I considered these writings as narrative constructions of meaning. These free-writes ranged from short paragraphs to several pages long. I engaged in these free-writes 3-4 times a week for 4 months. 3.5.2 Interview Transcripts: Secondary Data Source I invited my mother to participate in three audio-recorded, individual, semi-structured interviews lasting 1.5-2 hrs. each. An ongoing consent process was a significant part of these interviews. The consent processes included making my mother aware that I would use the transcript of our interview to inform the development of a playscript with the intention of future production for both academic and non-academic audiences, as well as the publication of the script in various formats, including as part of my dissertation. I also described the primary topic of the play as my coming out as a trans woman while completing my Ph.D. I explained that I would interweave her narrative and my grandmother\u2019s narrative of graduate school experiences with my own. In addition, I described my approach to RbT playwriting: the script might include verbatim quotes directly from the interview transcript but would also include elements of fiction.  I approached the interview like an open conversation (Brinkmann, 2020; Poulos, 2021) and invited my mother to share any stories related to her experiences in graduate school in the 1970s. I started with the prompt, \u2018How would you want to begin telling me the story of your time in graduate school?\u2019 For further interview prompts, see Appendix B. I audio-recorded the interviews and made transcriptions from the recordings. The interviews took place at my mother\u2019s home, where I grew up.    79 I did not engage in the same process with my grandmother, who died in 2007. A year before her death, my grandmother made two audio-recordings sharing memories from her life. Each recording is over 1 hr. in length. My grandmother shares several stories about attending graduate school in the 1940s in these recordings.  Although I cannot obtain permission from my grandmother to use the recordings, she asked for CDs with the recordings to be gifted to her family. I will return to the ethical tension of telling narratives of loved ones who have died later in the chapter. For now, though, I want to acknowledge that my grandmother shared her lifelong love of Shakespeare with me and took me to see plays as a child. She knew I was studying theatre as an undergraduate in the early 2000s and encouraged my playwriting. If she were alive, I hope she could support my using transcripts of her audio recording for a research-based play script. I transcribed the audio recordings of my mother and grandmother. I approached these transcripts assuming that meanings and stories are co-constructed in interview dialogues and storytelling. This assumption informed my data analysis process, which I describe below. 3.6 Data Analysis Summary: RbT & TA Blend In TA, like RbT, \u201cdata analysis is conceptualised as an art not a science; creativity is central to the process, situated within a framework of rigour\u201d (Braun & Clarke, 2022, p. 9). According to Mackenzie and Belliveau (2011), \u201cthe playwright provides a critical layer of analysis in research-based theatre\u201d (p. 2). Furthermore, Mackenzie and Belliveau (2011) write:  Any playwright will tell you the process of writing and distilling data into stage action through dialogue is riddled with analysis\u2014which themes, characters, moments, words to pursue? From what perspective will it be told? Where will it be set? (p. 12)   80 In the first part of my analysis process, I created an initial draft of a playscript based on my auto-writing and interview transcripts. In the later part of my process, I refined this playscript through several drafts in collaboration with professional theatre artists (Norris, 2017; Salda\u00f1a, 2011; Shigematsu et al., 2021).  My hybrid analysis process involved phases from RbT and TA. Importantly, TA is a method, not a methodology (Braun & Clarke, 2022). I utilize TA within a clear RbT methodological and critical-ideological theoretical framework alongside \u201creflexive descriptions of the method as used\u201d (Braun et al., 2022, p. 432). Braun and Clarke (2021) summarize six steps in their reflexive TA analysis approach:  \u2022 Data familiarization: Immersion in data corpus  \u2022 Systematic data coding: Data reduction and selection  \u2022 Developing initial themes: Grouping codes into initial themes  \u2022 Theme development: Revising themes through code and data review \u2022 Refining themes: Articulating clear theme names and definitions  \u2022 Report writing  For my study, I adapted and transformed these steps into an 8 phase RbT playwriting process as follows:  \u2022 Data familiarization: Immersion in data corpus \u2022 Initial script drafting: Data reduction and abstraction for dramatization \u2022 Script workshopping with professional artist \u2022 Script readings for invited audiences  \u2022 Script revision and re-drafting \u2022 Developing initial themes from playscript for critical commentary   81 \u2022 Revising and refining themes for critical commentary  \u2022 Writing the critical commentary  Braun and Clarke describe a TA process in which scholars move \u201cbackwards and forwards\u201d (Braun & Clarke, 2022, p. 97). My approach demonstrated this cyclical process as multiple phases of data analysis were co-occurring. For example, I returned to data after script workshopping, and I re-drafted the script while developing and reviewing themes for critical commentary.  3.7 Data Analysis Step-by-Step: The Analytic\/Aesthetic Process Up Close I now offer a detailed description of my 8-phase hybrid RbT playwriting and TA process.  3.7.1 Playwriting from Transcripts: Familiarization As my initial analysis task related to data familiarization, I transcribed the complete audio recordings of my grandmother and my interview with my mother. I made these transcripts in a word processing program. Before utilizing my mother\u2019s interview transcript in my scriptwriting process, I invited my mother to review the transcript and edit or remove whatever portions she chose. One section was removed for privacy around a sensitive topic.  My familiarization process for the transcripts involved data immersion through multiple readings and making notes of sections related to narratives of their graduate school experiences, broader education experiences, and those that explicitly focused on gender identity or expression. 3.7.2 Playwriting from Transcripts: Data Reduction & Abstraction In TA, coding involves the researcher engaging in data reduction and initial pattern finding (Braun & Clarke, 2022). In this study, I engaged in data reduction and pattern finding through script writing. Salda\u00f1a (2011) describes a cut-and-paste approach to data reduction from transcripts to a new playscript, working between two word processing documents. Salda\u00f1a   82 compares the process to \u201cpainting a blank canvas improvisationally with words, thinking theatrically as [you] experiment with arrangement and flow\u201d (p. 117). I engaged in cut-and-paste data reduction, selecting transcript excerpts to inform monologues, dialogues, stage directions, or scene titles. Often, due to my previous experience as a playwright, I knew if a transcript selection could be dialogue or some other element of the script immediately. For example, Bess\u2019s line about the smell of a library gladdening her heart is a verbatim excerpt from my grandmother\u2019s transcript. As soon as I heard my grandmother say these words in her recording, I could hear the character of Bess speaking these lines. They convey a life-long passion for scholarship in just a short statement. In this way, I built a story from the data, \u201crearrang[ing] the order of the narrative\u201d (Salda\u00f1a, 2011, p. 71) as needed and adding words and dialogue to \u201cartistically [render]\u2026 the unique empirical materials\u201d (p. 118).  Mackenzie and Belliveau\u2019s (2011) recommendation to \u201cintuitively identify what is essential or, more pointedly, what is viscerally elemental\u201d (p. 8) guided me in this reduction process. In RbT, data reduction also involves abstraction, or \u201cmoving away from the data through the process of dramatic interpretation (e.g., scripting semi-fictional scenes based on the research data)\u201d (Rossiter et al., 2008, p. 133). For example, a recent RbT production represented the live experiences of individuals with dementia through musical numbers, acrobatics, choreographed dance, and performers tangled up in silk sheets (Kuhlmann et al., 2023).  Rossiter and colleagues (2008) and others (Beck et al., 2011) suggest a continuum of data abstraction. In other words, the amount and extent of abstraction differs among RbT works. For example, in vivo quotes from an interview transcript could be edited into a monologue with minimal data abstraction. Or, as Kuhlmann et al. (2023) demonstrate, data could be abstracted into a choreographed dance, involving a great deal more aesthetic interpretation. Although some   83 RbT artist-scholars may choose to prioritize minimal data abstraction, Kuhlmann et al. (2023) state that \u201cabstraction of data is one of the key strengths of [RbT] \u2026 allowing for new interpretations as research comes into dialogue with audiences and facilitating experiential and transformative forms of learning\u201d (p. 468). Their perspective suggests that dramatized abstraction of data is a particularly vital process for artist-scholars working from a critical-ideological paradigm and intending to impact change. I chose to embrace abstraction and fiction in my playscript, a choice I will continue to explore in Chapters 4, 5, and 6. 3.7.3 Playwriting Auto-Texts: Data Reduction through Postcard Writing Alongside playwriting from transcripts, I was playwriting auto-texts. Doing both allowed me to dialogue across my data set. For example, I excerpted transcript data points about how professors qualified my grandmother\u2019s achievements with explicit comparison to her male peers. I then considered my experience with hierarchies and comparisons in academia when playwriting auto-texts as a result. The character of Gandin emerged from this investigation, a fictional character that all the other characters in the play encounter in academia. To transform my auto-texts into playscript form, I made them monologues, or text spoken by a single character. I wrote these monologues in the form of postcards. The format of postcards served as both an accessible writing prompt (postcards are short, written in point form, and can be scribbled out quickly) and offered a narrative structure. Saldana offers the following on monologue structure in research-based plays (2011): \u201cSometimes a \u201cslice of life\u201d monologue has no preparatory framing\u2014we dive right into the complicating action\u201d (p. 69). On the other hand, \u201cif a monologue is a portrait in miniature, then the narrative styles can range from impressionism to abstraction\u201d (p. 69).    84 Bakhtin (1981) refers to postcard texts as an everyday genre, like \u201cthe private letter, the laundry note \u2013 that are not considered artistic. They are, however, both conventionalized and canonized; indeed, all communication must take place against a certain background of shared expectations.\u201d (p. 428). The text on the back of a postcard often contains stock phrases, like \u2018wish you were here,\u2019 and cliches about the weather when travelling. When writing my playscript, I drew on Rodney\u2019s (2012) exploration of the work of the conceptual artist On Kawara, and Rodney\u2019s descriptions of postcards as \u201cthe most public and private of all forms of communication, generic and specific at once\u201d (p. 24). Alongside these shared genre expectations, I gave myself the invitation to write postcards as \u201corganic poems\u201d (Anna Deavere Smith as cited in Salda\u00f1a, 2011, p. 18), dwelling in the everyday poetry of how I might share my heart, thoughts, and somatic experiences with a dear loved one, in ways that would make them open their heart back, or laugh with me in response, or ask me a new kind of question. A playscript written in poetic format \u201chas particular effects\u201d (Salda\u00f1a, 2011, p. 72). When audiences encounter a research-based play written with poetic text, they \u201care forced to pay more attention to each particular grouping of words as a single idea and to attend to the way that the structure of free verse effects oral reading\u201d (p. 72). I drafted my organic poem postcards by hand, on my laptop or phone, or on actual postcards. I put aside time weekly to engage in regular postcard writing, and this took the place of my initial weekly auto-text writing during the data generation phase. I also allowed myself to write these narratives fluidly, on the bus, on a class break, or in bed, as a particular autobiographical memory came to me (for example, turning a white t-shirt into a dress at age 6) or as a means of processing an experience that had just occurred (having an egg thrown at me while travelling).    85 Whatever medium I used first to draft a postcard, I wrote the text on an actual postcard for a second draft. Although postcards come in all different sizes, the size constrains the length of the text. I used this constraint as a revision tool, refining and limiting each postcard\u2019s text to its essential elements, thereby creating \u201cdistilled or condensed\u201d (Salda\u00f1a, 2011, p. 70) drafts of these monologues. My reflexive interaction with the autobiographical narratives I was writing differed greatly depending on whether the experience was recent or years ago. Early on, I became aware that I could bring aesthetic, analytic, and emotional reflexivity to my writing about narratives like my t-shirt dress from my early life (age 6) but dwelt in emotion when processing narratives about recent experiences. One way this manifested was in length. The first drafts of postcards I wrote about recent experiences were often several pages long, and I had difficulty editing them to fit onto a postcard. In these cases, I kept the longer material until I could reflexively engage and selectively isolate patterns and unique occurrences to highlight in edited, shortened versions of these texts.  After playwriting from transcripts and playwriting auto-texts separately for six months, I brought these script fragments together in a complete draft of the playscript ahead of an initial workshop with professional theatre artists. I combined the various script fragments in a way that continued a dialoguing process across different aspects of the data corpus, intentionally intermingling narrative strands from my life, my mother, and my grandmother, and valuing a non-linear progression of events as a representation of trans time (Keyes et al., 2021).  3.7.4 Play Development Workshops and Subsequent Drafts Plays are only temporarily housed on the page. A script is always an artifact of transition from the theatre-making process. The script transforms as it moves from the craft of writer and   86 dramaturge to the crafts of the director, performers, designers, producers, and stage managers. All the while, the play is being transmitted orally among these artists in workshops and rehearsals as much as a written document. Once I completed the first draft of the play, my mother and I reviewed the script. Our collaborative review process directly influenced the script. We edited several lines for character credibility, focusing on Brim, the central character\u2019s mother. While acknowledging that Brim was fictional rather than a verbatim representation of my mother, I asked my mother during our member checking if there were lines or actions that did not resonate with her. Several of Brim\u2019s lines were removed, and I reordered sections of dialogue to accommodate these edits.   Three play development workshops allowed me to further refine my script by \u201cenvision[ing it] as if it were to be performed on stage\u201d (Salda\u00f1a, 2011, p. 71), asking, alongside fellow theatre artists (a dramaturge, actors, sound designer, and producer), how I stage these stories. As part of the workshops, we got monologues and scenes \u2018up on their feet,\u2019 meaning we read through them in an embodied way, moving around rehearsal studios. We experimented with music and considered potential elements of the set and costumes. In this way, my envisioning of future productions of the script was a collective process, one in which I wrote several new drafts during the workshop based on my explorations with other artists.  Throughout the workshop with professional theatre artists, I clarified the script\u2019s meaning and developed more fully realized versions of the characters. For example, with the play\u2019s dramaturge, Joanna Garfinkel, I clarified the play\u2019s non-linear structure and the possibilities for audience interaction in the script. In partnership with a composer, Sara Vickruck, I arrived at signature sounds for the characters: Brim\u2019s sound is a ringing telephone, and another character\u2019s sound is windchimes. These sounds are artistic choices that communicate meaning. For example,   87 the windchimes represent movement and communication across time between grandmother and granddaughter.  3.7.5 Invited Play Readings and Subsequent Drafts I also shared the playscript with invited audiences five times, reading excerpts or the latest complete draft, depending on the setting. These readings occurred in classrooms, conference rooms, rehearsal studios, or black box theatre spaces in Vancouver, Toronto, Melbourne, and Barcelona. Another way research-based playwriting, like TA, is recursive is the process of \u201cre-writing after a live reading or workshop\u201d (Mackenzie & Belliveau, 2011, p. 7) in which further \u201clayers and nuances are teased out\u201d (p. 7). Reading the script aloud for invited audiences allowed me to refine the script\u2019s rhythm, clarify meaning based on audience members\u2019 questions, and experiment with ways to involve the audience actively. Although these readings were not full productions, they were essential gestures towards eventual production, as \u201cthe creation of theatre needs the production element to reveal a richer substance. \u2026 . A play needs to be performed with an audience for the full meaning to be seen and heard\u201d (Mackenzie & Belliveau, 2011, p. 6).  After a full reading of an early draft in a studio theatre space with stage lights and no audience interaction, I was surprised by how separated I felt from those watching. If you have never performed under stage lights in a dark theatre, it may be hard to imagine how bright they are and how much they block out your ability to see the audience. I found this experience troubling, particularly as a trans woman on stage, feeling separate and apart.  Moving forward, I promised myself I would strive to share the piece in non-traditional theatre spaces or at least with the house lights up so I could see the audience and engage their participation in the play\u2019s storytelling.    88 3.7.6 Theme Creation and Revision Although Braun and Clarke (2022) view reflexive TA as \u201ctelling a story\u201d (p. 85) about the data, themes and write-ups are not stories. In reflexive TA, themes may be offered in a list or table, with descriptions, as I provide in Chapter 5. TA themes are subjective interpretations separated from the narratives of the data, supporting another avenue to analytic understanding. TA offers explicit ways of stating meaning through theme naming, definitions, and example excerpts. While revising the playscript in the workshops and as part of readings for invited audiences, I began identifying and refining themes that spoke to patterns across the playscript. I present these themes in Chapter 5. RbT playscripts offer no such explicit theme lists, tables, or descriptions; they provide a narrative encapsulation of themes. Although playwrights can write characters that explicitly state themes and their meanings in the script, such playwriting is often considered didactic (Salda\u00f1a, 2011; Smiley, 2005). Research-based playwright Donnard Mackenzie says, \u201cI try to avoid showing the analysis by not being too obvious. I think theatre should be a bit of a puzzle where the audience can make discoveries without a playwright pointing them out\u201d (Mackenzie & Belliveau, 2011, p. 12). If RbT playwrights strive to achieve the explicitness of academic text in explicating themes, we lose a key strength of theatre-as-research approaches: the expansive possibility of script writing to dwell in generative questions related to the research data that promote deep empathic engagement with multiple nuanced perspectives (Baer et al., 2019; Belliveau et al., 2019; Belliveau & Lea, 2016; Gray, 2023).  3.7.7 Process Postcards: Process-Focused Analytic\/Aesthetic Memos Throughout my data analysis phases, I wrote memos (Salda\u00f1a, 2011; Salvatore, 2020) detailing the specifics of the RbT process I engaged in and my reflections on sharing the work   89 with invited audiences. I hand wrote the memos on blank postcards. These memos were initial opportunities for me to consider the methodological possibilities that emerged from this research-based play and also offered opportunities to engage with the unexpected elements of creating and sharing this RbT work. I consider several selections from these memos in Chapter 5. 3.8 Scientist-Partitioners, Artist-Scholars, and the Ethics of RbT Playwriting According to Haverkamp\u2019s (2005) scientist-practitioner perspective, counselling psychologists \u201crequire an approach to qualitative ethics that differentiates them from other qualitative researchers\u201d (p.146). For example, Haverkamp suggests \u201cthat a research participant who describes a personal experience of trauma to a psychology researcher brings different expectations to that conversation than to a research conversation with an anthropologist\u201d (p. 153) due to public confidence in our clinical knowledge. From an RbT perspective, Lea and Belliveau (2023) state that \u201cwhen situated within the realm of academic research, RbT projects must strike a balance between responsibilities to the theatrical art form and the requirements of institutional research ethics\u201d (p. 352). As I engaged in this research, I questioned how to balance scientist-practitioner ethical commitments in writing a research-based play. I explore these questions below. 3.8.1 Confidentiality on Stage and Processes of Informed Consent in RbT Qualitative researchers working with long participant-collaborator quotes must reckon with the potential for these quotes, even when identifying details are disguised, to compromise confidentiality (Haverkamp, 2005). Research-based playwrights must do the same while considering the potential \u2018what ifs\u2019 of confidentiality violations by putting potentially identifiable participant-collaborator quotes or narratives onstage, arguably a venue for broader public consumption (Belliveau, Cox, et al., 2020).    90 In my RbT process, I could not offer confidentiality as my script features auto-narratives. I strove to create some level of anonymity, changing names and other identifiable details, but I made it clear to my mother during our informed consent process that it would be possible for audiences reading or watching the script to identify her story. Furthermore, we were navigating dual relationships: mother\/daughter, playwright\/interviewee, artist-scholar\/participant-collaborator. These multiple roles with potentially conflicting interests made me examine what informed consent looked like in this process beyond consent forms with blank lines for signatures.  Research consent processes are \u201cinherently hierarchical\u201d (Haverkamp, 2005, p. 154), and an RbT playwriting is no exception. Artist-scholar\/participant-collaborator power dynamics are always asymmetrical (Haverkamp, 2005). This makes a continuous, open-ended consent process imperative (Haverkamp, 2005). The consent process I engaged in with my mother while I wrote this research-based play was \u201congoing, [and] mutually negotiated\u201d (p. 154). At the start of each interview and transcript review session, we explored what my mother did and did not want in the script. In the play review session, I read the entire play to my mother, monologue by monologue, scene by scene, and checked for understanding, consent to the use of the specific interview material as dramatized, and if there were elements she felt were missing. I also acknowledged as we reviewed our almost five hours of recorded interviews, that only a portion of the interviews would be explicitly included in the script, and we discussed other ways the material could be carried forward. I gave my mother the digital audio files of our interviews, as well as the transcripts, and encouraged her to consider sharing the material with other family members, as my grandmother did with her audio recordings in the early 2000s.    91 3.8.2 But What About My Electrologist? Ethically Including Others in Staged Auto-Narratives All RbT auto-narratives are plays about others as much as plays about ourselves (Poulos, 2021). Indeed, our self-narratives often depend on the stories we tell of others (Tullis, 2022). My auto-narratives include individuals whom I have known over the last three decades of my life. I did not seek the consent of individuals I mentioned from my past, for example, my babysitter at 6 years old, because I have no way of contacting them. In other cases, for example, members of my health care team, I did not contact them for consent because they control my access to gender affirming care, and I do not want to jeopardize that.    My grandmother and mother\u2019s transcripts mention various third parties who were identifiable in the narratives they shared but also did not consent. In an RbT study which centers on personal stories, I must be aware of whose stories I include alongside mine. In the script, I changed personal details freely to anonymize others in my, my mother\u2019s, and grandmother\u2019s narratives. Fiction provides privacy by allowing me to change certain identifiable characteristics of those involved, and this is a common practice for many researchers known as creating composite narratives or characters (Willis, 2019). Composite characters, however, are just the beginning of the possibilities fiction offers RbT playwrights, a topic I will return to in Chapter 5. But regardless of how artist-scholars use fiction in a piece, \u201cthe play must remain grounded in all that the researchers have defined as viable data\u201d (Mackenzie & Belliveau, 2011, p. 11). In respect of anonymity, I also chose not to name the people mentioned in the script who are not characters. For example, Spiling refers to \u201cmy electrologist,\u201d and Bess-Rose Marie refers to \u201cher roommate,\u201d but never by name. Not only does this support privacy, but I also left these   92 individuals unnamed to imply to audiences that these are not their stories, and the playscript\u2019s narratives center on the named characters.  Despite the above, I remained wary of telling self-narratives that delimited alternative tellings from those who populated my narratives: babysitter, supervisors \u2013 even my electrologist. Whose stories are made subordinate to support the telling of my stories in the playscript? Put another way, how are these personal narratives biased? And is the only resort to telling biased personal narratives not to tell them at all?  3.8.3 Perspectives of a Counselling Psychology RbT Playwright on Personal Biases Scholars working in critical autoethnography argue that they embrace personal \u201cperspective (what some might call \u2018bias\u2019) to identify and challenge oppressive cultural beliefs, norms, and practices\u201d (Adams et al., 2022, p. 6). I am uneasy with grouping numerous cognitive biases that may influence my RbT writing and presentation of auto-narratives under the umbrella of \u2018my perspective.\u2019 My issue is that, while I am challenging oppressive power structures with \u2018my perspectives,\u2019 how am I interrogating my power as an artist-scholar? I want to engage in the ethical analysis and presentation of my stories by considering the numerous potential cognitive biases (Haverkamp, 2005) that may skew the stories I tell, including confirmation, recall, and social desirability bias, as well as biases stemming from a desire to minimize cognitive dissonance.  Confirmation bias indicates that the personal narratives I include in my research-based play may be limited to those confirming my beliefs about myself and the world (Featherston et al., 2020). Recall bias draws attention to how I might be misremembering narrative details, including affect-related details, recalling memories with different affects or differing intensities of affects than I would have reported during the actual experience (Colombo et al., 2020).   93 Considering external expectations, social desirability bias suggests that my judgements around maintaining social acceptability will impact the content of my personal narratives (Bergen & Labont\u00e9, 2020). Considering internal beliefs, to minimize cognitive dissonance that challenges my core assumptions of being a \u2018good person,\u2019 I might restory or exclude relevant narratives that contain examples of personal intolerance (Ford et al., 2022).  Statements that acknowledge the presence of biases like these in research based on auto-narratives are essential, such as \u201cI offer a narrative that displays my sense-making, my own biases, and interests, and my limitations\u201d (Pelias, 2022, p. 121). Or similarly, a statement like Poulos (2021) makes: \u201cThis kind of memory meaning is interpretive (subjective and open to various explanations); memory is not, for most of us, eidetic (precise recollection)\u201d (p. 44).  To draw a similar example from theatre, in Tennessee Williams\u2019 (1949) The Glass Menagerie, the character Tom addresses the audience at the start of the script and describes what they are about to see as a memory play. The audience knows from the start that Tom\u2019s biases are present. Beyond acknowledgments like these, I used reflexive process memos as an \u201cintentional and rhetorical process of analyzing [my] \u2026 research processes, biases, word choices, story choices, and analytic choices in a constant process of perception checking\u201d (Johnson & LeMaster, 2020, p. 7). Not to attempt to strive for bias-free research-based playwriting or TA, which would be impossible, but to actively incorporate an examination of potential biases as an essential analytic, aesthetic, and ethical strategy (Braun & Clarke, 2022; Haverkamp, 2005; Morrow, 2005).  3.8.4 Centring an Ethic of Trans Care Haverkamp\u2019s suggestion for counselling psychologists engaging in qualitative research to turn to ethical theories can support artist-scholars in navigating ethical choices in RbT as well.   94 Similarly, Lea and Belliveau (2023) draw a distinction between \u201c\u2018procedural\u2019\/macro ethics [which] are more clearly delineated\u201d (p. 352) in academic contexts by ethics review boards and \u201c\u2018ethics in practice\u2019\/micro ethics [which] can be harder to anticipate\u201d (p. 352) in an RbT process, which require thorough consideration. I considered macro and micro ethics in this study through theorizing on trans ethics of care, which disrupts hetero-\/cisnormative values.  Malatino\u2019s (2020) book Trans Care offers insights into a trans ethic of care, which is \u201conly ever manifested through practice\u2014action, labor, work\u201d (p. 41), and decenters care language with hetero- and cis-normative metaphors to move concretely \u201cinto the intricately interconnected spaces and places where trans and queer care labor occurs: the street, the club, the bar, the clinic, the community center, the classroom, the nonprofit, and sometimes, yes, the home\u201d (p. 42). Malatino (2020) points out that \u201cwhile trans bodies are routinely theorized as a prompt for cis folks to reconsider \u2026 the nature of embodiment, we have not thought very much, or very carefully, about whether and what form of ethics might spring from such a reconsideration\u201d (p. 40). For Malatino trans care: is a very different conception of ethical behavior than one that proceeds from ethical rules or first principles and features a moral agent who has maximal agency and unmitigated choice in the actions they take. An ethos emerges from an ensemble of practices \u2026. Because care isn\u2019t abstract, but only ever manifested through practice.\u201d (p. 40-41) A trans ethic of care actively informs my ethical sharing of auto-narratives in a theatrical form, taking the shape of specific commitments (Owis et al., 2023). For example, I include several stage directions in the playscript that enable me to skip postcards during readings if I feel too vulnerable or raw to revisit a specific autobiographical moment. These opportunities for choice feel empowering and like affirming acts of care.   95 3.8.5 Would My Grandmother Want to be in This Research-Based Play? An emergent ethos of trans care practices also allows me to examine how I am sharing narratives of a family member, my grandmother, who cannot give her consent. I stated earlier in the chapter that I hoped my grandmother, who died in 2007, would support me using her audio recordings for a research-based play. As I wrote my playscript, I wondered if she would want her graduate school narratives informing this playscript, one that explores my transness.  Trans playwrights staging narratives based on their origin family face tangled ethical tensions. Inherently, a playwright is in a position of power as a public storyteller. However, trans playwrights are writing for a public who may be ambivalent or hostile towards affirming trans narratives, depending on the audience (Bornstein, 2016). Furthermore, trans playwrights may investigate narratives from their families of origin in which they are subjected to physical, emotional, or ideological violence due to their implicit or explicit expression of transness. Such ambivalence, hostility, and violence must be considered in examining the relationships of power and responsibility when narrating family histories on stage (Ellis, 2007; Poulos, 2021).  A family member may take issue with a play in which their previous actions are portrayed as transphobic. They may feel hurt as they watch a character, based on them, shown as antagonistic towards a trans child, sibling, or parent. However, I would argue that the potential benefits of naming and outing transphobia in theatre as a means to \u201cscrutinize public meanings\u201d (Dolan, 2005, p. 6) and challenge cisnormative prejudices outweigh the potential harm (Ellis, 2007; Poulos, 2021). Tran folks can better support each other, and allies can actively help us, if we move transphobia from behind closed doors to places of public scrutiny, conversation, and learning.    96 But these tangled ethical tensions become even more knotted if a family member has passed away and has no opportunity to respond to how they are portrayed in a play. Lea and Belliveau (2023) wrestle with the ethics of staging narratives of chosen or genetic family who have died and question \u201cwhich stories might be best left untold\u201d (p. 344). Writing from the perspective of autoethnography, Poulos (2021) implies secret-telling is inherent when scholars use their auto-narratives, as the \u201cresearcher [is] writing about a topic of great personal relevance (e.g., family secrets)\u201d (p. 9) and he extols converting family secrets to stories for scholarly examination. According to Ellis (2007), \u201ceffective autoethnography demands showing perceived warts and bruises as well as the accolades and successes\u201d (p. 17) of intimate others. Such revelations can sometimes serve as memorials but are \u201coften \u2026 ethically more complicated\u201d (Ellis, 2007, p. 15) than pure remembrances.  I never spoke to my grandmother directly about my transness or queerness. When my grandmother was alive, these aspects of me remained unsayable. At times, when I visited her for long weekends during my undergraduate degree, she shared perspectives on queerness informed by the contexts of her generation. She grew up and lived most of her adult years in times when the health disciplines pathologized queer and trans lives, and media representations were just as pathologizing (Serano, 2016). An ethical tension I feel acutely, as pointed out by the play\u2019s dramaturge, Joanna Garfinkel (personal communication), is that my grandmother does not get to change alongside our changing context. If my grandmother were alive today, how would she relate to our contemporary conversations on transness and queerness?  I would say I did not know my grandmother well. And I would say that she did not know me. My not knowing forms one of the play\u2019s significant emotional gestures and transformations: How would my grandmother relate to a granddaughter she never knew she had, if she was given   97 that opportunity? How would I relate to her? One of the ways I have dealt with this tension is through fiction: my young grandmother writing me postcards and watching me share my experiences as a trans woman. In this play, my grandmother is imagined relating to my transness not as unsayable but as unremarkable. This is the fictional grandmother\/granddaughter relationship I choose to dramatize, aligning with my understanding of an ethic of trans care that respects future transformative possibilities, and future possibilities can only ever be fiction. Graham Lea\u2019s RbT Homa Bay Memories inspired me to create a dramatized fictional encounter that restories \u201ca problem-saturated\u201d (Neimeyer, 2014, p. 77) narrative of our relationship to one that offers my grandmother and me an \u201cunfinished eternal possibility in which [we] can reconnect \u2026 across time, space, and mortality\u201d (Lea & Belliveau, 2023, p. 352). 3.9 Evaluating RbT Playwriting Given my methodological mash-up, I draw on multiple sources for research evaluation protocols for this study, as recommended by Morrow (2005). The below table (Table 2) presents evaluative criteria for qualitative research best practices and RbT projects specifically from Tracy (2010), Nichols et al. (2023), Belliveau and Lea (2016) and Lea (2014).     Table 2: Evaluative Criteria for RbT Playwriting. General qualitative \/RbT specific  Criteria Exemplified by:  General qualitative Rigor  (Tracy, 2010) \u2022 Theory\/methodology match:  - I clearly state my epistemological and axiological positions and have selected methodologies and methods, RbT & TA, aligned with these positions. \u2022 Robust data generation and analysis:    98 General qualitative \/RbT specific  Criteria Exemplified by:  - I wrote the playscript over 1.5 years, engaging in a long-term, reflexive analytic process. - RbT & TA offer systematic and aesthetic data reduction approaches to support systematic and aesthetic analysis (Belliveau & Lea, 2016; Braun & Clarke, 2022). General qualitative Sincerity  (Tracy, 2010) \u2022 Artist-scholar process transparency: - I engaged in reflexive memo writing practice that forefront my challenges, questions, and biases in the playwriting process; these memos informed dialogue in my RbT playscript. General qualitative Credibility  (Tracy, 2010) \u2022 Show rather than tell: - Research-based playwriting prioritizes an aesthetic of embodied \u2018showing\u2019 the data (Salda\u00f1a, 2011). My \u2018showing\u2019 is the playscript in the next chapter. \u2022 Crystallization, or employing \u201cmultiple types of data and \u2026 various methods \u2026 to open up a more complex, in-depth, but still thoroughly partial, understanding\u201d (Tracy, 2010, p. 844): - I used multiple data sources (interview transcripts, auto-narratives) and methods (RbT, TA). General qualitative Resonance  (Tracy, 2010) \u2022 \u201cInfluences, affects, or moves particular readers or a variety of audiences through aesthetic, evocative representation\u201d (Tracy, 2010, p. 840): - RbT playwriting is uniquely positioned to meet these qualitative research criteria through expressive and vivid dramatizations (Belliveau & Lea, 2016). RbT specific Integrates learning  (Nichols et al., 2023) \u2022 \u201cHow have learning processes been integrated into the project?\u201d (p. 5) - Process memos integrated my learning into the playwriting process. RbT specific Carries forward learning (Nichols et al., 2023) \u2022 \u201cHow do we share project successes and lessons learned to inform future RbT projects?\u201d (p. 5) - The critical commentary speaks directly to the lessons learned to inform future RbT work. RbT specific Centers theatre aesthetics (Belliveau & Lea, 2016) \u2022 Prioritizes theatre as an art form in research: - I draw on my training and professional abilities as a playwright to utilize theatre as empirical research.   99 General qualitative \/RbT specific  Criteria Exemplified by:  RbT specific Gifting  (Lea, 2014) \u2022 \u201cContinue[s] the chains of transformative circular gifting\u201d (Lea, 2014, p. 30), which Lea conceptualizes as beginning when collaborators offer stories to artist-scholars and continuing when artist-scholars transform and transmit these stories for audiences: - The play development process included \u2018gifting\u2019 the script to invited audiences.  - Although beyond the scope of this research project, I intend to pursue the script\u2019s production with local theatre companies to continue the chain \u201cof transformative circular gifting\u201d (p. 30).    100 Chapter 4: Postcards to My Younger Transexual Self, Ages 0-119, A Playscript   I don\u2019t believe in safe spaces. They don\u2019t exist. I do, however, believe in dangerous stories: The kind that swirl up from inside of you when you least expect it, like the voice of a mad angel whispering of the revolution that you are about to unleash \u2026 Where are those kinds of stories about trans girls like you and me? -Kai Cheng Thom, Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars:  A Dangerous Trans Girl\u2019s Confabulous Memoir 4.1 Prologue: Postcards to the Reader Figure 2: Process Memo Process Memo: Postcard Memories  Note. The word \u2018time\u2019 is missing from the first sentence on the postcard above. The question should read: When was the last time\u2026?   101 \u201cWhen was the last time you sent or received a postcard?\u201d asked dramaturge Joanna Garfinkel. We sat around a table at the start of the first play development workshop for Postcards to My Younger Transexual Self, Ages 0-119. Figure 2 shares a process memo detailing this moment.  Postcards offer the glamour of travel while being affordable souvenirs. They are a chance to reach out to a chosen family member, friend, or lover. Companies, artists, and government agencies may use them to advertise or provide information. On the fridge, a corkboard, or in a shoebox, collected postcards might feature famous artworks or geographies. Today, handwriting an address, stamping, and dropping a postcard in a mailbox may be rare and unfamiliar compared to emailing or texting.  When Joanna asked us about postcards, each artist present in the first development workshop had different answers: a remembered postcard received as a teen, desperately searching the airport for a mailbox to send promised postcards before a return flight, a government notice someone received in the mail a few weeks ago. But each of us had postcard memories.  Salda\u00f1a (2011) makes use of \u201ccurtain raisers\u201d (p. 63) or introductory monologues or dialogues that set the stage for the research-based play that is about to be shared. Similarly, Belliveau and Lea\u2019s work (Belliveau, Lea, et al., 2020) exemplifies a three-act structure encompassing the research-based playscript: the first act is the prologue or introduction to the RbT script, the second act is the script, and the third act is an epilogue, which in performance often includes a conversation with audiences. I have written this chapter with a similar three-act structure. This section serves as the curtain-raiser, the next section is the playscript, and the chapter\u2019s final section is a bridge between the script and the critical commentary in Chapter 5.    102 Reflexively, I also acknowledge that, as Caswell (2011) writes by way of introducing an autoethnodramatic playscript dealing with personal and familial narratives, \u201cthis text is open and from the fiber of my being, but I don\u2019t know exactly how to tell you what this is\u201d (p. 165). I must push through my desires to write: \u2018I\u2019ve said all I wanted to say \u2013 it\u2019s in the playscript.\u2019 I also must move past my concern that speaking about artistic choices in isolation, as I do in this prologue, flattens them by removing them from the context of all the other creative decisions in the piece. Below, I consider the play\u2019s title, characters\u2019 names, and fiction-as-transformation to illustrate that every word and line break in the script, no matter how seemingly minor, is an aesthetic choice that conveys a pattern of meaning. In reading plays, we must consider \u201cthe way the story is told, word for word\u201d (Ruhl, 2014, p. 25). Playscripts are intended to be read differently than novels, short stories, poems, or other literary forms. For one, they are designed for performance rather than publication on the printed page. In this way, the script could be viewed as an incomplete or unfinished work. This incompleteness promotes possibility and asks readers to move from a passive assimilation of a text to a stance of active spectatorship. Questions to inform your reading include: What images arise in your imagination as you read the play? Which images occur more than once or stay with you after reading? What emotions arise in you? What are you aware of in your body as you read the script? What might you imagine happening on stage if you saw this play performed? What, for you, is legible in the script? What is illegible? What is your relationship to what is legible\/illegible?   103 4.1.1 An \u2018Outdated\u2019 Title Play titles are crucial in my writing process. A title, for me, is always part of my earliest conceptualizing of a script. I need a title before I start writing. So, from the beginning of my writing process, I knew the play\u2019s title included transexual. According to the American Psychological Association (2020) style guide, \u201cthe term \u2018transsexual\u2019 is largely outdated, but some people identify with it; this term should be used only for an individual who specifically claims it\u201d (p. 135). I briefly explored transexual in Chapter 1 with DSM\u2019s revamped diagnostic categories that influenced gender-affirming care access. Here, I want to further explore this term and my reasons for using it so prominently in my play\u2019s title.  In Transgender History, Stryker (2017) traces the origin of the word transexual to medical literature from the first half of the twentieth century, including the work of Magnus Hirschfeld, a German physician credited with creating the term transsexualismus, and Harry Benjamin, who popularized the term in North American medical literature. Based on its original clinical definition, transsexual referred to individuals seeking gender-affirming surgeries (Benjamin, 1954). The transgender communities reclaimed the word and expanded its meaning to include diverse gender identities, expressions, and manners of affirming one\u2019s gender. In the clinical literature, authors spelt transexual with two Ss, transsexual. According to Serano (n.d.), \u201cDuring the 1990s, the activist group Transexual Menace forwarded the alternative spelling \u2018transexual\u2019 (with one S rather than two) as a reclaimed variant of the word\u201d (Transsexual, par. 1). Stryker (2007) writes that, even in trans communities, transexual is now \u201csometimes considered an old-fashioned word\u201d (p. 38). Elsewhere Stryker (2016) speaks of transsexuality as \u201canother gender possibility, another site of identification, a place, a space\u201d (p. 304), albeit one   104 that means \u201ctaking on a language that is already being spoken by other people\u201d (p. 303-304). But what are the possibilities for \u201cobtaining and coining new words, making neologisms\u201d (p. 304) from language that already exists? Stryker states that \u201ctranssexuality\u2014the way it has been stigmatized and pathologized or eroticized in a very suspect way\u2014is really just a powerful mechanism for containing the transformative potential of human existence\u201d (p. 304). Psychologists and other medical professionals working today favour trans and transgender. I use the term transexual in my play\u2019s title to emphasize that (1) our language for gender is fluid and changing, and (2) as a reminder that trans history exists, and this history is rich and varied. One aspect of this history includes storied relationships with counselling psychologists and other health professionals and the reclaiming of language used in these settings. When health professionals switched from transsexual to transgender to be less outdated, this was a surface transformation. It does not necessarily alter outdated assessments and clinical practices, which requires more profound reflexive change on the part of clinicians and our discipline as a whole. 4.1.2 Character Names I need a title before I start writing; similarly, I need my characters to have names. The play has four characters, performed by two actors and a musician.  The play\u2019s central character is Spiling, described in the stage directions as \u2018a trans woman with an affinity for postcards.\u2019 Spiling is the speaker of the play\u2019s title; she is the character writing postcards to herself. Although this work contains auto-narratives, I chose not to give the central character the name Christina. The play\u2019s text includes moments from Spiling\u2019s life up to the age of 119, and I cannot claim that much life experience. Furthermore, the name evokes a meaningful metaphor of transitioning as a graduate student in counselling psychology.   105 Literary critic Lejeune\u2019s autobiographical pact is \u201ca tacit agreement a reader makes with the author of a text which has non-fictional truth claims\u201d (Julie, 2009, p. 17). Part of Lejeune\u2019s pact suggests that \u201cthe author\u2019s proper name in the world outside the text matches the name on the cover of the book, and the first-person pronoun within the narrative itself\u201d (p. 17). If the names differ, \u201cthe book is considered to be fictional\u201d (p. 17) rather than autobiographical. Although Lejeune\u2019s work has been criticized for positing an oversimplification of the direct relationship \u201cbetween author, narrator and character\u201d (Allamand, 2018, p. 52), Lejeune\u2019s aim was to describe the intention with which an author and reader comes to autobiographical material, and he acknowledged the existence of narrative construction of identity through storytelling even in autobiographical work (Allamand, 2018; Lejeune, 2009). Continuing from Lejeune\u2019s pact, considering the intention of naming the central character in my RbT play, I am making a fiction pact with my audience. I want audiences to approach this work with autobiographical elements as fiction.  As I suggested in the last chapter, the name change and pact of fiction are ethical acts of self-care. If I get up on stage and share these stories, I prefer to maintain privacy about the events that have actually happened to me. Writing from a family therapy perspective, Androutsopoulou (2001) posits that fiction is \u201ctemporarily safer [emphasis added] than the use of the first person\u201d  (p. 286), and therapeutically, individuals can use the \u201ccontent of a fictional story \u2026 as a vehicle \u2026 to talk about their lives\u201d (p. 286). Similarly, drama therapists position fiction as a \u201ctherapeutic tool\u201d that offers \u201ca safe container for diverse and difficult feelings, experiences, and thoughts. Through the use of fictional characters\u2026 clients begin to discover and explore their inner worlds, tapping into dormant creative energies\u201d (Sajnani & Johnson, 2014, p. 289). Spiling is that safer container for me.    106 The other characters, Brim, Bess, and Gandin, also have made-up names. Brim, Spiling\u2019s mother, and Bess, Spiling\u2019s grandmother, have made up names to offer privacy to my mother and grandmother and to mark that these too are fictional characters, not attempts at one-for-one representations of the women in my family. Additionally, these names, like Spiling, convey meaning. The name Brim draws a connection to Spiling, as in \u2018spilling over the brim,\u2019 and Spiling is ultimately closest to her mother. Even if an audience does not consciously make this connection as they watch the play, I contend these names will implicitly support their understanding of the close (though sometimes fraught) relationship between these two characters. The name Bess is less clearly connected to Spiling and Brim, creating a distance between this name and the other women\u2019s, implying a lack of closeness in their relationships and the separation of time and death. Bess also evokes \u2018better\u2019 and \u2018best,\u2019 which draws attention to the character\u2019s academic abilities as well as how her achievements were qualified:  highest praise your Grand-Mother got:  she was \u2018as good as the boys\u2019 right? in the lab\u2014  she was better actually. as i understand it. but that would have been going too far  Gandin, whose name is also made up, may seem illegible or disorienting to some, and this is the point. Gandin is not simply a composite character, nor is Gandin only a personification of misogyny and transphobia in academia. Gandin reappears in different universities, decades apart, engaging the other characters like a nomadic monument to the violence of implicit and explicit minimizing and erasure. Gandin\u2019s seeming immortality and everywhereness is a \u201c(re)configuring of spacetimemattering\u201d (Barad, 2014, p. 168), a trans knowing of time and place. Gandin dramatically renders patterns of meaning from my data corpus by drawing connections across the three generations of women in the play regarding barriers they faced in academia.      107 Above I focused specifically on fictional names in the play, and now I will consider other elements of fiction as transformation. Ruhl (2014) writes, \u201cAt the level of story we crave transformation as much as we crave verisimilitude\u201d (p. 33). As seen in Ovid\u2019s (2007 [1883]) narratives, Ruhl refers to stories where magic and transformation are givens. In such narratives, contemporary qualifying descriptors like \u2018magic realism\u2019 seem unnecessary. These are stories where a question like \u2018What\u2019s made up? seem superfluous. Though, perhaps not surprisingly, when I shared this play as part of its development, I sometimes got versions of these questions: \u2018What did you make up, and what parts of the play actually happened?\u2019   I usually responded to these questions with some variation of the following: \u2018What happened is that I had conversations with my dead grandmother.\u2019  \u2018What happened is my electrologist played C\u00e9line Dion on repeat.\u2019  \u2018What is happening is that I am offering you some postcards to read, and they are postcards about me.\u2019 Although I understand the desire to know which parts are fiction, as mentioned above, please know that transformation to the fictional allows me privacy. I experience so much vulnerability when I share this play. I feel less vulnerable knowing that audiences don\u2019t know what parts happened and what I imagined. 4.1.3 Work-in-Progress The following script is a work in progress. I have completed five different drafts of this script. I will continue to develop the script for performance in the coming years, and will likely complete anywhere from 10-15 drafts prior to its first production.  Inspired by Woodson and Underiner\u2019s (2018) Theatre, Performance and Change, in which the authors offer multiple tables of contents as a means of \u201cperform[ing] different work in   108 making change strange\u201d (p. 6) and \u201chighlighting different categories and collisions\u201d (p. 6), I dedicate separate sections of the playscript to different audiences: \u2022 For the Materiality of Postcards, \u2022 For the [Trans] Girls, \u2022 For the [Counselling Psychology] Discipline, \u2022 For Matrilinealities. These four dedications create different tracts throughout the script. Although every portion of the playscript can be performed for and witnessed by every audience member, the dedications make clear the intended audiences. Furthermore, as the playscript exists as a written document in various forms, including this dissertation and journal article texts, the dedications make strange a straightforward, linear reading. Some readers may choose only to read the specific sections that resonate with them, while others may choose to read all sections but read those intended for an audience they do not identify with differently.  4.2 Postcards to My Younger Transexual Self, Ages 0-119 Characters  SPILING. a trans woman who enjoys postcards (she\/they pronouns, mostly)  BESS ROSE-MARIE.  SPILING\u2019S Gran (she\/her pronouns)  BRIM. SPILING\u2019s mother (she\/her); voice only  GANDIN. SPILING, BRIM, and BESS\u2019s mentor (various pronouns), or GANDIN might be a living, breathing institution\u2014whatever they are, they\u2019ve been around for a while  Casting The script is for two actors and a musician. All the performers are trans, nonbinary, or gender nonconforming.     109 A trans woman should play SPILING, and she can be any age. Spiling reads postcards throughout her life, from age 6 to 119, but she can be any age as she reads them.  A trans woman should also play BESS, Spiling\u2019s grandmother, and she should be older than the actor playing SPILING. At points in the play, BESS is in her 20s, and at other points, she is in her 80s.  BRIM is a recorded voice. At points, Brim is in her 20s, 40s, and 60s.  Role Doubling SPILING also plays BRIM, her mother, lip-synching her recorded words. The musician plays GANDIN.  Setting The audience is seated around tables cabaret-style. When not directly involved in the action, the actors join them at the tables.  Postcards are EVERYWHERE\u2014floor, ceiling, walls. They are faded and stuck like wallpaper and flooring.   The postcards in the script are written out by hand on actual postcards. It would be even better to have stamps and postal markings from sending them through the mail.  Several sets of strings are tied to walls of the space, and when undone by SPILING, these strings lower various props, such as cassette tapes, library catalogue cards, and a book.  In the performance, SPILING, BESS, and the musician are present as the audience enters the space. In the pre-show, as the audience take their seats, the performers can acknowledge the audience and each other.   The musician is always on stage, clearly visible to the audience. Music may underscore any part of the script, and this should be created live in the space in an almost improvisational manner.    Projections SPILING speaks the [bracketed] section titles and postcard titles as part of her lines. Any bracketed text is projected behind SPILING as she speaks the words. For example, SPILING speaks, and the audience sees a projection of all the book titles, such as [Book I: Away from Here & Now] and titles that begin some postcards, such as [Postcard to My Younger Transsexual Self, Age 6].  Script Contents   110 Rather than acts or scenes, the play is divided into a series of Books. These books are more akin to movements in music composition. The Books mark the changing relationship between the characters, with each new book demarking a significant shift in how the characters relate.   [Book I: Away from Here & Now.]  Spiling reads postcards by herself. [Book II: The Chemistry of Familiar Things.]  Spiling and Bess begin exchanging postcards. [A Leaflet: Discipline Phantasies.] Gandin rehearses a lecture and exchanges postcards with Spiling. [Book III: Ways Home.]  Spiling and Bess exchange more postcards. [Book IV: \u2026Bringing Up Herself.]  Spiling and Brim talk on the phone, Brim sends postcards. [Book V: Postal-Parts.]  Spiling reads postcards to herself again. [Book VI: You Will Go to the Moon.]  Spiling, Bess, and Brim exchange messages.  Performance Notes Line breaks often take the place of punctuation.  When a line break interrupts a thought, let the words of the following line drive forward with momentum. When a link break ends a thought, treat it like a period.   If there are no spaces between words, try to speak the words without spaces between them. Extra spaces between letters or words add weight to whatever is being said.  Performance Variations The script, as presented here, is one possible variation (Variation 1). Other variations may be more suitable depending on the context, as described below (Variation 2).   Variation 1 During the performance, SPILING hands out postcards to audience members and SPILING encourages them to read the cards. At various points, SPILING will ask audience members to volunteer the postcard they are holding for her to read. She tells the audience they can choose not to give her the postcard they are holding, and she can refuse to read any postcards she is offered.  In Book I and Book II, the telephone calls from BRIM always interrupt the same postcards whenever they are read. This version of the script should run approximately 70 minutes.   Variation 2   111 When the script is performed in shortened versions, it becomes a solo show performed by one actor. SPILING is the only character, and the script comprises only her postcards. Spiling\u2019s postcards make up:  [Book I: Away from Here & Now.], [Book V: Postal-Parts.], and the final postcard in [Book VI: You Will Go to the Moon.]  That\u2019s 17 postcards in all, but not all these cards need to be included. If only a few cards are selected, the overall tone of the cards should be reaching toward joy rather than focusing on barriers.   As in variation 1, the cards are handed to the audience at the start and the audience volunteers which card is read next, choosing the order of the piece. The actor can refuse to read any card volunteered.   This version suits conferences, classroom presentations, and other community events.   Dedications Specific portions of the script are intended for one or more specific audiences, marked by these dedications:  The Materiality of Postcards  F o r  t h e  G i r l s  For Matrilinealities For the Discipline   \u2018The Materiality of Postcards\u2019 is a visual offering to echo the material postcards present in the performance.   \u2018For the Girls\u2019 is for trans women.   \u2018For Matrilinealities\u2019 is for mothers and daughters.  \u2018For the Discipline\u2019 is for counselling psychologists.   Of course, other audiences may also witness these sections.     *   *   *    More and more, I have thought of my gender as a story I tell myself.   112 -Rae Spoon & Ivan E. Coyote, Gender Failure     I wade through your editions, lives you\u2019ve bound, lives you\u2019ve stitched, lives you\u2019ve flushed with dedication,  to unearth the truths you\u2019ve hidden  in my own time, in my own skin,  my own self unfolding toward you and away -Joy Ladin, Letter the Feminine    I got a postcard once. -Jo Clifford, Eve 4.2.1 [Book I: Away from Here & Now.] Figure 3: Postal Routes Postal routes.  The Materiality of Postcards      113     *   *   *    As the audience enters, SPILING holds 150 postcards. BESS and the musician are also there.  She offers the first 9 postcards to audience members as they enter. SPILING selects one postcard from somewhere near the middle of the pile and keeps it for herself.  BESS holds a briefcase. From SPILING\u2019S postcards, BESS retrieves a red envelope. It\u2019s a drug-store-card-kind-of envelope. She tucks it in her briefcase. She finds a seat in the audience to watch.  SPILING can improvise conversations with audience members as they enter and between postcards. BESS keeps more to herself.   Once BESS finds her seat, she begins writing. BESS watches SPILING attentively but also seems to be writing constantly. A seemingly endless supply of paper and forms comes from her briefcase. She writes by hand. What she is writing changes: a speech to a university women\u2019s club, to-do lists, filling out a medical intake form, a recipe for her mother\u2019s cinnamon buns, and a letter to her mother while she was at university. She never writes any postcards. When she is finished writing whatever she is writing, she stuffs it in the cuff of her shirt or sticks it in her collar or wherever else it may fit. She might leave a trail of this paper stuffing behind her as she moves.   A golden rotary telephone is on a little stand, some distance from SPILING.     *   *   *    SPILING reads the postcard she took from the pile once the audience is seated. The text [Postcard to My Younger Transsexual Self, Age 6] is projected behind Spiling as she reads the card title.  F o r  t h e  G i r l s  For Matrilinealities  SPILING. [Postcard to My Younger Transexual Self, Age 6]    114 O Spiling your outfit for kindergarten: a beautiful white dress but no beautiful white dresses  are in your dresser\u2014  only pants t-shirts\u2014 you find your longest white t-shirt you put it on     you decide this IS a dress with that decision  all the anxiety  in your little 6yroldmind  disappears\u2014at 6 y   o   u       d   e   c   i   d   e & your dress is beautiful    *   *   *    SPILING asks the audience members with postcards to pass them to her when they want her to read them. SPILING reads the following 9 postcards in the order they are offered.   The text [Postcard to My Younger Transexual Self] is projected behind Spiling as she reads the card title. The shortened title projections continue for the rest of this Book.  For the Girls  SPILING. [Postcard to My Younger Transexual Self], Age 34  Fears\u2019 aging at the same rate i am\u2014  no that\u2019s not right Fears\u2019 younger than me  but i act like she\u2019s my elder\u2014  i don't remember Fears  before i was 6 Fears\u2014a little sister whooooo\u2014ooooohoooo a little sister  i never had but who i would be sooooo  \u2026 she\u2019d say: \u2018YOU DON\u2019T KNOW\u2014   115 YOU DON\u2019T EVEN F\u2019ING KNOW\u2014 YOU CAN\u2019T SEE HOW HARD THIS IS\u2019 but i would be so  inconsolably\u2014 \u2014envious \u2026 & my little sister Fears would act like a parent a parent who knows best & i\u2019d feebly attempt to strike a deal with her in the bathroom or after midnight  but negotiations always stall  we end up repeating \u2018maybe one day\u2019 in chorus:  \u2018maybe one day\u2014\u2019 \u2018maybe one day\u2014\u2019 \u2014i\u2019ll speak out \u2018she\u2019    *   *   *    SPILING reads another postcard from an audience member.   For the Girls  SPILING. [Postcard to My Younger Transexual Self], Age 73  i am not ageist  but i worry about your memory  retrieval  that it won\u2019t happen you\u2019ll make a choice not to retrieve life as a 20-something  nerdy twink in Montreal & threatening your husband with \u2018his & his\u2019 matching startrek costumes in your 30s & how much you sweated when you wore  a dress in public for the first time & how 2 years in you still couldn\u2019t find  a pharmacist to fill  your hormone prescription right   minimize    116 avoid not retrieve  i worry  eventually it won\u2019t be a choice  eventually the un-retrieval  will become involuntary  you really  won\u2019t  remember    *   *   *    Another postcard.  For the Girls For the Discipline   SPILING. [Postcard to My Younger Transexual Self], Age 37  i\u2019m in a long-distance relationship with my endocrinologist    i imagine i\u2019m meeting him  at the back of a dive bar  with a 7-million-dollar ocean view  my-endo & me  drinking house red  at the bayside lounge  me squinting into the sunset  trying to see fathoms  as he mansplains\u2014  as he mansplains estrogen\u2014   being a trans woman on hormones  side effects    117 desired effects  \u2018your-dreaming-if-you-think- they-\u2019ll-give-you-bigger-hips\u2019 effects   then he bats his eyes &  i think he might put his hand on  mine\u2014   instead  he slides over  a giant white matchbox  of clear hormone patches for my ass  to be switched twice weekly &  child-proof pill bottles  with some very potent anti-testosterone effects  plus a regular bloodwork order (he\u2019s the type of man who worries about my kidney  & liver function) \u2026 we only have phone appointments  i\u2019ve never seen his face he\u2019s never seen mine  he\u2019s ethically obligated to mansplain  my new hormone regimen\u2014  but is NO GATEKEEPER & he says so  i have said this too as a phd-student- psychologist-to-be:  \u2018i don\u2019t want to be  Gatekeeper\u2019    *   *   *    Another\u2014this postcard is interrupted by a phone call.   118  For the Girls For Matrilinealities  SPILING. [Postcard to My Younger Transexual Self], Age 6  YOU in a beautiful white (t-shirt) dress\u2014heavenly your babysitter asks  \u2018can you get ready for school?\u2019 you sing: \u2018i AM READY!\u2019 you\u2019re wearing your dress\u2014let\u2019s go!\u2014  you\u2019ll remember clearly  a look of concern cross  babysitter\u2019s face for at least 33 years (& counting)\u2014 her understanding that you\u2019re thinking it\u2019s okay  to wear a dress in-that-bodythat-bodyyour-body:  \u2018YOUTHINKYOUCANWEARTHATOUTSIDE MISTER?\u2019 a babysitter ultimatum\u2014  The golden telephone starts ringing.   SPILING stops reading but doesn\u2019t pick up the phone.  The ringing stops.   An answering machine.  SPILING (recorded). you\u2019ve reached Spiling please leave a message  BRIM (recorded). Spiling it\u2019s Mom again so who gets callbacks? who do you actually call back? i know you\u2019re going through it darling i know but call me back please    119 Click. A loud dial tone. SPILING stares at the golden telephone.  Spiling continues reading the postcard.  SPILING. a babysitter ultimatum: \u2018CHANGECLOTHES!\u2019\u2014 run back to your room refuse to leave wear your dress    SPILING whispers a self-soothing mantra.   SPILING   whistlewhistlewhistlewhistlewhistlewhistlewhistle\u2014 wish\u2014wish\u2014wish you wish that outer space was closer Mom comes home  you hear whispering  babysitter &  Mom you might be    d i s a p p o i n t i n g   h e r   in your little 6yrold mind you whisper: \u2018put on pants don\u2019t turn  t-shirts into dresses againnever\u2019  The sounds of wind chimes.   In the audience, BESS stands, holding the red envelope. BESS offers it to SPILING.  SPILING takes hold of the envelope and hesitates.   SPILING and BESS stand, connected by the envelope.   SPILING opens the envelope and reads the front of the card.   SPILING and BESS speak in unison:   SPILING & BESS. \u2018congratulations!\u2019   SPILING opens the card, and it starts playing music\u2014the tune of \u2018Jolly Good Fellow.\u2019   SPILING & BESS. \u2018honey listen to my tapes\u2019    120 SPILING flips the card over and looks in the envelope, searching for more explanation, but there is none.    *   *   *    SPILING reads another postcard offered by an audience member.  For the Girls For Matrilinealities For the Discipline   SPILING.  [Postcard to My Younger Transexual Self], Age 12  channel 28  5 pm monday-to-friday commitment   \u2018startrek: thenextgeneration\u2019\u2014reruns  your favourite character  Deanna Troi ship\u2019s counsellor  you are going to grow up  to BE  D. Troi  therapist to a starship  \u2026your Granma Rose-Marie  sends a postcard:  The sounds of wind chimes, and BESS joins in from her seat in the audience:  SPILING & BESS. \u2018the galaxy\u2014 since you want to be an astronaut!\u2019  SPILING is startled and pleased by BESS\u2019S voice.  SPILING. at the card\u2019s centre  a sun with diamond eyes & fairies flying   SPILING & BESS. it was bright Apollo an old god\u2026   121 the fairies were muses  BESS. muses\u2014 hark, hail, etc. muses! muses for sharp insight  for loving backwards for singing enviously  how to tell a life\u2014 we believed in them long ago  ps: when you visit you\u2019ll have to show me  how my cassette recorder works  SPILING. O Granma youwish: \u2014gran sent a D. Troi  action figure  \u2014youwish\u2014  you were flying with hair long as the sun  \u2014youwishthat\u2014   outer  space  was  closer    *   *   *    For the Girls For Matrilinealities For the Discipline   SPILING. [Postcard to My Younger Transexual Self], Age 36     Your 2nd year of a phd  in counselling psychology  in private spaces like the bathroom or after midnight  you form words to express\u2014   122  your growing understanding of why  you flinch at \u2018misters\u2019 & \u2018sirs\u2019  makes flinching worse\u2014 a pain grown numb  returns with an ache  but alongside this ache\u2014 \u2026 suddenly  learning to float\u2014  you thought treading water was\u2014 you thought NOT drowning was\u2014 but  to float  on your back  & feel  the sun  on your face  water beneath you\u2014 t o  f l o a t  O  t o  f l o a t !       *   *   *    For the Girls For Matrilinealities For the Discipline   SPILING.   [Postcard to My Younger Transexual Self], Age 38  SPILING into the street  the body boils roils & is read as  human & someone asks about possible medical coverage  for the lack of breast growth\u2014  my Granma Rose-Marie always said:     123 BESS joins in from the audience as the sounds of windchimes play:  SPILING & BESS. crying & whistling are  like mushroom soup & cherry-cola  SPILING and BESS playful talk in unison.   SPILING & BESS. whistlewhistlewhistlewhistlewhistle!  SPILING they just don\u2019t go together\u2014 whistling was my Gran\u2019s cherry-cola\u2014wait\u2014  SPILING speaks to herself.  SPILING. did you she that?  BESS does not respond. SPILING goes back to the postcard.  SPILING. the body fills out the requisite paperwork:   \u2018i SPILING solemnly declare i intend to maintain  the gender identity  that corresponds  with the requested change CHECK THIS BOX\u2019    *   *   *    For the Girls For Matrilinealities For the Discipline   SPILING. [Postcard to My Younger Transexual Self], Age 39    124 i\u2019m trying to get an A+ in electrolysis   i carefully follow my electrologist technician\u2019s instructions to  lather on emla cream & cover it with plastic wrap  to keep it airtight  the bottom half of my face  looks like leftovers  pushed to the back  of the fridge  i lie down on the hospital  bed tissue & i  k n o w   i\u2019m crinkling it   there\u2019s a photo hung so  i look at it every time  i swing my legs over the bed  C\u00e9line Dion\u2019s  embracing the technician  smiles bigger  than the photo  they\u2019ll burst the frame  \u2018whenever C\u00e9line\u2019s  in town  i get free tickets  for me & girlfriends\u2014 i worked on C\u00e9line  like i\u2019m working on you\u2019 & she\u2019s already on my chin  electrocuting hair follicle  by hair follicle  emla cream  feels like spreading  Greek yogurt  on my face & might be as effective  in terms of pain relief\u2014 SOOOOO  not very   125  my chin\u2019s swollen  like a radish  when we finish the 1sthr & she tells me to avoid all sun exposure after electrocution:  \u2018mister solar\u2019s NOT  your friend  pumpkin\u2014 neither are his  UV pathways  of light\u2019  i should be studying  psych history  or for my personality\/pathology  exam  but C\u00e9line  watches over me  for over 80hrs  that summer & in September  when the technician asks me  if i notice  hair on my face is thinner? if it\u2019s working? i lie & say  \u2018yes\u2019  because  i\u2019m trying to get an A+  in electrolysis     *   *   *    When SPILING receives this postcard from an audience member, she reads it to herself quietly.   For the Girls   126 For the Discipline   SPILING. [Postcard to My Younger Transexual Self], age 40\u2014something  you go back & forth on passing   but in some moments you would give A   N   Y   T   H   I   N   G\u2014    She chooses not to read it aloud. She tucks it away instead.    *   *   *    After SPILING reads all the postcards handed to her by audience members, the golden telephone starts ringing. SPILING doesn\u2019t pick up.  The ringing stops. An answering machine.  For Matrilinealities  SPILING (recorded). \u2014please leave a message  BRIM (recorded). Mom here still  let me get specific: you have disappeared   leaving you messages is a FICTIONAL RELATIONSHIP  sometimes specifics are absolute hon  D O N \u2019 T  be fiction   D O N \u2019 T    127 disappear  Click. A loud dial tone.  SPILING crosses to the golden telephone. She takes her time to get there. She makes a call, then hangs up.  She makes a call, then hangs up. She makes a call and finally doesn\u2019t hang up.    BRIM (over the phone). Spiling?  SPILING (on phone). Mom\u2014i want Granma\u2019s cassette tapes  BRIM. hello to you too huuuuuun  SPILING. hi\u2014yeah\u2014the tapes Granma recorded  about her life before she died can i have them?  BRIM. 1st words from my REAPPEARING child\u2014  SPILING. i didn\u2019t disappear\u2014  BRIM. no i am glad you called\u2014 i have no idea  \u2014Grand-Mother\u2019s tapes are packed away  somewhere but yes of course you can have them\u2014  SPILING undoes a tie on the wall and a cassette tape descends on a string. The sounds of wind chimes.  SPILING.  thanks Mom! BRIM. Spiling\u2014  SPILING hangs up the golden telephone.    *   *   *       128 4.2.2 [Book II: The Chemistry of Familiar Things.] Figure 4: Implicit Bias Is a\u2014 Implicit bias is a\u2014  The Materiality of Postcards       *   *   *    SPILING considers the cassette tape.  SPILING holds the tape to her ear and listens close. The sounds of wind chimes. BESS ROSE-MARIE is speaking on a recording, as if from the tape.  For Matrilinealities  BESS (recorded). another\u2014  SPILING lowers the tape quickly, started by BESS ROSE-MARIE\u2019s voice.    129 She tries again, bringing the tape to her ear.    BESS (recorded). another\u2014  SPILING lowers the tape.  Again, she brings the tape to her ear.    BESS (recorded). another story about my father\u2026 my Grand-Mother kept him in petticoats  dresses  \u2014people did with little boys at that time\u2014 when he turned 6 his father said to his mother: \u2018cut off the curls take off the dresses he\u2019s a man from now on\u2019 from that time on he had to work out in fields with a man  had to learn  SPILING lowers the tape and turns it over in her hands. She brings the tape back to her ear as if listening to the other side. The sounds of wind chimes. BESS ROSE-MARIE is speaking on the recording.  BESS (recorded). O  i was in heaven  i must have been eight years old when i discovered i could walk  into this huge building  in downtown Regina & borrow as  many books as i liked   no body to tell me \u2018no you can\u2019t read that\u2019   can\u2019t recall\u2014 how  i was introduced  to the library  we didn\u2019t live far\u2014 the smell!    130 \u2014yes of a library\u2014 still gladdens my heart  SPILING undoes another tie on the wall, and library catalogue cards descend on strings.  SPILING moves through the cards, and the cards make the sounds of wind chimes.  SPILING moves through the cards again, and the cards play the sounds of librarians helping patrons search for books.  SPILING takes down a card to listen closer. SPILING takes down all the cards and listens to each. She lays them out on the floor.  BESS ROSE-MARIE\u2019S recorded voice plays and the sounds of windchimes.  BESS (recorded). certain books  i borrowed again & again:  SPILING reads out the library catalogue card book titles as BESS continues:  SPILING & BESS. \u2026 \u2018bringing up ourselves\u2019 \u2018you will go to the moon\u2019 \u2018the chemistry of familiar things\u2019 \u2018away from here & now\u2019 \u2018a woman of parts\u2019 \u20183 ways home\u2019  SPILING gathers the library catalogue cards up.  SPILING undoes another tie on the wall and a book, The Chemistry of Familiar Things, descends on a string.  SPILING takes the book down and flips through it.   SPILING takes a blank postcard and a pen and she reads aloud as she writes.  SPILING. dear Granma Bess Rose-Marie:\u2014 hello! i hope this postcard finds you well i am\u2014this is your\u2014 I\u2019m reading \u2018the chemistry of  familiar things\u2019 & it\u2019s a favourite of mine too!\u2014 i am aaaaaaaaaaaaa   131 grad student in psychology &&& your  future\u2014  BESS voice rings out loud and clear from the audience, underscored by windchimes.  BESS. future Grand-Daughter!:\u2014  BESS enters from the audience and the sound of windchimes grows before it subsides.   SPILING is startled by BESS\u2019S sudden presence right beside her and works hard to resist reaching out and touching her.   SPILING and BESS only communicate through postcards, never directly.    SPILING offers BESS the book. BESS retrieves a postcard from a hiding spot inside the book jacket of The Chemistry of Familiar Things and reads it to SPILING.  BESS. hark, hail, etc.  future Grand-Daughter!:\u2014  i was impossibly gladdened to receive your greeting  i can imagine YOU\u2014  Far Away from Here &  Now\u2014  i can imagine you  very well indeed:  studying psychology  at university must be grand!  there wasn\u2019t great encouragement  to work for university entrance the nuns who taught us  at st mary\u2019s chirped:  \u2018girls it\u2019s not proper; take a commercial course  learn typing\u2019    132 but\u2014 i\u2019ve gone & done it now! i completed a bachelor\u2019s degree yet i haven\u2019t answers to any  of my questions   i couldn\u2019t see not going on & i have the opportunity  no Canadian university  awards PhDs  in biochemistry you have to go away   i am now in a place called  MICHIGAN!  the campus is gorgeous full of students very much  bigger perhaps   10x as big  as anything in Regina  with the war over  the residences aren\u2019t needed for barracks & i can live on campus  my dorm-mate is a girl from Brooklyn & talks exactly like the taxi drivers in the movies! \u2018gawd\u2014! this and \u2018gawd\u2014!\u2019 that ha!\u2014such a blaspheme! i\u2019ve never heard the like!   yesterday she said \u2018gawd\u2014  happy 21st birthday Bessie-Rose!\u2019 & she had baked  the only appropriate recipe she could find: Canadian wedding cake! (never heard of it &  judging by the taste i know why\u2014 lord knows where she found it)    133 i can tell all this will be quite the education   your future Grand-Mother Rose-Marie  ps \u2013 what do you remember of your first year?    *   *   *    SPILING reads a postcard back.  For the Girls For Matrilinealities For the Discipline   SPILING. Granma!  i was so anxious to receive your reply thank you for\u2014 \u2026 writing  happy birthday!  Michigan sounds incredible\u2014  my first year was  so many things of course but also my year was allllllllllllllllll  right expression management you know: fix your face fix your hair  talk like this walk like him-eeeeeer be-less\u2014gender expectation management i want to talk to the manager demand a talisman  that will be my ceremonial rite into recognized\u2014what? not sure  my little first-year talisman   134 of expression  was shellac nailed it! a weak-in-the-knees-to my phd  listening to a clinic training director lecture on dress-pectations  of course  they were binary men\u2019s expectations: pants  shirt\u2014what else? director makes eye contact right here no need for elaboration   women have a list of qualifications:  no knee (don\u2019t be weak) no sleeves \u2018no way\u2019 no leggings no hugging tight no cut  director doesn\u2019t make eye contact qualifications aren\u2019t for me no need for elaboration   i walked around  with my hands in fists nails in hiding no one\u2019s calling me  to the director\u2019s office  i\u2019ve changed my mind actually  i don\u2019t want to speak to the manager  actually  i don\u2019t want to manage expectations   eyecontacteyecontacteyecontact  ACTUALLY i want to walk down the hall  to the therapy room  with my hands open  BUT  your first year  will be very different of course of course    135 of course it will    *   *   *    The golden telephone rings. SPILING and BESS stare at it.  SPILING doesn\u2019t pick up.   The ringing stops and then the answering machine.  For Matrilinealities  SPILING (recorded). \u2014leave a message  BRIM (recorded). Spiling  are you listening to those cassette tapes?  are you summoning up your  dead  Grand-Mother?  your alive  mother  is right here  call me  SPILING and BRIM stare at the golden telephone and then at each other. Then they return to their postcards.    *   *   *    BESS replies with a postcard from her book.  For Matrilinealities For the Discipline   BESS. Spiling my love greetings from   136 a carrel in the  biochem library!  i\u2019m not sure i understood all that but i predict you have terrific eyes\u2014 a credit to your gene\u2019s eyes\u2014 i am glad you are making  contact with them  i am working in the basement lab all  hours until my experiments are  finished even midnight\u2014so be it!  you aren\u2019t supposed to eat in  the lab but we students make  coffee in a beaker over  the bunsen burner toast  over the burner & put the fume  fans on so dr gandin \u2014my major professor (that\u2019s g-a-n-d- i-n spell it right or he throws a fit)\u2014 does not smell our our breakfast lunch & dinner  & more reports from  trouserdom;  major professor gandin  that\u2019s g-a-n-d-i-n (!) had a celebration  for all his students & he got up to give  a little account of each of us  it came to my turn:  \u2018you don\u2019t have to worry\u2014 she knows to  keeps her mouth  shut  she doesn\u2019t talk a lot\u2019   this was his  complete    137 &  total account of me & i couldn\u2019t  bare it  dreaming of us on campus together  with you studying psychology  me biochem  major professor gandin (G-A-N-D-I-N)  would have  a twin  training you in psychology & we\u2019d tear them down side by side\u2014  wouldn\u2019t that be delicious?  SPILING and BESS look at each other, hesitating, BESS\u2019S proposal hanging in the air.   They smile in agreement and together walk back to BESS\u2019S seat, so close they could hold hands. They never touch. BESS takes a seat and SPILING sits on the floor beside her, child-like.    *   *   *                     138 4.2.3 [A Leaflet: Discipline Phantasies.] [Gandin\u2019s Rehearsal for A Distinguished Lecture on Transsexualismus]  The musician plays GANDIN. GANDIN is lying on the floor, practicing. There are two rehearsals here. GANDIN\u2019s lecture rehearsal keeps getting interrupted by rehearsal for an argument that hasn\u2019t happened yet. For the lecture rehearsal, GANDIN tries to work from memory. But GANDIN is not off-book and often refers to cue-cards.  We hear SPILING\u2019S voice speaking her lines, which narrate and (almost) control the scene. She can stand when she speaks but stays close as she can to BESS until GANDIN starts dancing.   For the Discipline   GANDIN. ummmmmmmmm ah \u2018interest  interest in interest in COMPLAINTS of the patient suffering gender transformation\u2014\u2019  ah\u2026 ah fuck me. ummmmmmmmmm\u2014 \u2018who could ever have imagined our 1940s\u2014 the availability of THON as a neuter gender singular pronoun in a well-respected dictionary &\u2014\u2019  ah ah shit. \u2018the clinical expertise\u2019 ah \u2018i will share with you this evening Ladies & Gentlemen\u2014\u2019  umhmmmmmmmmm nononononononononon  GANDIN crosses out some words on her cue-cards.  GANDIN. no \u2018Ladies & Gentleman\u2014\u2019  no \u2018Ladies &\u2014\u2019 aha \u2018HONOURED ATTENDEES the clinical expertise\u2014\u2019  We hear SPILING\u2019S voice speaking her lines from where she sits.  SPILING (voice only). a postcard floats down from the ceiling: you\u2019ve got mail!  As SPILING narrates, a postcard floats down from the ceiling. GANDIN tries to ignore the postcard.    139 SPILING (voice). Gandin stops her rehearsal to grab it  GANDIN doesn\u2019t move.  SPILING (voice). Gandin grabs the postcard  GANDIN doesn\u2019t move.  SPILING (voice). GANDIN. please grab the postcard  GANDIN grudgingly stands up and grabs the postcard.  SPILING (voice). thank you. and now read it  GANDIN mouths along with the words. We hear SPILING\u2019S voice.  SPILING (voice). \u2018dear dr g just a quick easy-peeeeesey little note: yesterday in our one-on-one supervision  you went over AGAIN  how painful it is for trans women: electrolysis, slow hormone changes\u2014 i know  of course i know   but you\u2019re not used to one within the gates  so just a reminder:  she\/her, libra\u2014trans woman that\u2019s me  please use my correct name &  pronouns  in front of our patients\u2014 easy-pesey-teasy now!\u2019  GANDIN has a pen and writes a response:  GANDIN \u2018Spiling i don\u2019t recall that we\u2019ve  talked directly about pronouns &  this does not feel like  the right time to talk at length about names or gates or horoscopes or whathaveyou i propose we schedule a time  at a later date   140 dr that\u2019s g-a-n-d-i-n\u2019  GANDIN attaches the postcard to a string, the postcard flies away, and GANDIN is rehearsing again.  GANDIN. \u2018ATTENDEES my clinical expertise considers the influence of the patient\u2019s mother on his gender transformation inasmuch\u2014\u2019  nonononononononono  GANDIN adds to her cue-card notes.  GANDIN. influence of patient\u2019s mother on THON\u2019S  not HIS but THON\u2019s gender transformation  & if THON\u2019S patient\u2019s mother also uses a THON  then THON\u2019s mother-THON\u2019s influence on THON\u2019s gender transformation  Is mother-THON gender-neuter?  what is\u2014 PARENT! thon\u2019s PARENTPARENTPARENTPARENT word existed all along  SPILING (voice). a postcard floats down from the ceiling: you\u2019ve got mail again!  GANDIN makes no move towards the new postcard that has just descended.  SPILING (voice). GO GANDIN!  GANDIN grabs the postcard.  SPILING (voice). \u2018to dr g  you pass yourself off as a knight-in-shining  armour for trans girls signed off on readiness assessment after assessment  for years  but glad this is a pass\/fail credit & for me  it\u2019s a course in making unnoticed  disclosures noticed  easy to pass  with trying colours   141 just wince & repeat yourself  your suggestion  that pronouns like THON  do not sound \u2018right\u2019\u2014  GANDIN. baaaaaaaaaaaaaah!  GANDIN has a pen again:  GANDIN. \u2018Spiling i have strong feelings about this topic &  do not feel postcards do justice  to this important conversation\u2014\u2019  For a moment, GANDIN doesn\u2019t know how to express it. Then GANDIN goes off, not writing any of this down but arguing it out.  GANDIN. like it or not  your pronouns aren\u2019t a muse to me they are\u2014   this is insignificant  you are NOT insignificant &  your experiences are NOT insignificant  but this is this is THIS IS i am not sure how else to say it other than INSIGNIFICANT  because this is an INSIGNIFICANT CORRESPONDENCE  about a   p   a   s   s   i   n   g      i   n   t   e   r   a   c   t   i   o   n\u2014  just let them  p   a   s   s  because  i for one am trying to figure out how to  support you  a student therapist trying to support their first patients  patients struggling with grief or anxiety symptoms or divorce or new parenthood or job termination or chronic depressive episodes they\u2019ve had for years & & &  It is a great release for GANDIN to say the following.  GANDIN. & \u2018thon\u2019 is not a pronoun NOT EVEN A WORD & COME ON  \u2018they\u2019 is NOT    142 SINGULAR!!!  your pronouns are not a crisis  it is a matter of grammar  i care about language  i too bristled  in my younger years against the pronouns assigned to me & don\u2019t we all? but ENVIOUSITY will get us NOWHERE  GANDIN without warning offers a beautiful, choreographed gesture. And again. And again. GANDIN\u2019S dancing solo continues with precision and grace.  SPILING (voice). Gandin\u2019s dancing seems to say  \u2018my every step forward  is a joy as solid as the ground  & just as capable of carrying me  & everything else on this goddamn planet\u2019  & also:  \u2018i\u2019ve drunk too much coffee\u2014\u2019\u2026  & maybe:  \u2018sorry i keep hurting you\u2019  SPILING leaves her place beside BESS in the audience and begins to move closer to GANDIN. BESS does not follow her but is very alert, as if she could jump up and interfere at any moment.   Some of the dance appears as if it could involve a partner. As if SPILING could join. SPILING does not. GANDIN dances with a hauling-like movement too close to SPILING. The dance ends with GANDIN again lying on the floor. SPILING\u2019S back is towards the audience and GANDIN.  GANDIN. but returning to the topic at hand: i know trainees discuss\u2014 i have been the subject of much trainee discussion I KNOW discussion & ranking & raking really i\u2019ve been raked over the\u2014 plenty of egg on my face my name\u2019s dyed mud by detractors but you see this is not a crisis either i am not in crisis & you are not in crisis    143 & this is an incredible waste of resources mine & yours  GANDIN returns to writing:  GANDIN. \u2018excuse the splotch i spilled some instant coffee too many cups while getting through  distinguished speaker rehearsal\u2019  GANDIN is about to send the card, but another postcard drops down. GANDIN grabs it and reads as SPILING speaks:  SPILING. \u2018\u2014you dr gandin chose to confide:  SPILING & GANDIN. \u2018i knew a transexual once\u2014   GANDIN. i did\u2014  SPILING & GANDIN. \u2018i watched her transition her eyes always looked red as if every time i looked away she was crying\u2019  GANDIN. she was\u2014  A deluge of postcards from the ceiling now.  SPILING. better move quickly Gandin you\u2019ve got to read them all!   GANDIN throws the newest card away and can\u2019t stop grabbing card after card and reading until:  GANDIN. nonononononononononononononononononononono no more  GANDIN has a pen and a blank postcard. SPILING\u2019S back is still turned  GANDIN. \u2018REPLY TO ALL PREVIOUS CARDS your ceiling Spiling\u2014  FIX your damn ceiling! there must be leaks all these cards have unclear drops droplets splotches on splotches ink is running streaked like tears   144 i can barely understand no i CAN\u2019T i CAN\u2019T understand them at all\u2019  GANDIN is about to send the card she\u2019s just written but hesitates; then goes to send it, hesitates; and then goes to send it\u2014but tears it up. SPILING turns slightly. GANDIN lets the pieces rain down. GANDIN lies down on the stage.  GANDIN. i\u2019ll respond in the morning yes in the morning    *   *   *                                 145 4.2.4 [Book III: Ways Home.] Figure 5: My Practicum Supervisor Is\u2014 my practicum supervisor is\u2014  The Materiality of Postcards      *   *   *    SPILING is now lying in GANDIN\u2019S spot. She is flipping through BESS\u2019S book, The Chemistry of Familiar Things, and the postcards inside. BESS is watching her.  BESS moves slowly from her seat and sits beside her.   SPILING puts the book aside and retrieves the postcard she chose not to read in Book 1. She decides to read it aloud now.   For the Girls   146 For the Discipline   SPILING. [Postcard to My Younger Transexual Self, age 40\u2014something]  you go back & forth on passing   but in some moments you would give A   N   Y   T   H   I   N   G:   \u2018please just let me\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2019   someone threw an egg yesterday   & they weren\u2019t transparent about their motivations    it made that crushing\/sucking sound an eggshell makes when it smashes the red brick wall beside you   you can\u2019t read read minds   but you are packing eggs today    *   *   *    SPILING hands BESS a postcard from her book.   BESS isn\u2019t sure whether she wants to keep reading the cards.    147 SPILING and BESS stare at each other.   BESS reads the card.  For Matrilinealities For the Discipline   BESS ROSE-MARIE. Spiling:\u2014 i hope these cards are some relief my words some distraction   my dissertation is submitted & approved(!)  the head of the department did not want me to graduate: \u2018how could SHE have met  requirements?\u2019  but good ol\u2019 major professor GANDIN stuck up for me:  \u2018she\u2019s earned it  & she\u2019s getting it\u2019   & so  i am now dr Bess Rose-Marie  ps:  please don\u2019t psychoanalyze  this postscript  but i met another Canadian  in a lab 2 floors up  he is  intelligent & one can have  a reasonable conversation  with him &\u2014 he proposed\u2014 \u2026 marriage \u2026 well  i consider myself a practical person    148 & now  i\u2019ve a doctorate & a husband    *   *   *    SPILING finds a particular postcard she wants to read from her stack by scattering them across the floor, tossing them around, flicking them far from her.  For the Girls For the Discipline   SPILING. [More postcards, age 40\u2014something]   \u2018i\u2019m gender blind\u2014 i don\u2019t see trans people\u2014 i only know someone\u2019s trans if they tell me they\u2019re trans\u2019   the interviewer \u2014a psychologist\u2014 looks like they were trained when clinicians still said \u2018TRANS SEXUAL\u2019 when the diagnosis still included the word \u2018DISORDER\u2019   but did your cover letter say \u2018trans\u2019? you\u2019re trying to pass in this interview\u2014 you thought\u2014 you were\u2014 passing\u2026     \u2026is this interviewer trying not to say  \u2018transexual\u2019?   you whisper go ahead say: \u2018hey you beautiful transexual you \u2014i am a big fan\u2019   149 \u2018hey you beautiful transexual yoooou \u2014i love transsexuals liiiiike--\u2019 \u2018heeeey  you beautiful transexual yoooooooou   \u2014i haven\u2019t thrown an egg at someone like you in years\u2019    *   *   *    SPILING hands BESS a postcard from the book. BESS only glances at it before she shakes her head. She won\u2019t read it.   BESS takes up her card from the red envelope, the one she gave to SPILING, opens the card, and it starts playing music\u2014the tune of \u2018Jolly Good Fellow.\u2019   BESS sings to SPILING.  BESS (singing). for she\u2019s a jolly good lady for she\u2019s a jolly good lady for she\u2019s a jolly good laaaaady\u2014  SPILING selects a postcard for herself and starts reading it, interrupting BESS.  SPILING. [Postcard to My Postcard to My Younger Transexual Self, Age 15]  Granma Rose-Marie offers  her thoughts on\u2014  BESS then interrupts SPILING to read aloud the postcard she just refused to read.  For Matrilinealities For the Discipline   BESS. Spiling\u2014\u2014\u2014  is this man  i married  to be your Grand-Father?    150 the picture on the front  is Michigan  but postage is Canadian (there\u2019s a hint)  he\u2019s been hired on at the University of Toronto they have a rule against hiring family (read: wives)  but i can grade papers in his class  a teaching assistant with  the same degree as the professor  no time anyway two little ones now(!!)\u2014 i sit here at 4in-the-morning  nursing babies  with the journal of biological chemistry open keeping up with developments  gorgeous postcard isn\u2019t it? exceedingly stimulating the university  lab  biochemistry exceedingly stimulating probably more so  than any other place i\u2019ve known before or since  BESS takes a long look at the front of the postcard.   BESS buries her book under some postcards. SPILING watches.  BESS takes a seat at a table in the audience. SPILING watches her go.     *   *   *    SPILING reads her postcard.  For Matrilinealities    151 SPILING. [Postcard to My Postcard to My Younger Transexual Self, Age 15]  Granma Rose-Marie offers  her thoughts on pride parades\u2014 the floats floating front page  of the local paper\u2014 while she rips it up & i could smash 20 Grecian-style urns before breakfast\u2026 the yardsale finds  which send Gran Over the Moon\u2014 huffing up the gravel driveway to folding tables  with junkdrawer spreads &sticky handwritten pricing\u2014 give her a vase or 2\u2014  potpourri bowels\u2014 she\u2019s ready to haggle \u2018pandemic of swindling\u2019  according to Gran\u2014 won\u2019t get her walks away with her change purse  only ever slightly lighter  another vase for the bathroom  sills getting crowded 20-or-more\u2014 i could smash them all  the glaze catches sunlight just as well in pieces\u2014  what worries me is pano-ceramic me trapped in one of those little vases how do i smash it from the inside i can\u2019t  i can\u2019t! the cracks are there light\u2019s getting in but what good is light if i am stuck inside\u2014  pano-ceramic\u2014 Gran doesn\u2019t notice or doesn\u2019t say  just keeps going to sales\u2014 \u2018pandemic of swindling\u2019  according to Gran    152  The sound of windchimes grows into a storm.  *   *   *                                           153 4.2.5 [Book IV: \u2026Bringing Up Herself.]  Figure 6: Bubbles in the Head Bubbles in the head  The Materiality of Postcards       *   *   *     In this Book, SPILING switches characters to play BRIM. In previous books, we\u2019ve seen SPILING on the phone with BRIM. In this book, we are watching BRIM who is on the phone with SPILING. In the following exchanges, SPILING\u2019S voice is recorded and can only be heard as if it is coming through the golden telephone.   At the start of this book, the sound of storming windchimes merges and is replaced by the golden telephone ringing. As SPILING picks it up, she becomes BRIM.   BRIM\u2019S lines are all pre-recorded, and lip-synced.    154  BESS notices the change immediately and stands and moves towards SPILING, her granddaughter, as SPILING plays BRIM, her daughter. BESS watches carefully but still from a distance.  For the Girls For Matrilinealities For the Discipline   BRIM. \u2026 yes my Mum\u2014your Grand-Mother\u2014was delighted that they accepted me into the department of pharmacology and therapeutics at Queens  \u2014my graduate supervisor\u2014GANDIN\u2014in retrospect he was\u2014  \u2014you know i spent my career surrounded by GANDINS\u2014 i was in a very GANDIN-dominated area i would say for every eight GANDINS there might be 2\u2014 or there might be 9 GANDINS and me on grant committees or at conferences\u2014  it is changing  it is changing now but  \u2014in retrospect as a supervisor GANDIN was gregarious\u2014he was a real pal to all his students\u2014 \u2014he was NOT a great scientist  but i knew it would be fun. & it was. it was a good lab. we had good parties\u2014  GANDIN rode horses\u2014his whole thing was you had to have an interest outside of the Lab so he was on horseback & i decided i would take up\u2014cross-country skiing or something\u2026 \u2026  \u2018exceedingly stimulating\u2019 i would not use those words \u2026  SPILING (over the phone). \u2026Mom!  \u2018those words\u2014\u2019 what\u2014?  you trailed off  BRIM. \u2026 it\u2019s amazing to be able to hear her again \u2018exceedingly stimulating\u2019   155 O it\u2019s\u2014mm-hmm doesn\u2019t really make me sad but\u2014 she sounds not as vigorous as she was. do you hear that?  SPIILING. \u2026i guess   BRIM. Spiling\u2014  SPILING. Mom?  BRIM.  you keep disappearing  SPILING. i know\u2014  BRIM.  why do you keep disappearing?  SPILING. can we just leave it? let\u2019s leave it\u2014 \u2026 so Granma cared about\u2014?  BRIM. O  oooookay  yes  \u2026 yes your Grand-Mother very pleased\u2014 \u2014i had been floating until the final year  of my bachelor\u2019s in biochemistry  afterwards i could only imagine:  lab assistant  i had no interest in being somebody\u2019s  lab assistant  & my Mum had done biochemistry  i didn\u2019t want the same area as her  so i applied to pharmacology graduate programs\u2014 pharmacology was wide-open   i don\u2019t think your Grand-Mother had any doubt i could do graduate school\u2014 i think she was concerned i didn\u2019t have the right kind of ambition always floating  at a loss as to what to do    156 graduate school was a random decision\u2014based on:  \u2018ohno\u2014whatamigoingtodonow?\u2019  & so for me cross out \u2018exceedingly\u2019 & \u2018stimulating\u2019 i enjoyed my graduate school experience but\u2014   but the whole thing was to get in and out\u2014 i see it as the start of\u2014 more\u2014 more stimulation more development\u2014  the faculty were ALL older white men\u2014every single one\u2014  except GANDIN  my-liked-to-party supervisor but even GANDIN was ridiculous i remember we were talking salaries\u2014GANDIN says:  \u2018Brim doesn\u2019t have to get paid the same as the rest of you\u2019\u2014all these other graduate students\u2014all these men\u2014 \u2018because she will be a wife\u2019 right?  maybe he was just egging me on same with another faculty member: \u2018O\u2014O well she\u2019s smart enough but that doesn't matter\u2014\u2019  WHAT?  i was horrified & GANDIN wasn\u2019t that much older than me & was spouting this\u2014 BUT i wasn\u2019t like: \u2018O no, they are portraying my future!\u2019 NO  they just needed to be shown  i was going to setup my own lab\u2014correct them\u2014 but still  i wish someone had told me to stand up for myself\u2026 there was a fellow on staff\u2014  he would make suggestive comments. he would always say sexually suggestive things he was aggressive never when anyone else was around i was 22 in the mid-1970s\u2014it never occurred to me i could tell someone but\u2014    157 but i don\u2019t remember Mum giving me any advice about graduate school it might be she felt the world had changed or\u2014 maybe she felt that she didn\u2019t really have advice to give  highest praise your Grand-Mother got:  she was \u2018as good as the boys\u2019 right? in the lab\u2014  she was better actually. as i understand it. but that would have been going too far  SPILING as BRIM puts down the golden telephone.      *   *   *    SPILING as BRIM retrieves a tiny envelope from a hidden pocket and removes an even smaller postcard. She flips it over and lip-syncs:   BRIM. dear Mum: tell me why you loved getting a doctorate again?  yesterday\u20141st time!\u2014my hand wasn\u2019t shaking holding my cigarette in the departmental lounge  everyone knows they only took me in PROVISIONALLY\u2014  too chequered an academic past for smooth entry into the PhD\u2014  BUT yesterday GANDIN  was comparing me to another graduate student\u2014 the only other women in the program:  \u2018it\u2019s not that your smarter though you are more curious than she is\u2019 & i think i\u2019m supposed to take that as a big compliment\u2014?  i\u2019m heading to the lab for a\u2014 i guess it\u2019s a sort of halloween party\u2014 stimulating!  if we don\u2019t come in costume  GANDIN will make us go horsebackriding in the snow    158 so me & the other graduate students agreed to all go dressed up as  GANDIN  a bunch of different GANDINS  dancing to the \u2018monster mash\u2019  everyone else is playing it safe going in his standard issue short-sleeve-button-down-tucked-into-wool-trousers-&-giant-rectangular-frames-riding-his-mustach uniform  BUT i\u2019m going as GANDIN brick-&-mortar-&-stucco windowframes  (all cardboard of course)  GANDIN THE LIVING BREATHING INSTITUTION an eternal fixture\u2014  or seems like one  to me  SPILING as BRIM unburies the book from under the postcards. It\u2019s the same book that BESS had before.  BRIM. thank you for sending  \u2018The Chemistry of Familiar Things\u2019 wasn\u2019t really for me  BUT\u2014  She carefully removes a stack of postcards from the book.  BRIM. inside i found your postcards  to your future Grand-Daughter  \u2014sooooo\u2014my future Daughter\u2014 they\u2019re very sweet, Mum\u2014  but  it\u2019s a funny thing\u2026 i  can\u2019t find your postcards to me\u2014? i must not be looking in the right place  write me back      159 *   *   *    The golden telephone is ringing. SPILING as BRIM lets it ring for some time.   Eventually she picks up. SPILING\u2019S voice comes through the receiver.   SPILING (over the phone). Mom  BRIM. yes hon?  SPILING. would Granma see me as her Grand-Daughter?  BRIM. um well i think that\u2014  SPILING. \u2014implicit bias is a bitch?  BRIM. no that\u2019s not what i was going to say\u2014  SPILING. i\u2019ve been imagining we  Granma & me meet up at the tail end of  a conference i was presenting at she\u2019s only cities away & i drive a couple of hours to stay with her after warm greetings & small talk defenceless silence  her reading\u2014maybe pretending to? me reading\u2014no  pretending to & wanting to ask \u2018do you see me as your Grand-Daughter?\u2019 sometimes specifics are absolute  i want her to be absolute in this i want a real  absolute  BRIM. O hon i think your Grand-Mother\u2014 well i have imaginary conversations with your Grand-Mother too  SPILING as BRIM puts down the golden telephone.   160    *   *   *    SPILING as BRIM has her tiny envelope and removes a tiny family photo card.  BRIM.  happy holidays! this year\u2019s family photo\u2014  a cross-country skiing pastoral  except  Spencer looks hypothermic & too skinny  he\u2019s floating in his longjohns\u2014 but i swear he\u2019s wearing more layers than both his brothers combined\u2014 \u2014updates from the lab:\u2014 got another grant so i\u2019ve brought 2 more post-docs in to keep up i\u2019ve been asked if i\u2019ll be a part of this distinguished lecture series the university is putting on and the last thing i need is another lecture on top of all my teaching this semester & I agreed to serve on the tenure committee again\u2014  \u2014updates from the boys:\u2014 Spencer wanted me to tell you he\u2019s \u2018sorry\u2019  for smashing the vase you sent  (you got it at a yardsale right?)  the boys are worried about Y2K  especially Spencer  he won\u2019t make new year\u2019s resolutions  for fear of their uselessness  amidst societal collapse admittedly prudent reasoning right?  \u2014but lately i\u2019ve been making vows & among them i  vowed    161 to write you this   Mum: \u2014i know i make less than every male on faculty here\u2014 \u2014i know your gobsmacked i could have the lab & the boys & you can\u2019t give me any credit because YOU think the faculty has been unbelievably supportive (special accommodations)\u2014 \u2014i know you thought you\u2019d have a Grand-Daughter & i couldn\u2019t do that either! 3 boys \u2014i know!\u2014 so then  why  are you so   envious?  my vow\u2014  i resolved to write you this & never send it  SPILING as BRIM goes to rip up the card but doesn\u2019t. She tucks it away carefully.     *   *   *                   162 4.2.6 [Book V: Postal-Parts.] Figure 7: I Am a Fully-Fledged Psychologist I am a fully-fledged psychologist  The Materiality of Postcards       *   *   *    SPILING\u2019S postcards are still spread out all over the floor.   She begins gathering them up. As she does, she finds five that she wants to read. She can read the following postcards in any order.  BESS is back in her seat in the audience, writing lists and filling in forms. She puts them all over herself, and they stick to her clothes. She should be mostly paper by the end of the play.   In the following postcard, we hear BRIM\u2019S recorded voice. Spiling lipsyncs the words.   F o r  t h e  G i r l s  For Matrilinealities    163 SPILING. Mom\u2019s asking\u2014   dresses (a beautiful white dress\u2014) she\u2019s asking\u2014    BRIM (voice). are we looking for  anything in particular\u2014  SPILING. \u2018dresses for work\u2019  shopping on a family vacation i pull a shower curtain across  the narrow change room&can\u2019t let go swelter-sticky-making august heat crazygluing my hand to the plasticsheet a clerk says \u2018i\u2019ve pulled a few more sizes\u2019  Mom responds:  BRIM (voice). i\u2019ll pass them to her  SPILING. t   o      h   e   r  wish i could pull back time like a  shower-curtain see Mom say \u2018her\u2019 crazyglue let \u2018her\u2019 stick&stick& never let \u2018her\u2019 go  &i am floating i look back towards shore sunspots in my eyes &can still make out  Mom waving    *   *   *    Another postcard.  SPILING may decide not to read this postcard\u2014depends on how she feels. If this is the last of the five postcards, she chooses not to read it.  F o r  t h e  G i r l s  For Matrilinealities For the Discipline     164 SPILING. i am a fully-fledged psychologist remembering being an intern sitting across  from a 16 year old patient &being trained to ask: please answer one of the following\u2014  never  rarely sometimes  often always  \u2018how would you describe gender experience?\u2019 never  rarely sometimes\u2014   O\u2014wait\u2014sorry\u2014this is my 1st assessment & i\u2019m a little lost  the 16 year old patient is staring:  \u2018how would YOU describe your ASKING-THESE-QUESTIONS EXPERIENCE?\u2019  i think of my endo my endocrinologist    never  rarely sometimes  often ALWAYS  he\u2019d rehearsed  mansplaining   i\u2019d rehearsed  responses   always often always often always    165 how do we get  to the good parts  if we don\u2019t  stick  to what  we rehearsed?  always often always often always  now somewhere  in the province  there\u2019s a file  with my name on it\u2014  probably  my old name  probably  my old gender  marker with a diagnosis of   \u2018Gender Dysphoria in Adults  (Code F640)\u2019&   my endo keeps  forwarding scripts  to my local  pharmacy  i can pick up   always often always often always  in a couple hours    *   *   *   166    SPILING reads over the following postcard to herself. She probably chooses not to read it aloud, but she might.   F o r  t h e  G i r l s  For Matrilinealities  SPILING. \u2018a tranquil step back in time\u2019 according to the b&b advertisement  our host Linda welcomes us: \u2018is the 2-year-old yours?\u2019\u2014 in that millisecond i live more lifetimes  than i care to admit & in every single 1 i am the mother of 2-year-olds\u2014  & i pause  so i can live more lifetimes\u2014 before answering:  \u2018no he\u2019s my nibiling\u2019 & Linda doubletakes at the sound of my voice\u2014 my voice declares \u2014what Linda?  what does my voice declare? Linda\u2019s micro-contorting now  unconscious of course & quite common a contortion of category of expectation  of autopilot  not an unnatural contortion not dangerous no burning sensations\u2014 perhaps even thrilling\u2014 a contortion of mouth  eyes neck  to look again at what\u2019s been declared\u2014     i am contorting too of course\u2014  it\u2019s a skill to practice:  this is what a woman\u2019s throat looks like my throat    167 hands feet toes elbows & i could be a pregnant mother of 2-year-olds\u2014 i choose\u2014  i choose not to\u2014 but no\u2014 it\u2019s burning  ease off ease off  i can\u2019t see Linda anymore    *   *   *    Another postcard.  For Matrilinealities For the Discipline   SPILING. you realize  ACTUALLY  you got a doctorate too  a few years after  getting through  &  not  for  nothing now when asked: \u2018you & Psychology - any relation?\u2019 you have to acknowledge   Psychology\u2019s no discipline to you he\u2019s  CHOSEN  FAMILY a  CHOSEN  BROTHER & O brother he\u2019s got lessons & he likes to teach   168 psych 2-O-1 you were differential  psych 3-O-1 you pushed back psych 4- 5- &-600 all aced   now YOU ARE psych 10,000-&-1  babe watch out:  \u2018she\u2019s an expert in her field!\u2019  & your little sister  the one you call Fears  she\u2019s got that look in her eyes she\u2019s daring you: \u2018push him further\u2019  CUZ your making him anxious but you\u2019re proud you are  you can\u2019t help it  it\u2019s not  for  nothing you & psych are  fam now    *   *   *    SPILING has another postcard.  F o r  t h e  G i r l s   SPILING. you don\u2019t want to be a Gatekeeper  & only a Gatekeeper can say  they don\u2019t want to be a Gatekeeper  \u2026as you walked down the street yesterday you saw someone who you perceived as male-bodied    169 walking towards you not looking looking  & you remember  in your before time looking at trans women not looking looking  as you passed this person on the street you sent your heart to them & you hope they can hear you: \u2018if this  is your journey too say yes keep going just keep going\u2019    *   *   *    Another postcard. Spiling lipsyncs BRIM\u2019s words.  F o r  t h e  G i r l s  For Matrilinealities  SPILING. i used to collect \u2018ma\u2019ams\u2019  like diamonds diamonds i could eat i could live off any tiny passing ma\u2019am for weeks  1st time Mom heard a man call me ma\u2019am was the 1st time she saw a man hold open a door for me  BRIM (voice). there now, honey, you can be patronized just like the rest of us  SPILING. she never wanted me to become an academic not something she said   170 just something i sensed  she\u2019s protective  wants to spare me what she had to endure: eggs & living breathing institutions & endless distinguished lectures delivered  by the old boys   when you start estrogen they say  look at the women in your family  to see what you will become to see what you are  my whole family wants to protect me  my brothers want to drive me home in the dark now my father keeps running me through self-defence: kick the side of the kneecap  eventually it will cave  then you run   i am so lucky because  their love is tangible & thick  like a coating of honey  that can refract and sharpen  itself into points \u2026  i learn not to tell them  about the things people shout from trucks men following me  their eyes in streetlights  & i only told them about the one egg  because i see fear in their eyes fear for me  they don\u2019t understand that even if the \u2018ma\u2019am\u2019s\u2019  feel like everyday  pennies now  they feed me  i move through  these living breathing institutions  like a well-fed 50ft  trans woman    171 crushing & smashing & i  i could protect them all  my brother  would say: \u2018but you\u2019re not  a 50ft trans-zilla so let me drive you home\u2019  i just don\u2019t tell them my family  my love is sharp like honey too    *   *   *                              172 4.2.7 [Book VI: You Will Go to the Moon.] Figure 8: Postcards, Postcards, Postcards 2022-2023 Postcards, Postcards, Postcards 2022-2023  The Materiality of Postcards         173    *   *   *    The golden telephone starts ringing. SPILING starts playing BRIM again and picks up quickly. BRIM\u2019S lines are lip-synced.   F o r  t h e  G i r l s  For Matrilinealities  SPILING (over the phone).  Mom? BRIM (lip-synced). let\u2019s imagine let\u2019s imagine more\u2014 we\u2019re all at happy hour  your Grand-Mother says something like:  BESS speaks from where she sits the audience.   BESS. when the patriarchy\u2019s  caught fire our task is done  BRIM. & i say:  \u2018i won\u2019t be  caught dead sleeping on the job once the patriarchy\u2019s burnt & terminal then on to the next\u2019   i\u2019ve got matches in my purse!  SPILING stops playing BRIM, putting down the phone and becoming herself again.   SPILING. Granma goes all quiet & i ask:   SPILING speaks directly to BESS for the first time in the play.  SPILING. how do you feel?  BESS. caught caught between a rock  & fragile reflections   your reflections    174 SPILING. where do you feel  the discomfort in your body?  where  in your body do you feel  like a ceramic  vase sitting on  a shelf?  breathe breathe  Mom wants you to know she gave me matches   BESS leaves her seat and moves towards SPILING trailing papers.  BESS. O dear what are we going to do with matches?\u2014  i liked the idea  that you could pose a problem   & have some hope of solving it   i  remember  reading a book when  i was in grade 12 talking  about modern chemistry & ended  with O   something  about the tremendous  vistas opening in front of us  \u2018duetothevaillantcarbonatom\u2019 & \u2018ingenuityofman\u2019 & it never occurred to me for an instant that \u2018man\u2019 did not mean me\u2019  \u2014but i must admit matches are practical    175 hold on to the matches dear hold on  BESS leaves the space, trailing papers.    *   *   *    SPILING reads a postcard.  SPILING. [Postcard to My Younger Transexual Self, Age 85]  &to Granma Dear Granma:\u2014 wanted to tell you i am through your reading list:  SPILING reads the following like a poem.  SPILING. Ways Home: Away from here & now You will go to the moon A woman of parts Bringing up herself with The chemistry of familiar things    *   *   *    SPILING is talking to BRIM over the phone again, asking the same question she asked before.   SPILING. would Granma see me as her Grand-Daughter?  BRIM (over the phone). um well i think that\u2014 it\u2019s your Grand-Mother & then me  & then you\u2014   176 generations of women  in our family\u2014 i am  so glad\u2014  & your Grand-Mother would feel the same i know she would\u2014 because sooner or later you\u2019re going to have to admit  you too  are a successful woman  in the academic lineage of our family  & you\u2014 you\u2019ve gotta keep going my love    *   *   *    SPILING. [Postcard to My Younger Transexual Self, Age 103]  This postcard has no text.   For some time, SPILING has been laying concentric circles of postcards around herself. SPILING lifts the first circle of postcards up revealing it is attached to other cards.   With the musician\u2019s help, SPILING drapes the attached postcards over herself, making a dress.    *   *   *    SPILING. [Postcard to My Younger Transexual Self, Age 119]  you wake up every morning knowing in your widest deepest parts  the pronouns  she\/her&they you doubted for    177 s   o      m   a   n   y      y   e   a   r   s but there is a chorus in you everymorning  singing the YOU-of-YOU to the highheavens &these are the words you need to speak:  \u2026 \u2018this is not the end of things\u2019 \u2014ah yes\u2014  you\u2019ve lived  to see  the you  you see in cardoors&shopwindows&dressingroom mirrors  \u2014see a version of yourself  who doesn\u2019t use pronouns anymore\u2014 you\u2019ve gone through them all\u2014 you started changing names yearly on yourbirthday \u2014daily even\u2014   with loved ones you don\u2019t speak your new names  just mouth the words  they read your lips  before you say it aloud  you can hear loves  calling for you as is the way of names  your \u2018i\u2019 coming into being \u2026 \u2014i see\u2014  \u2014we all see\u2014  \u2026 bring your hands together like this    SPILING demonstrates.   The words to [\u2018to float O to float\u2019] are projected.         178 SPILING. cast a spell an invocation  a prayer:  [\u2018to float O to float\u2019] \u2026 you float    *   *   *    End of script.                    179  4.3 Epilogue: A Postcard for You  Before moving on to the critical commentary in Chapter 5, I want to return to the questions I asked in the curtain raiser, and build on them:  What images arise in your imagination as you read the play?  Which images occur more than once or stay with you after reading?  What emotions arise in you?  What are you aware of in your body as you read the script? What did you imagine happening on stage, during a live performance, as you read the script? What, for you, seemed legible\/illegible? What makes some parts more legible than others? If you had to make a leap towards a possible understanding of what is illegible for you, how would you make this leap? How might your relationship to what is legible\/illegible shift and transform as your relationship to the memory of reading this work changes? If we were together, in the same space, following a reading of the script, I might also ask:  If you were going to write a postcard to a younger or older self, what would you write?  After sharing the script with invited audiences, I often have a stack of blank postcards that I hand out to the audience, which people can choose to write on and leave or take away. Although I can\u2019t give you a postcard, I encourage you to write one to yourself.   180 Chapter 5: Insights from a Playscript on Embodying Transness in a Doctoral Psychology Program  \u201cTo be a proud trans woman is to blow the system apart.\u201d  -Emma Frankland, NONE OF US IS YET A ROBOT:  Five Performances on Gender Identity and the Politics of Transition   Chapter 5 investigates insights drawn from Postcards to My Younger Transexual Self, Ages 0-119. Importantly, it does not translate the play\u2019s text into an academic form. In RbT, theatre, in this case, the playscript, stands alone as research. The play is data generation, analysis, and knowledge translation interwoven into one. When I share and workshop parts of the script in front of a live audience, there is often a post-show conversation, but it may or may not touch on themes I clarify below, as determined by the audience\u2019s questions, comments, and context. I may emphasize the power of collective joy\/rage for audiences of trans folks while declaring the need for reparative work with trans communities if I am at an academic conference for psychologists.  In providing this critical commentary, I mean to offer another entry point into my work by exploring patterns of meaning in the play from a reflexive, critical perspective. This is reminiscent of Brecht\u2019s (1964) advocacy to allow our emersion from the \u201criver\u201d (p. 201) of a play\u2019s story, to ensure we are \u201cproductively disposed \u2026[once] the spectacle is over\u201d (p. 205). This chapter includes a discussion of the play\u2019s themes, while Chapter 6 considers how, when taken together, these themes address my research questions:  1. What generative possibilities emerge when RbT is applied to explore my auto-narratives as a trans woman in a graduate counselling psychology program? In   181 what ways can RbT centre trans ways of knowing and contribute to lifting trans voices in counselling psychology? 2. What generative artistic\/scholarly possibilities emerge from a trans-informed approach to RbT creation? 5.1 Thematic Analysis My critical commentary offers a reflexive TA (Braun & Clarke, 2022). In reflexive TA, scholars create themes from the reduced and coded data, not the entire data corpus. In my project, I view the reduced data as my playscript. While theme generation and RbT have been drawn on by numerous research teams to explore data sets, previous studies tend to analyze interviewee transcripts with TA or other qualitative approaches and then create an RbT script based on the transcripts and initial analysis (Brown et al., 2018; Colantonio et al., 2008; Jarus et al., 2022; Schneider et al., 2014). My use of TA is closer to the autoethnographic studies I reviewed in Chapter 2 that conduct TA on researcher\u2019s written auto-narratives (Consoli et al., 2022; Hargons et al., 2017; Yang et al., 2022). I view TA as offering another perspective on my RbT creation, one that may build a bridge between counselling psychology and theatre, supporting those who are less familiar with reading and interpreting a script by explicitly examining the play\u2019s patterns of meaning.  I created the following themes from my playscript: 1. maternal & disciplinary narrative dis\/inheritance, 2. embodied fiction beyond the body, 3. care as aesthetics of fragmentation and choice.  I begin with theme definitions and supporting excerpts from the playscript that illustrate these patterns of meaning (Table 3). I also search for discrepancies in these patterns and potential   182 alternative implications. I connect these themes to the research literature in counselling psychology and trans studies. In the chapter\u2019s final section, I consider several key moments from the play development process as part of the third theme.  Table 3: Theme Definitions and Example Excerpts. Theme  Definition Example  Maternal &  academic narrative dis\/inheritance  Narratives passed down from grand\/mother to grand\/daughter; narratives given to graduate students across various academic disciplines; the interaction between these narratives. Maternal \u2013  BESS ROSE-MARIE: \u2018another story about my father\u2026\/ my Grand-Mother kept him in petticoats\u2019  Disciplinary \u2013 BESS ROSE-MARIE: \u2018Bess \/ you are as good as a boy\u2019 Embodied fictions beyond the body  Dramatic embodiment is a productive inquiry stance at the healing meeting place between \u2018real\u2019 and \u2018fictional\u2019.  BRIM: \u2018i have imaginary conversations with your Grand-Mother too\u2019  Care as aesthetics of fragmentation and choice   Active care-as-aesthetic choices that prioritize trans time and consent in the staging of trans narratives.  Stage Directions: \u2018At various points, SPILING will ask audience members to volunteer the postcard they are holding for her to read. She tells the audience they can choose not to give her the postcard they are holding, and she can refuse to read any postcards she is offered.\u2019  While the themes and their overarching meanings speak to my entire data set, it is vital to acknowledge the predominance of my narratives in the script. As such, meanings and patterns are supported mainly with playscripts excerpts from Spiling, the character who represents me in the play. These excerpts are supplemented with the voices of other characters, where possible, to draw intergenerational connections in the analysis.   183 5.2 Theme One: Maternal & Academic Narrative Dis\/inheritance. The first theme I identified in the playscript is maternal & academic narrative dis\/inheritance. I define this theme as narratives passed on from grand\/mother to grand\/daughter; narratives handed down to graduate students across various academic disciplines; the intra-actions (Barad, 2014) between these accrued narratives.  5.2.1 Maternal Narrative Dis\/inheritance. SPILING. when you start estrogen they say  look at the women in your family  to see what you will become to see what you are  Spiling speaks these lines in a postcard exploring familial love, how her family tries to protect her, and how she tries to protect her family. Spiling describes the love passed down to her by her family and the love she passes back as \u2018sharp like honey.\u2019  According to Goodall (2005), narrative inheritance \u201cdescribe[s] the afterlives of the sentences used to spell out the life stories of those who came before us. What we inherit narratively from our forebears provides us with a framework for understanding our identity through theirs.\u201d (p. 497). Goodall\u2019s concept of narrative inheritance aligns with McAdam\u2019s narrative identity, emphasizing \u201cthe internalized and evolving story of the self that a person constructs to make sense and meaning\u201d (McAdams, 2011, p. 99) is passed-down. Narrative inheritance also highlights a specific aspect of narrative exchange (Hammack & Cohler, 2009) in identity formation: an individual\u2019s conscious and unconscious discourse with the narratives left to them through familial lineage. Goodall complicates the concept of narrative inheritance by considering whether we extend or rebel against our inheritance and whether we perceive the inherited narratives as complete. If not, what is omitted? And how, as inheritors, do we relate to   184 these omissions? Can we see ourselves in a \u2018factual\u2019 or \u2018nonfiction\u2019 retelling of our inherited narratives? The concept of incomplete familial narrative inheritance resonates with trans ways of knowing in terms of secrets previous family members may have needed to keep about their transness and gender, thereby erasing gender-diverse ancestors from our histories. Bess shares this family narrative: BESS. another story about my father\u2026 my Grand-Mother kept him in petticoats  dresses  \u2014people did with little boys at that time\u2014 when he turned 6 his father said to his mother: \u2018cut off the curls take off the dresses he\u2019s a man from now on\u2019 from that time on he had to work out in fields with a man  had to learn  The above family narrative does not indicate acceptance of trans expression in early life or a gender-fluid child. For centuries infants were dressed similarly regardless of gender (Horbury, 2021). Importantly, trans and gender-diverse children played outside gender boundaries long before health professionals and politicians made a pathologizing language for transness in childhood and families dominated by colonial, Eurocentric viewpoints would have known how to support an explicitly gender-diverse childhood (Gill-Peterson, 2018). The above narrative of petticoats and dresses echoes Spiling\u2019s recounting of creating a dress from a t-shirt at six years old. The echo between these narratives is evocative: What if Spiling did have a trans ancestor and the narrative has been omitted from family history? How   185 might such new possibilities for the past support Spiling\/me seeing herself\/myself as legible in her\/my family\u2019s story?  As I wrote this section of the play, I was tantalized by this question: What if I did have a trans ancestor? The above narrative is a near-verbatim excerpt from my grandmother\u2019s audio recordings. As I engaged in data familiarization, I listened to this specific portion of her audio recording repeatedly, and I played it for other family members. These family members had already listened to my grandmother\u2019s recordings, but I felt compelled to re-share this excerpt explicitly with them. I have no idea what my great-grandparent thought about a haircut, changing clothes, and suddenly learning from men. These might have been thrilling changes. But when I listen to this family narrative, I read grief into it. Although I could not articulate this when I shared the excerpt, I hoped that my family would read grief in it as well. I played the recording for my mother, and she said, \u201cI actually felt really sorry for [your great-grandparent] \u2026 It would be a terrible shock.\u201d My mother\u2019s empathy for my great-grandparent resonated with the grief I read in the excerpt and gave me a feeling of being perceived through our exchange around this inherited family narrative.   Audiences can read Bess\u2019s above anecdote in several ways. One possible reading of this inherited narrative is that it implies the social construction of gender: dresses can be taken off, and you can \u2018learn\u2019 to be a specific gender \u2018from now on.\u2019 However, Bess seems unaware of such implications as she recalls the narrative, and so do the family members who appear in the petticoats anecdote. Her grandfather\u2019s declaration \u2018he\u2019s a man from now on\u2019 is definitive and seems to indicate now-established gender immutability and normality. The narrative is more explicit in passing down how different members of Spiling\u2019s family might manage the gender expression of other family members: \u2018cut off\u2019 and \u2018take off\u2019 the aspects   186 of gender expression that require alteration. These are the same policing and management practices used by Spiling\u2019s babysitter: \u2018CHANGECLOTHES!\u2019  Following Stern\u2019s (2020) example of using narrative inheritance and queer theory in auto-narrative analysis, I was interested in playwriting Spiling\u2019s babysitter narrative through a lens of critical transgender theory. This led me to disarm the babysitter\u2019s gender expression management strategies by positing them as ridiculous tropes rather than traumatic. The ridiculousness is conveyed through typography and language choices. The babysitter is so desperate to manage Spiling\u2019s gender that the words of her ultimatum run together, no spaces between them. Such typography choices suggest to audiences the babysitter\u2019s level of anxiety related to Spiling\u2019s engagement in fluid gender expression. While not delineating a single performative interpretation for an actor (Harris, 2020), the typography choices also provide hints about how to deliver this exclamation: quickly, loudly, with the initial [ch\/ t\u0361 \u0283\u2009] sound of \u2018change\u2019 and initial [k] sound in \u2018clothes\u2019 sounds hitting the air, rounded out by the final noisy, plural [z].  The babysitter\u2019s ultimatum to a 6-year-old child expressing gender fluidity is also reclaimed by being spoken by Spiling, an out, middle-aged trans woman who never deems it necessary to even refer to the babysitter by name. This way, a narrative sharing potentially traumatic familial gender expression management strategies is re-storied into one Spiling controls through editorializing choices.  5.2.2 Narrative Inheritance and Trans Daughters Narrative inheritance from their families of origin is hardly a birthright for trans daughters. I propose further complicating Goodall\u2019s (2005) narrative inheritance by considering narrative disinheritance. Such disinheritance is particularly relevant to trans children. The narrative disinheritance of trans children may take different forms, including being disowned and   187 kicked out of the family home (Munro et al., 2017); through parents grieving as if they have lost a loved one when the child comes out as transgender (Riggs & Bartholomaeus, 2018); or being affectively and spiritually disowned, for example, likened to rejected family members from previous generations (Wiggins, 2017). The disinheritance may also result from a child\u2019s (including an adult child\u2019s) gender being unrecognized or perceived as illegible by their family of origin.  In terms of cross generational legibility\/illegibility, parents transmit intergenerational gender attitudes to their children via role modelling and verbal persuasion, implicitly and explicitly (Moen et al., 1997; Platt & Polavieja, 2016). Same-gender parent-child (e.g., mother to daughter, nonbinary parent to nonbinary child) transmission may have more influence than cross-gender transmission (e.g., father to genderqueer child; Platt & Polavieja, 2016). An example of implicit modelling of gender role attitudes and education from the playscript is when Brim shares that her mother reacted excitedly to her attending graduate school in the 1970s. An example of explicit verbal persuasion is in the excerpt above: \u2018take off the dresses \/ he\u2019s a man from now on.\u2019 But grand\/mothers cannot explicitly influence trans grand\/daughters they don\u2019t know they have. Spiling is barred from the explicit grand\/mother-daughter transmission of gender attitudes in her family because her gender is unrecognized by them. Spiling hides her gender partially intentionally (von Doussa et al., 2020), as when she, at age 6, fearful she is upsetting her mother, commands herself: \u2018don\u2019t turn \/ t-shirts into dresses againnever\u2019. The previous illegibility or misreading of Spiling\u2019s gender by her family is also manifested relationally, as suggested when Spiling describes that the \u20181st time Mom heard \/ a man call [her] ma\u2019am\u2019 it was decades later.\u2019    188 But narrative disinheritance can also be reversed. Spiling is instated into a grand\/mother-daughter transmission by her mother\u2019s explicit and implicit verbal persuasion and role-modelling when they are clothes shopping: SPILING. a clerk says \u2018i\u2019ve pulled a few more sizes\u2019  Mom responds:  BRIM (voice). i\u2019ll pass them to her  SPILING. t   o      h   e   r wish i could pull timebacklike a dressing-room- shower-curtain see Mom say \u2018her\u2019          crazyglue let \u2018her\u2019 stick&stick& never let \u2018her\u2019 go   In the above script excerpt, typography conveys clues to the character\u2019s affect in response to her mother explicitly recognizing her gender in an unremarkable way, with a casual \u2018i\u2019ll pass them \/ t   o      h   e   r\u2019. A gender transition of a family member is a transition for the entire family (von Doussa et al., 2020), and Spiling\u2019s wanting to hold on to this moment suggests her mom may not have always used \u2018her\u2019 for Spiling in such an unremarked way. The space between letters in the words Spiling speaks, \u2018t   o      h   e   r\u2019, suggests the character is trying to dwell in the moment of her mom saying \u2018her\u2019. At the same, no spaces between phrases like \u2018timeback\u2019 and \u2018stick&stick&stick\u2019 imply the character rushing, head-long, joyfully, into the materiality of this new maternal recognition, the pronoun accompanied by dresses passed through a changing room curtain, undeniably conveying Spiling\u2019s mother recognition of her daughter. 5.2.3 Academic Narrative Inheritance We can transpose Goodall\u2019s (2005) narrative inheritance from the family system to systems of graduate academic studies. Bess and Brim attended graduate school in the 1940s and 1970s, respectively. They share resonant narratives of faculty members qualifying their academic   189 achievement through a gender binary. For Bess, her major professor told her, \u2018Bess \/ you are as good as a boy.\u2019 For Brim, she overhears a faculty member talking about her: \u2018O well she\u2019s smart enough but that doesn\u2019t matter\u2014.\u2019 Such qualifications are disinheritance from academic narratives in which Bess and Brim can recognize themselves. Although the statements are in the guise of achievement recognition, they are contingent on a gender binary that is not natural or neutral (Hyde et al., 2019) but misogynistic.  The experiences that Bess and Brim recall align with historical research on women in academic sciences in the second half of the twentieth century. Although differences existed within specific science disciplines (Ceci et al., 2014), research suggests women were published less, paid less, and underrepresented in faculty positions (Levin & Stephan, 1998; Svarstad et al., 2004). Drawing on Barad\u2019s (2014) work, we can consider the agency and influences of prejudices like misogyny in creating such conditions for women in the academy. Misogyny inter-acts materially with the women in my play: for example, Bess Rose-Marie shares that she is sitting with an academic journal open on her lap, nursing babies, unable to find a teaching position at the university that hired her husband due to a policy that means they cannot hire wives. For Spiling, academic and disciplinary narrative disinheritance takes the form of transmisogyny (Serano, 2016). An example of transmisogynist disciplinary narrative disinheritance is in Spiling\u2019s postcard to her supervisor, Gandin. This passage implies that Spiling\u2019s gender, despite her already having declared it in supervision, is still perceived as illegible to Gandin: SPILING. yesterday in our one-on-one supervision  you went over AGAIN  how painful it is for trans women: electrolysis, slow hormone changes\u2014   190 i know  of course i know   but you\u2019re not used to one within the gates  so just a reminder:  she\/her, libra\u2014trans woman that\u2019s me  Spiling\u2019s postcard is an act of self-advocacy that reclaims her academic narrative inheritance: she is a trans woman inside the gates of her academic discipline. Research suggests that such self-advocacy and repeatedly coming out is difficult for trans graduate students, considering power dynamics between students and faculty members (Goldberg, Kuvalanka, Budge, et al., 2019; Goldberg, McCormick, et al., 2021). However, Spiling sends this and other postcards to Gandin with her grandmother, Bess, sitting behind her. The stage directions place Bess in a supportive position, reflecting research that suggests trans adults can weather workplace or educational cisgenderism with less cost to their mental health with strong family support (Fuller & Riggs, 2018).  According to Lea (2016), RbT is uniquely positioned to explore narrative inheritance, as theatre can embrace narrative \u201cfluidity in time and place \u2026 [and] ways of crossing time, place, and mortality to maintain and build connections\u201d (p. 17) Narrative inheritance is made material in the playscript, made visible: postcards pass narratives between the characters; stories passed down from women in Spiling\u2019s family as well as the narratives from the women\u2019s various academic studies, and the interaction between these tales. Although narrative disinheritance is witnessed in multiple microaggressions and outright aggressions towards Spiling and other characters, family support allows Spiling to engage in advocacy and activism. As Brim says to Spiling:  BRIM. it\u2019s your Grand-Mother   191 & then me  & then you\u2014 generations of women  in our family\u2014 i am  so glad\u2014  & your Grand-Mother would feel the same i know she would\u2014 you\u2014 you\u2019ve gotta keep going my love & like it or not you must admit  you too  are a successful woman  in the academic lineage of our family   Here Brim\u2019s family re-storying inter-acts and transforms Spiling\u2019s disinheritance to re-inheritance. 5.2.4 Reflexively Engaging with Theme One As I reflect on this first TA theme and consider the possibility of confirmatory bias in my analysis (Morrow, 2005), I find myself watching scholar-vidder Rox Samer\u2019s (2014) Gold Rush. Vidding is the practice of remixing found footage into short vids, originally a fan art medium. Samer (2019) describes Gold Rush as a scholarly-vid transfeminist critique of \u201cfeminist historiographic models of mother-daughter inheritance\u201d (p. 545). In my playscript and the above analysis, I look to traditional constellations of mother-daughter legacy. If an adult\u2019s gender transition ruptures their relationship with family members of origin, some trans adults and their families can heal these ruptures (von Doussa et al., 2020); however, research also indicates that trans women report low family support, and some of these ruptures never heal (Davey et al., 2014). I am aware of the privilege inherent in Spiling\u2019s closeness to her mother, and such familiarity with a parent is impossible for some. Even Spiling is mindful of this privilege, saying,   192 of her family\u2019s love for her, \u2018i am so lucky because \/ their love is tangible & thick.\u2019 An example of an autobiographical play by a trans playwright that explores navigating transition without a parent\u2019s support is Draw the Circle (2018) by Mashuq Mushtaq Deen. Although the final monologue in the play, which is optional in performance, suggests Deen has reconciled his relationship with his parents, most of the script is a raw and aching exploration of a trans man being shut out of parental love.  5.3 Theme Two: Embodied Fictions Beyond the Body My second theme, embodied fictions beyond the body, is broadly connected to the entire playscript, as the work represents embodied, dramatized fictions. I define this theme as the dramatic embodiment of a productive inquiry stance at the healing meeting place between \u2018real\u2019 and \u2018fictional\u2019. When I write or perform the script, I embody a fictional character, acting as if my name is Spiling, and that I have \u2018an affinity for postcards.\u2019 As Gray (2023) describes, theatre is \u201can embodied, gestural, spatial, imaginative multi-dimensional art form\u201d (p. 314). Gray implies that from a theatre perspective, embodiment involves imaginative\/fictional dimensions.  The props in the play are \u201ckey artifacts\u201d (Salda\u00f1a, 2011, p. 136), and the postcards are essential meeting place between the \u2018real\u2019 and the \u2018fictional\u2019 in this production. Ruhl (2014) describes props as \u201ca real thing that creates a world of illusory things\u201d (p. 6), and using the example of an umbrella, she explains, \u201cthe umbrella is real on stage, and the rain is [usually] fiction\u201d (p. 6). Similarly, in the playscript, the postcards are visible, legible, and tactile to the actors and the audience. These objects, written by hand, are uniquely textured and otherworldly \u2013 they come from a world outside of the performance space. The stage directions call for audience members to have contact with these postcards, to hold them, and even read the handwritten fictions for themselves.     193 5.3.1 Postcards Can Time Travel: Metaphorical Patterns of Meaning Making Cards are the main form of communication in Postcards to My Younger Transexual Self, ages 0-119. Through an imaginative leap, Spiling\u2019s postcards to herself and the postcards Spiling, Bess, and Brim send to each other allow for communication across \u201cspacetimemattering\u201d (Barad, 2014, p. 168). In this script, postcards are not an archive of the past; they travel through time, from the past to the future and back again.  It might be relatively straightforward for audiences to identify that Spiling\u2019s exchange of postcards with Bess, her dead grandmother, is a fictional conceit. But because the script is partially based on transcripts, audiences might wonder what specific words in their exchange are \u2018real,\u2019 as in they are taken from transcripts, and which are fictional. Similarly, Gandin\u2019s distinguished lecture rehearsal appears as if it could be a daydream born from Bess, Spiling, or both together. Is any part of Gandin \u2018real\u2019? BESS. dreaming of us on campus together  with you studying psychology  me biochem  major professor gandin (G-A-N-D-I-N)  would have  a twin  training you in psychology & we\u2019d tear them down side by side\u2014  wouldn\u2019t that be delicious?   Immediately after Bess\u2019s words, the stage directions indicate that Bess and Spiling look at each other and then move to seats in the audience while smiling in agreement, making space for them to watch the musician play Gandin. The \u2018dream\u2019 that is Gandin\u2019s scene sits alongside some of the play\u2019s more abstract fictional imagery: for example, \u2018i used to collect \u2018ma\u2019ams\u2019 \/ like diamonds \/ diamonds i could eat\u2019 and \u2018the Body boils roils & is \/ read as \/ human\u2019. The   194 playscript\u2019s recurring images include floating in the water, the sun, eggs, and diamonds. Some of these images are \u2018real\u2019 in that they refer to tangible things, some are poetic and surreal. These fictional images combine to allow the play\u2019s characters to embody a union of complex and intertwined thoughts and emotions through metaphor.  For instance, although Gandin only appears once, each of the women refers to Gandin in their graduate school experience, as Brim directly acknowledges: \u2018you know i spent my career surrounded by GANDINS\u2019, and later \u2018GANDIN THE LIVING BREATHING INSTITUTION \/ an eternal fixture\u2014.\u2019 In this way, Gandin, an embodied fictional character, becomes a symbol of the systemic barriers these women encounter in academia.  5.3.2 Rescripting Onstage: Affirming, Interpersonal Fictions, and Therapeutic Rescripting Spiling speaks directly about some of the fictions included in the play with her mom: SPILING. i\u2019ve been imagining we  Granma & me meet up at the tail end of  a conference i was presenting at she\u2019s only cities away & i drive a couple of hours to stay with her after warm greetings & small talk defenceless silence  her reading\u2014maybe pretending to? me reading\u2014no  pretending to & wanting to ask \u2018do you see me as your Grand-Daughter?\u2019 sometimes specifics are absolute  i want her to be absolute in this i want a real  absolute  BRIM. O hon i think your Grand-Mother\u2014 well i have imaginary conversations with your Grand-Mother too     195 In the above excerpt, audiences may hear Spiling\u2019s drive for a \u2018real \/ absolute,\u2019 wanting to know beyond a doubt that her grandmother would accept her. Here, \u2018real\u2019 refers to an interaction that can only ever be imaginary, as Spiling\u2019s grandmother has passed away. Brim offers that she also embodies imaginary conversations with Bess Rose-Marie, affirming and normalizing the fictive and the imaginary. In the next part of the play, audiences see Brim manifesting the unreal in writing a letter to Spiling\u2019s grandmother that she never intends to send.  The above example suggests that, through fiction, RbT can offer embodied rescripting of auto-narratives during the creative process. Theatre replaces talking about a dysregulating event with rescripting an image in 3D, multi-dimensionally, through text, gesture, and movement (Gray, 2023; Lea & Belliveau, 2023; Lea et al., 2020). Returning to the question of Gandin\u2019s distinguished lecture, the playscript\u2019s exploration of fictive embodiment implies, rather than questioning, What is real here? The question to ask of the script might be, What is healing here?  Spiling\u2019s interruptions of Gandin include a literal re-staging as she directs and then insists Gandin read the postcards she sends. In the end, Gandin does not send a final reply to Spiling, deciding it might be better to sleep on it and \u2018respond in the morning,\u2019 and tears up the card. The physical act of watching the performer playing Gandin tear up the card serves as an enacted metaphor (Westwood & Wilensky, 2005) for Spiling\u2019s release from the burden of all that is transmisogynistic in their correspondence, including Gandin\u2019s seeming inability to recognize Spiling as a trans woman.  Theatre deals in fictions that extend beyond the body and are created and witnessed collaboratively, by fellow theatre artists and audience members (Belliveau et al., 2019; Lea et al., 2020). In this way, theatre offers the potential for rescripting in the context of a witnessing group (Ali et al., 2019). We can consider the importance of the witnessing group by drawing on   196 perspectives from psychodrama and drama therapy. In psychodrama, realistic fiction or surreal scene arrangements are played out. Surreal scenes are meant to \u201ctranslate the \u2018inner reality\u2019 of the protagonist\u201d (von Ameln & Becker-Ebel, 2020, p. 151) or lead client, embodying otherwise \u201cinvisible building blocks of meaning\u201d (p. 151) in the context of the group. In drama therapy, rescripting in a community is emphasized, and the group \u201ccoconstructing [sic] a shared body of experience that is constituted of both imagination and reality\u201d (Sajnani & Johnson, 2014, p. 200).  To offer an example of support and integration through group witnessing from this playscript, I wrote the postcard \u2018i used to collect \u2018ma\u2019ams\u2019\u2019, about Spiling\u2019s family\u2019s love for her, as a fictionalization of my struggle to accept the changing way my family interacted with me when I began presenting as a woman. At times, I perceived so much fear and worry from them. It was in the writing process that I discovered an image for their protectiveness: \u2018like a coating of honey \/ that can refract and sharpen \/ itself into points\u2019, and the image allowed me to reframe their protectiveness as love. I continued to deepen my understanding of the image by embodying these words in workshops, witnessed by a supportive community of fellow artists and invited audiences. I felt my awareness of my relationship with my family transforming, as I embodied the love and protectiveness I feel back for my family members. My second theme, then, indicates a therapeutic potential for fiction in RbT that dramatizes trans narratives. In his play Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes, Kushner describes \u201cthe moments of [stage] magic \u2026 as bits of theatrical illusion \u2013 which means it\u2019s OK if the wires show\u201d (p. 12). In other words, apparent wires make some of the illusions obvious. I see a connection between Kushner\u2019s wire-obvious stage imagery, therapeutic rescripting using fiction, and a trans-informed theatre aesthetic that amalgamates fiction and retelling autobiographical memories to stage new possible futures. Sometimes \u2018the wires\u2019 will be   197 obvious, or the fictional aspects of the script will be easy to determine. Sometimes the wires or fiction may not be so obvious. This \u2018real\u2019\/fiction indeterminacy is in and of itself an ethical act of care. I tell these stories because of the protection provided by the possibility that most of it is made up. The audience can feel cared for, too, if informed in the curtain-raiser that the play contains fiction and invited to consider the question posed above: Fiction or not, what is healing here? \u2018Real\u2019 or not, what points towards new possibilities, new future relationships (Rosiek, 2018)?  5.4 Theme Three: Care as Aesthetics of Fragmentation and Choice Although traditional themes in reflexive TA are limited to pattern-finding in written text, my final theme considers patterns of meaning from embodying and sharing the text for invited audiences as part of the playscript\u2019s development. Such pattern finding is like TA with visual images or artwork (Braun & Clarke, 2022), which considers the entire work. In the case this RbT play, I conceptualize developmental explorations like readings for audiences as part of the whole work. This aligns with Dolan\u2019s (2005) emphasis on theatre audiences:  a group of people who have elected to spend an evening or an afternoon not only with a set of performers enacting a certain narrative arc or aesthetic trajectory, but with a group of other people, sometimes familiar, sometimes strange. (p. 10) Who makes up this group of \u201csometimes familiar\u201d and \u201cstrange\u201d audience members changes over the development of a playscript. In the case of this development process, the audiences were made up of theatre colleagues, academic colleagues, as well as others who were strangers to me.   I named the final theme care as aesthetics of fragmentation and choice. I define the theme as active care-as-aesthetic choices that prioritize trans time and consent in the staging of trans narratives. Fragmentation and choice are intertwined in the playscript, connected to trans   198 conceptions of temporality (Fabbre, 2014) and the possibilities of exploring temporality through RbT (Lea, 2016; Lea & Belliveau, 2023). My third theme is also in dialogue with a trans ethic of care (Malatino, 2020; Owis et al., 2023).   5.4.1 Fragmentation As I review in Chapter 2, gender expansive experiences are artistically rendered on stage as time slips, time folding, and non-linearity in trans theatre (Keyes et al., 2021). Non-linear narratives are not unique to trans theatre (Smiley, 2005). Still, they are employed for different aesthetic purposes through a lens of trans ways of knowing, as trans artists explore staging \u201cthe potentiality of a life unscripted by [normative temporal] conventions\u201d (Halberstam, 2005, p. 2) and how to \u201crepresent and \u2026 inhabit temporal, gendered, and conceptual discontinuities\u201d in theatre (Amin, 2014, p. 2020). Postcards are usually delayed communication, full of breaks and ellipses as the card travels through the mail. This delay is nonexistent in the playscript as cards travel from past to future. Lea\u2019s (2016) notion that RbT has the potential to explore \u201cfluidity in time \u2026 [and] ways of crossing time \u201d (p. 17) suggests the fragmentation of time at work throughout the playscript. For Lea, this time-crossing holds the potential for connection-building. I view this time fragmentation as an act of care. Fragmentation and time folding exist in the script at the level of section juxtaposition, for example, when a postcard from adolescence is butted against a postcard from older adulthood. Fragmentation and time folding are also demonstrated in the reoccurrence of Gandin, as a symbol, across the narratives of all three generations of women. In addition, time folding occurs at the level of the word, such in the repetition of egg across time and characters, connecting them through a single image: the phrases \u2018plenty of egg on my face,\u2019 \u2018maybe he was   199 just egging me on,\u2019 \u2018someone threw an egg yesterday,\u2019 are spoken by different characters in various times. Time slips and folds in the playscript because the postcards are outside of linear chronology, in a chronology based on care: mine and the audience. In this way, the playscript is staged and embodied in a way that challenges \u201cnormative narratives of sexed development, continuity, and coherence\u201d (Amin, 2014, p. 220). In a\/r\/tography, \u201cunfolding\u201d (Irwin, 2003, p. 64) refers to activating \u201can aesthetic awareness [that] is open to wonder while suspending belief and trusting uncertainty\u201d (p. 64), blurring boundaries and embracing fluidity (Irwin, 2013). Spiling\u2019s postcards are movements beyond the boundaries of medicalized narratives of trans identity or the \u201ctherapeutic confessional discourses of talk shows and the press\u201d (Amin, 2014, p. 220), in which auto-narratives of trans lives are often sensationalized. Indeed, the \u201cconventionalized and canonized \u2026 expectations\u201d (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 428) of medicalized and media-influenced trans auto-narratives might include being born in the wrong body, dysphoria as earliest memories, or position surgery as the long-awaited cure-all (Mason-Schrock, 1996).  \u201cIf we do not wish to become unintelligible, we cannot tell stories that break the rules\u201d (Gergen & Gergen, 1988, p. 20), and the above conventionalized genre expectations \u201ccondition the relative legitimacy and currency of the narratives\u201d (Ellis & Cromby, 2009, p. 326) any trans person can express. The master narratives related to trans lives described in Chapter 2 point to some of these limiting expectations: for example, the narrative of trans folks being born in the wrong body, co-opted as a means of managing access to gender affirming procedures (Miss\u00e9, 2022). While these genre expectations may fit some trans individuals, there is a danger that they become monolithic, standardized assumptions through which we identify and recognize a trans life narrative with direct implications on care access and who is represented in the media (2014,   200 p. 220). I wrote my playscript actively resisting these genre expectations and opposing sensationalization. The fragments of gender affirming care documented in these cards are mundane. For example, of all the gender-affirming procedures I have engaged in, there is nothing more monotonous than electrolysis sessions, and images in Spiling\u2019s electrolysis postcard are mundane: emla cream, yogurt, leftovers, and plastic wrap. It is difficult to sensationalize plastic wrap.  5.4.2 Choice  As part of the final theme, choice focuses on decisive moments during my artistic-scholarly process. These moments represent major turning points in my RbT playmaking journey, creating the potential for integrating care at deeper levels throughout Postcards to My Younger Transexual Self, Ages 0-119. These moments all happened while reading the play for invited audiences, emphasizing the importance of performing as part of an RbT research design (Belliveau & Lea, 2016). These moments are shared through images of my process postcards in the figures below.             201 5.4.2.1 Sharing Moment: Beyond the Stage Lights.  Figure 9: Process Memo Process Memo: Further Away from Me     As the above memo suggests (Figure 3), early in the process of script development, I gave myself the objective of sharing the script in different ways to engage the audience more actively and center my consent in the storytelling process, prioritizing my ability to choose whether I wanted to read a particular part of the script in the moment of a public performance. In another process memo, I wrote: \u2018The other day after reading, an audience member said, \u2018You should try handing postcards out to the audience, get them to shuffle them around, and see what comes back. Leave it to the Theatre Gods.\u2019\u2019 I took the audience member\u2019s suggestion to heart as I wrote the next draft. I also felt emboldened by the play Becoming a Man in 127 EASY Steps by Scott Turner Schofield (2018),   202 which invites the audience to shout out a step number, and Schofield then shares that \u2018step\u2019 based on a narrative from his transition. With these inspirations in mind, I changed the play\u2019s stage direction to emphasize in-the-moment choice in building the narrative.  These postcards are intimate, sensitive, and public: like all postcards, they can be easily read by anyone who holds them, and in the stage directions I added, the audience is encouraged to read them. Asking the audience to choose postcards they want me to read next, encouraging them to hand me their card, and letting them know I might not read a particular postcard, allows me to speak to the audience outside of the role of Spiling. During these role breaks, I strive to communicate to the audience: I am okay to keep going if you are. I don\u2019t want the audience to be concerned for me; I also want the script to enable me to care for myself. For me, performing the piece with the audience choosing postcards engenders a feeling of expansive togetherness. The audience is taking some responsibility for the storytelling each time they hand me a new card. They are making an implicit request for me to keep going, and one that brings awareness to the structure of care that postcard choice imbues in the script.           203 5.4.2.2 Sharing Moment: Who Reads the Postcards? Figure 10: Process Memo Process Memo: Reading Rules    During an invited sharing of the script, an audience member held up the postcard that started \u2018SPILING into the street\u2019 and asked if they could read it. The ethical responsibilities of RbT scholars extend to audience members of their research-based playscript (Belliveau, Cox, et al., 2020), and this audience member wanted to move into the role of a fellow performer. We were in a university classroom, and the other individuals in the audience was looking at me, waiting for my response. I only had a few moments to weigh the ethical tensions of this choice.  I was across the classroom from the audience member. I decided that I needed to be closer to them no matter how I responded. If I said, \u2018No,\u2019 I hoped physical proximity would help convey that my boundary was not meant to rebuke their request but remove the possibility that   204 the audience could become performers. If I said, \u2018Yes,\u2019 I wanted physical proximity to convey, as they read the postcard, that they were not alone reading an unfamiliar text in front of people they didn\u2019t know.  The postcard \u2018SPILING into the street\u2019 contains surreal imagery. It deals with institutional cissexism (quoting a government form that requires an oath of commitment to change gender markers), societal transmisogyny (a body being read as female while its failure to conform to female body expectations is highlighted), and family support (Spiling\u2019s grandma\u2019s trick for not crying was whistling). However, all this material is explored at the level of metaphor, in short statements, and the whole card is just over 200 words and can be delivered in under one minute. Because of the symbolic representation, I decided that the card did not feel as personal to me as some of the other cards and could be read by someone else. I also decided that the metaphors and shortness of the text potential offered a safer container (Androutsopoulou, 2001) around possibly emotionally activating material explored in the card.  I said, \u2018Yes.\u2019 I told the audience member they did not have to read the whole thing if they did not want to. They read the entire postcard and thanked me afterwards. I said, \u2018Yes,\u2019 because if I was in the audience, I could see myself making the same request.          205 5.4.2.3 Sharing Moment: Trans Joy (No Pressure). Figure 11: Process Memo Process Memo: Expectations    Note: A line from the curtain raiser for my script included the phrase trans joy.  After one play reading, I wrote the following memo (Figure 4): At another workshop sharing, I introduced the script with my usual curtain raiser lines: As a trans woman, I\u2019m wary of the \u2018auto\u2019 in life stories. I\u2019m wary because trans-life narratives have been co-opted and used against trans people in art, media, and medical settings for centuries. I\u2019m wary because we, as consumers of trans stories, seem fascinated with trans trauma and the regulation of trans bodies. I\u2019m not interested in regulations. I\u2019m not interested in trauma. I write & create as a means towards trans joy. Afterwards, two audience members wondered about the expectations inherent in the term trans joy. Is trans joy a utopian promise? What does it mean for me to write as a means towards trans joy? These questions remind me of Mu\u00f1oz\u2019s (2009) words, that \u201cutopian thinking gets maligned for being naively romantic\u201d (p. 27). As Stone (2014) writes, \u201cWe have barely begun, really, to explore how powerful trans\u2014born in the joy and pain of living bodies and fully engaged in the world\u2014can be\u201d (p. 94). However, when not defined, trans joy might be taken as a synonym for gender euphoria, \u201ca joyful feeling of rightness \u2026 experienced\u201d (Beischel et al.,   206 2022, p. 291) in body, mind, and social interactions. Like gender dysphoria, gender euphoria is not experienced by all members of the trans community. Although the concept gender euphoria was developed by trans communities in reaction to the clinical emphasis on dysphoria, if employed in an overly simplistic binary, gender euphoria further pathologizes, suggesting that euphoric self-acceptance should be the end goal of transitioning (Beischel et al., 2022).  I realized my curtain-raiser\u2019s call to trans joy, if interpreted as euphoric self-acceptance amid systemic cisgenderism and transphobia, did seem na\u00efve. I revisited Stone\u2019s words, and I added them to my curtain raiser: I write towards an imperfect trans joy, born, as trans studies founder Sandy Stone writes, of our power and pain, and \u201cfully engaged in the world\u201d (p. 94).  5.5 Conclusion I drew three themes from the playscript and several turning points in my artistic-scholarly process during the play\u2019s development: (1) maternal & disciplinary narrative dis\/inheritance, (2) embodied fiction beyond the body, (3) care as aesthetics of fragmentation and choice. These themes allow me to address my research questions in Chapter 6, offering possibilities for how and why counselling psychologists might consider RbT, in what ways RbT will contribute to traditions of qualitative research within counselling psychology, and what trans-informed RbT might look like.    207 Chapter 6: Discussion Theatre-making, particularly playwriting, is the central research process I undertook for this dissertation. If \u201cstories give meaning to our lives [and] become our equipment for living\u201d (Bochner & Herrmann, 2020, p. 286), then research-as-theatre practices offer new ways to investigate meaning through embodied stories and become new methodological equipment for counselling psychologists. The playscript Postcards to My Younger Transexual Self, Ages 0-119 is one possible arts-based response to my research questions, illustrating the generative possibilities and advocacy that emerge through RbT versions of my auto-narratives and a trans-informed approach to RbT creation. The playscript does not offer definitive or absolute insights, and like any playscript, remains unfinished, emphasizing that calls to engage with trans ways of knowing in counselling psychology must be ongoing. In the final chapter, I first consider implications for RbT in counselling psychology based on the playscript, followed by my suggestions for trans-informed RbT practices. I then reflect on the clinical implications of my work, study limitations, and directions for future research.   6.1 RbT and Counselling Psychology RbT remains underutilized in counselling psychology; as such, my playscript offers an example of the methodological affordances that RbT presents to counselling psychology artist-scholars, particularly within the activist-oriented qualitative research paradigms well established within the specialization (Ponterotto, 2005; Sinacore et al., 2011). To embrace RbT, scholars in counselling psychology need to challenge assumptions of what counts and is valued in data and research evidence. RbT formalizes art as data, positioning theatre pieces and the processes that create them as a valid form of data generation and analysis. In RbT, plays may include sources like transcripts or recorded observations, as in other qualitative approaches, but could also   208 encompass artist-scholars\u2019 autobiographical and fictional accounts, other artistic works, and theatre-based stimuli such as tableaux (frozen images made with the body), improvisations, movement, dance, and song.  Challenging our assumptions of what research looks like in counselling psychology will allow for generative new possibilities. My playscript demonstrates RbT\u2019s potential to contribute such methodological possibilities by investigating (1) narrative inheritance and disinheritance, (2) re-story through embodied dramatizations, and (3) prioritizing aesthetic choices that enact unique strategies for ongoing consent.  6.1.1 Narrative Inheritance and Disinheritance Postcards to My Younger Transexual Self, Ages 0-119, illustrates the potential of RbT to explore intergenerational narratives (Goodall, 2005), master narratives (McLean et al., 2017), and narrative exchanges (Hammack & Cohler, 2009). By putting auto-narratives on stage (Shigematsu et al., 2021), RbT offers counselling psychology an embodied methodology to investigate identity as narrative (McAdams, 2011, 2020; McAdams & McLean, 2013) and reexamine the traditional researcher-subject\/object-of-research binary (Pratt & Rosiek, 2023) in staged autoethnographic narratives. My playscript highlights ongoing narrative exchange (Hammack & Cohler, 2009), or Spiling\u2019s ongoing negotiation of family, educational, and work expectations in articulating gender identity and embodying gender expression. For example, Spiling\u2019s identity is at first unrecognized within her family, signalling narrative disinheritance. But over the course of the play, Spiling shares narrative pieces that amount to her becoming the inheritor of her grand\/mother\u2019s legacies, articulating a transformation of self beyond gender, beyond her roles as grand\/daughter. Spiling\u2019s transformed self comes with new relationship possibilities, as seen in the gesture that she invites the audience to do with her at the end of the   209 play, physically embodying previously unrealized connections. RbT expands possibilities of aesthetic analysis and knowledge translations of the \u201cnarrative reasons for what we do, and narrative motives locked into who we are\u201d (Goodall, 2005, p. 503).  6.1.2 Embodied Re-Storying: Fictional Possibilities Fiction in RbT can support change on a therapeutic level by re-storying of narratives saturated in cisgenderism (Neimeyer, 2014). While writing the script, I drew on fiction to ensure that I did not have to tell experiences of cisgenderism and transmisogyny in a way that continued the violence of these interactions by repeating \u2018real\u2019 versions of these experiences. Fictionalization allowed me to embrace the numerous ways I could narrate and re-narrate these events, allowing me, for example, to create a scene dealing with discrimination in graduate school in which Spiling is in control, directing the action.   \u201cNarrative is \u2026 an accumulation of future possibilities\u201d (Ruhl, 2014, p. 29) which speaks to the embodied calls to action throughout this piece. RbT is an amplifier; every aesthetic choice can evoke and amplify the change at the heart of the artist scholars\u2019 critical-ideological practice. In my playscript, fiction encourages change by directly disputing master narratives of trans lives and offering alternatives to genre expectations related to typical trans narrative. Master narratives related to trans women\u2019s lives may include transmisogyny that individuals must navigate mostly privately (McLean et al., 2017). Genre expectations related to trans autobiographies in the media may consist mostly of depictions of an affirmed self via permissions and procedures of medico-juridical and psychotherapeutic systems (Amin, 2014). As an art form dependent on community, theatre can put alternatives to master narratives and genre expectations on stage. For example, Spiling and her grandmother exchange time-travelling postcards, and Spiling\u2019s grandmother, Bess, is in her early 20s and the 1940s during these exchanges. Not only does Bess not   210 pathologize Spiling\u2019s gender, but their postcard interactions imply that to Bess, Spiling\u2019s gender is perfectly legible and unremarkable. These fictional alternatives to master narratives and genre expectations can be part of an open conversation with the audience after an RbT performance in the form of talk-backs, and the audience can take these alternatives with them as they leave the theatre.  6.1.3 Aesthetic Choices for Consent Our training as counselling psychologists gives us a unique understanding of research ethics (Haverkamp, 2005). For example, due to changing resources and other factors related to personal resilience and regulation resources (Breslow et al., 2015), we understand that a collaborator or research participant might become dysregulated when telling a narrative that has to do with cissexism even when they previously told the story without emotion. Our awareness of changing levels of resilience and distress is vital for RbT projects that include auto-narratives, as these projects may involve telling the same story multiple times in play development, rehearsals, and performances (Belliveau, Cox, et al., 2020). However, I am not suggesting that RbT projects involving trans auto-narratives need to involve counselling psychologists to provide care, only that RbT study designs must prioritize community care as understood through trans lives and ways of knowing. For example:  \u2022 Facilitating care support from chosen family in rehearsal and performance spaces.  \u2022 Offering flexibility and space to process ongoing experiences of the burden of navigating day-to-day systems that may not explicitly make space for transness. \u2022 Adaptable rehearsal schedules that account for fluctuating experiences of dysphoria which may make performance and being watched much more challenging on some days than others.     211 The liveness of RbT performance offers numerous possibilities for incorporating ongoing consent in unique ways. In my playscript, I emphasize choice by including stage directions that offer the option of not sharing particular postcards. These directions ensure that I can consider my overall well-being and daily resource levels in deciding whether to read certain narratives aloud. This emphasis on consent is essential in RbT processes and can encourage us to consider how to incorporate ongoing consent throughout other qualitative research designs.  6.2 Trans Informed RbT I now consider possibilities for trans-informed RbT based on my playwriting process. RbT practitioners need to tailor their processes to the uniqueness of each project\u2019s context (Belliveau & Lea, 2016), and I offer these possibilities with the desire that others transform or discard them if they do not suit the context. Trans ways of knowing and trans theatre can encourage RbT plays to explore (1) new meanings concerning linearity and time on stage, (2) embrace metaphor and other fictional imagery as sites of analysis and knowledge sharing, and (3) boldly engage with unconventional theatre aesthetics.  6.2.1 New Meanings Concerning Nonlinearity on Stage Trans ways of knowing encourage RbT practitioners to explore theatrical embodiments of trans time outside of chrononormativity (Freeman, 2010). Nonlinear narratives are a well-established storytelling structure for playwrights (Smiley, 2005), and RbT scholars have previously explored non-linear and fragmented narratives to represent numerous features of research (Lea, 2016; Myers & Schneider, 2016). Along these same lines, embodying notions of queer and trans time (Amin, 2014; Halberstam, 2005) enables RbT pieces to consider how expectations related to hetero- and cisnormativity, including temporal, development, and productivity expectations (Amin, 2014), limit all of us no matter how we identify and express   212 ourselves to the world. For example, only staging trans narratives that illustrate the bottlenecking hypothesis, or a delay in typical developmental milestones due to gender identity exploration (Morris & Lent, 2023), is a limiting view of the diverse trajectories of trans lives. In my playscript, even the title implies care and a challenge to pathologizing temporality, as the title suggests that Spiling will live to the age of 119. The title takes a stand against stereotypical narratives from television and film, which may centre on trans characters and narratives that feature untimely death.  Trans ways of knowing inspire RbT practitioners to ask, How might the way time works in this story structure limit the identities the play is narrating or reinforce certain narratives to the exclusion of others? How can the play embody multiple temporalities, linear and non-linear developmental trajectories, and multiple selves more expansively?  6.2.2 Fictional Imagery as Sites of Analysis and Knowledge Sharing Leavy (2023) states that, as a research practice, fiction is \u201csimultaneously a method of inquiry and of representation\u201d (p. 1), which allows researchers to \u201cdocument experience and to reimagine it\u201d (p. 2). RbT artist-scholars have suggested similar possibilities of fiction in theatre-as-research, arguing that fiction is sometimes the most effective means of representing research on stage (Conrad, 2016; Hassall & Balfour, 2016; Wales, 2016). Surreal imagery and metaphor are present throughout my playscript. Researchers from other qualitative traditions may be uncomfortable with the multiple interpretations such fictive imagery allows (Michalovich et al., 2022). Guides to trustworthiness and quality in qualitative research may emphasize clarity in analysis and findings (Morrow, 2005), which might appear to be the opposite of some of the play\u2019s narrative choices, such as a choreographed dance solo narrated by Spiling, with words like \u2018i\u2019ve drunk too much coffee\u2014\u2026 \/ & maybe: \/ sorry i keep   213 hurting you\u2019. Whether this knowledge exchange is more, or less, clear depends on whether we embrace a trans way of knowing, which highlights transformation, change, and multiple selves over a lifespan (Bornstein, 2016). In addition, a trans perspective on language suggests that existing language may fail to offer us what we need to articulate who we are, and we many need to create or reclaim our own (Bornstein, 2016). Fiction supports the generation, examination, and analysis of new language and imagery that unfolds ongoing possibilities for self-articulation when auto-narratives are embodied onstage.  Embracing fiction, RbT practitioners can ask, How can this data be abstracted to images and metaphors? How can these images and metaphors repeat and transform over the RbT narrative? How can these transformations represent patterns of meaning in the data? For RbT projects that will include traditional academic outputs, how can the use of fiction be articulated as part of the data generation and analysis phases of the research design? 6.2.3 Boldly Engage with Unconventional Theatre Aesthetics We may come to RbT with expectations of what a play is and what theatre looks like, be it a Broadway musical, Shakespeare, or the shows of our local community theatre troupe (Shigematsu et al., 2022). But RbT can thrive and push the boundaries of expected and conventional theatre aesthetics. For example, Postcards to My Younger Transexual Self, Ages 0-119, expands beyond traditional materials and techniques of monologues. The play\u2019s monologues are written by hand, on postcards, and handed out to the audience. The script searches out the boundaries of the stageable: not all writing is playwriting, and standard postcard text \u2013 a short, passing memory from a trip \u2013 offers little guidance on how theatre artists might put it on stage. But pursuing these specific, unconventional aesthetic choices in an RbT development process creates work that moves off the shelf (Lewando Hundt et al., 2019), where   214 traditional research publications might sit, while also justifying why we are putting it on stage, why we are choosing to make a play. A series of postcards might also work as poetry or another ABR approach (Leavy, 2020). But the totality of aesthetic choices that make up the playscript in this dissertation means that it can only be a theatre piece, happening live in community: the members of the audience choose the order in which Spiling will read certain cards, characters dance and sing, and sit amongst the audience members watching the story unfold.   RbT practitioners can ask, How does the staging of this data engage with the specific possibilities offered by the art form of theatre? How can this RbT piece offer alternatives to traditional theatre aesthetics in its research dramatization?  6.3 Implications for Clinical Practice  As cited in Chapter 1, scholars have defined the discipline of trans studies in critical opposition to \u201cmedico-juridical and psychotherapeutic frameworks\u201d (Stryker & Currah, 2014, p. 4). I relate my research to both counselling psychology and trans studies. The playscript and critical commentary suggest reconceptualizing assessment and treatment practices that could be consciously or unconsciously influenced by pathologizing master narratives and sensationalized trans auto-narrative genre expectations (Amin, 2014). Mu\u00f1oz (2009) cautions us to be aware of how present conceptions of queerness are influenced by hetero- and queer-normativity. We can extend this concept to conceptualizing trans lives in counselling psychology scholarship and assessment. Like it or not, our current disciplinary conceptualizations are products of our pathologizing past relationship with trans communities, and \u201cwe may need to squint, to strain our vision and force ourselves to see otherwise, beyond the limited vista of the here and now\u201d (Mu\u00f1oz, 2009, p. 22). As we continue to work together with trans communities on affirmative care and assessment practices (Chang & Singh, 2016; Chen et al., 2020; Singh & dickey, 2016),   215 counselling psychology can lead the profession by making specific adjustments to counsellor training. For example, if the only course content related to trans individuals is a DSM diagnostic category or medicalized affirming practices, then a pathologizing lens is being used.  Counselling psychologists can also work to contextualize gender transitions and normalize the diversity of possible gender transition pathways. There are many ways to transition gender and identity. We all transition gender and expression at multiple points throughout our lives (Bornstein, 2016). Furthermore, transitions happen to all of us every day. Although their impact levels vary, every shift has cognitive, affective, somatic, relational, and systemic reverberations, whether the transition is from sleeping to waking, childless to parenthood, or from one gender to another. Some changes take a moment, some have an endpoint, some are ongoing and some last a lifetime. As counselling psychologists, we can acknowledge the limitations of cis\/trans binary in that we are all a self-made \u201cpatchwork\u201d (Barad, 2015, p. 393; Stryker, 1994). Our work in the therapy room supports the understanding that self-construction\/self-birth\/transformation is not only a trans project and that such transformation is supported by caring relationships that prioritize unconditional acceptance in the midst of transformation (Rogers, 1989; Wampold & Imel, 2015). These caring relationships may happen within counselling spaces or in community, among chosen family, loved ones, friends, colleagues, and active allies (Malatino, 2020). 6.4 Study Limitations A playscript is a schematic towards a live performance. Towards because a script does not contain a blueprint for all aspects of a production. It provides the words audiences will hear and some indications of what the audience will see. But much remains for other artists to contribute. RbT playscripts develop further in each phase of theatre creation, including when   216 mounted as a full production. The script I include in this dissertation is the latest draft that will continue to change and evolve as I collaborate with theatre artists through a rehearsal and performance period.  Another limitation related to the playscript\u2019s development is the few opportunities I had to share the entire script with an invited audience. Of the five invited readings of the playscript, I only read the whole script at two of these readings. Further opportunities to share the entire play will also influence its development.  A final limitation is the informal way invited audience members provided feedback on the script. Sometimes I engaged the audience in a talk-back, or open conversation, following the readings. Also, individual audience members often offered feedback through one-on-one conversations after a reading. If I had employed more systematic and diverse ways of collecting feedback I could have enabled more audience members to provide input (Belliveau, Cox, et al., 2020). But I felt vulnerable when sharing the script with invited audiences, and I did not have the capacity to engage in creating systems for collecting audience feedback in addition to sharing the script. RbT, like all theatre, requires a team working together, and graduate students interested in taking on RbT need to consider how peers, collaborators, and a team of artist-scholars can support them throughout their RbT development process.  6.5 Directions for Future Scholarship I created this study to be transdisciplinary. The very notion of disciplining the academy into specializations could be enough to give us pause (Pascal, 2011): we lock ways, forms, and bodies of knowledge into separate rooms, isolating them from one another. I hope my playscript contributes to creating new relational possibilities (Pratt & Rosiek, 2023) between the fields that have defined my professional life: theatre and counselling psychology.     217 In general, more research on the narratives and experiences of trans women transitioning in mid-life and in graduate school will contribute to the literature in counselling psychology and beyond. Based on this dissertation, researchers could also explore the relationship between narrative identity and systematic and familial cissexism and heteronormativity for trans women transitioning in mid-life. Further research could also continue conceptualizing and refining the concept of narrative disinheritance as it relates to trans narrative identity.  My playscript offers narratives from my life. I am a white trans woman with socio-economic privilege living in an urban centre in Canada. As I stated in Chapter 1, this research-based play is not generalizable. The script\u2019s hyper localness and specificity is a strength and one that I hope invites further explorations by other artist-scholars sharing their specific narratives. May my RbT script be one of many by trans artist-scholars exploring trans auto-narratives in the coming years.  6.6 Final Curtain  I began Chapter 1 with three questions: What if you wrote postcards to yourself for a year? What if it was the year that you came out as a trans woman in your counselling psychology graduate program? And what if you turned these postcards into a play? This dissertation is my response to these questions.  Writing Postcards to My Younger Transsexual Self, Ages 0-119 has been one of the most significant experiences of my life. Working on this script has transformed me and caused me to realize that my trans joy and trans rage are one and the same. When I bring these emotions on stage, everyone in the audience may feel them to some extent, connecting us all. Trans joy\/rage is also how I found the courage to write personal stories and continue to find the courage to share them in workshops and readings. We need more trans auto-narratives and diverse auto-narratives   218 that are at odds with assumed narratives. Stone (1992), considered one of the founders of trans studies as a discipline, positions aspects of her biography next to autobiographies by trans women, such as Morris\u2019s (1974) Conundrum, utilizing these autobiographical texts to speak to dominant medicalized, patriarchal, and normative discourses that silence polyvocal and nonbinary experiences and identities. As Stone (1992) points out, autobiographies of trans individuals predate any textbooks on trans identities from the psychology discipline. In recent decades, trans autobiographies and memoir (Boylan, 2003; Carl, 2021; Green, 2004; Mock, 2014) that blend genre, bridging the academic with the personal and sometimes the fictional, have made essential contributions to advocacy efforts, resources, and diverse representations of trans lives. Writing a play filled with my personal stories allowed me to feel more connected to myself on a deeper level while connecting to the wider project of activism through auto-narratives within trans communities.  RbT can support the centring of trans voices in counselling psychology research, and trans voices need to be centred for us to move beyond a surface-level understanding of outdated diagnosis labels to a deep understanding and respect for trans ways of knowing. RbT is currently a convention-defying research approach in counselling psychology. In the coming decades, I hope it reflects the wide berth of evocative and exciting qualitative possibilities that are informing our discipline\u2019s literature.   219 References Adams, T. E., Holman Jones, S., & Ellis, C. (2022). Introduction: Making sense and taking action: Creating a caring community of autoethnographers. In T. E. Adams, S. Holman Jones, & C. Ellis (Eds.), Handbook of autoethnography (2nd ed., pp. 1-19). Routledge.  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W., Wang, R. J., Le, T. P., & Hill, C. E. (2022). Counseling psychology doctoral students\u2019 experiences of authenticity: A collaborative autoethnography. Counselling Psychology Quarterly, 1-23. https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1080\/09515070.2022.2063260  Zussman, R. (2000). Autobiographical occasions: Introduction to the special issue. Qualitative Sociology, 23(1), 5-8. https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1023\/A:1005447331522     258 Appendices Appendix A: List of Plays by Trans Playwrights This list is partial and based on my growing knowledge of trans plays. I apologize for any omissions. This list is limited to works published in English.   Alabanza, T. (2018). BURGERZ. Oberon Books. Alabanza, T. (2021). Overflow. Bloomsbury Academic. Baig, B. (2020). Acha bacha. Playwrights Canada Press. Barnes, A. (2020). BLKS. Dramatis Play Service. Bornstein, K. (2016). Hidden. Published in Bornstein\u2019s memoir\/manifesto Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women, and the Rest of Us. Vintage Books. Clifford, J. (2019). The Gospel According to Jesus, Queen of Heaven: 10th Anniversary Edition. Stewed Rhubarb Press.  Clifford, J. (2017). Eve. Oberon Books. Deen, M. M. (2018). Draw the Circle. Dramatists Play Service. Frankland, E. (2019). None of Us is Yet a Robot. Oberon Books. Kreimendahl, B. (2018). Orange Julius. Dramatists Play Service. Mac, T. (2015). Hir. Northwestern University Press. Shraya, V. (2021). How to Fail as a Popstar. Arsenal Press. taddei, k. f. (2022). Duecentomila. Playwrights Canada Press.     259  An anthology of plays by trans playwrights: Keyes, L., Mantoan, L., & Schiller, A. F. (2021). The Methuen Drama Book of Trans Plays. Methuen Drama. Includes:  Kaufman, M.J. Sagittarius Ponderosa Deen, M. M. The Betterment Society chavez, j. how to clean your room Khouri, R. A. She He Me Yasmin, S. The Devils Between Us Keyes, L. Doctor Voynich and Her Children Defoe, T. Firebird Tattoo Osborne-Lee, A. D. Crooked Parts      260 Appendix B: Interview Script Preliminary Discussion Points Confirmation of consent to take part in the study: \u2022 Do you have any questions, concerns, or things you would like to discuss about the consent process or the study in general? \u2022  Do you consent to proceed with the interview? Agreement to be audio recorded: \u2022 I would like to audio record and transcribe this interview with your permission. If you would prefer that the interview is not recorded, I can take written notes instead. Is that all right with you? \u2022 I can make notes afterwards if you would rather that I didn\u2019t make notes during the interview. What would you prefer? A reminder of the right to end the interview or decline to answer any questions: \u2022 Please remember that your participation in this study is voluntary. You can choose to end your participation anytime without a reason. \u2022 Please remember that you can choose not to answer any questions you don\u2019t want during the interview. \u2022 Also, if I haven\u2019t asked about something you would like to tell me about, please feel free to say so.       261 Orienting Statement: First Interview Session The following orientating statement will be used to begin the interview: \u2022 I would like you to think about your experience in graduate school. If you were going to tell the story of your experiences in graduate school, how would you start telling the story?  Orienting Statement: Second Interview Session The following orientating statement will be used to begin the interview: \u2022 Just like last time, I would like you to consider your graduate school experience. If you were going to tell the story of your experiences in graduate school, how would you pick up the story from where we left it last time?  Orienting Statement: Third Interview Session The following orientating statement will be used to begin the interview: \u2022 Just like last time, I would like you to consider your graduate school experience. If you were going to tell the story of your experiences in graduate school, how would you pick up the story from where we left it last time?  Optional Prompts: First, Second, and Third Interview Sessions The following are examples of other prompts that may be used to generate further dialogue: First Interview Session: \u2022 If you were going to break the story of your graduate school experience down into separate parts \u2013 a beginning, middle, and end \u2013 think about what those parts might be.   262 \u2022 What specific moments can you remember from when you were just starting graduate school that you can remember? How would you tell the beginning of the story? What were the significant challenges you faced in this part of the story? What supports did you draw on?  Second Interview Session: \u2022 Is there anything we talked about last time that you want to add to or discuss further? \u2022 Remember, in the last interview, we thought about the story of your graduate school experience down into separate parts \u2013 a beginning, middle, and end. \u2022 What specific moments can you remember from when you were in the midst of your graduate school journey? What were the significant challenges you faced in this part of the story? What supports did you draw on? How would you tell the middle of the story? Third Interview Session: \u2022 Is there anything we talked about last time that you want to add to or discuss further? \u2022 Remember, in the last interview, we thought about the story of your graduate school experience down into separate parts \u2013 a beginning, middle, and end. \u2022 How would you tell the end of the story in graduate school? What were the significant challenges you faced in this part of the story? What supports did you draw on?  \u2022 What do you think you carried with you, from your graduate school experience, into the rest of your career?    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