Life is weirder than ever for LGBT+ people – and I think I know why

For some people, transgender bodies are one glitch in the Matrix too far, writes Jordan Gray

I can only lament the sheer bad luck that my k*** was the straw that broke the gammon’s back (PA)

Last autumn, I turned Edinburgh Fringe inside out, made history at the London Palladium, and laid myself bare on the now Bafta-winning Friday Night Live. My life was thrown into a careful-what-you-wish-for kind of chaos. But things have gotten even weirder.

As of Pride Month 2023, The Independent has honoured me with the #3 ranking on their Pride List of LGBT+ game-changers. All the while, amidst continued calls for my arrest, faceless Twitter accounts publicly scrutinise my press pictures for the outline of a poorly concealed penis.

Suffice to say, this job is full of contradictions.

One week I’m handing out “novelty boob stress balls” to Britain’s leading medical minds on Radio 4’s Best Medicine. The next I’m shooting the breeze on Australian breakfast TV while Nazis protest my existence on the parliament steps. The next I’m in the back of a self-driving Mercedes E-Class next to an honest-to-God robot (a gift from Rhod Gilbert).

It’s a struggle to have your head in the clouds and your feet on the ground... particularly when my size 11 feet are being squashed into size nine heels on the Bafta red carpet – nodding knowingly to Stephen Merchant as we both tower an entire foot above the glitterati parapet.

On 17 February, I was whisked across London on the back of a motorbike to close the National Comedy Awards live on Channel 4. But as scary as my agents tell me it looked, those 10 minutes on the back of that bike were the last time I remember feeling free of “low-key dread” since my career blew up in August 2022.

“Inertia” isn’t quite the right word. It feels more like I’m everything, everywhere, all at once (she said, establishing a theme). Until now I assumed this eerie sense of disassociation was a symptom of my career taking off. But that’s not true.

We all feel it, don’t we? “That funny feeling” (to quote the great Bo Burnham) that “something is off” (Alpha Waymond, Everything Everywhere All At Once). We’ve reached our bandwidth. There is simply too much conflicting information coming in. The human brain isn’t designed to subsist on “A little bit of everything, all of the time” (back to Bo). Even pre-internet, I was always struck by how newsreaders could jump so callously between tragedy, weather and weekly sport.

HP Lovecraft once wrote: “The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all of its contents.”

Enter Twitter, where any given opinion is instantly and mercilessly met with every possible postulation to the contrary. Tell Twitter “I like cats” and it’s a countdown to “What about dogs!?”, “Cats have Aids! Are you pro-disease!?”, “Cats had terrible CGI! One star from me!” and “Why are you talking about cats!? What about the Russian spyware!?”.

It’s easy to start doom-scrolling the moment you wake. As Rick & Morty’s Summer Smith puts it: “B****, my generation gets traumatised for breakfast.” In response, many have adopted the glib philosophy espoused by Summer’s little brother Morty: “Nobody exists on purpose. Nobody belongs anywhere. Everybody’s gonna die. Come watch TV.”

It’s no coincidence that our collective sense of “drifting through a fractured reality” is reflected back at us by today’s most popular cinema. Everything Everywhere All At Once, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, Rick & Morty, Spiderman: No Way Home, Bo Burnham’s Inside. Stories about lost wanders, ricocheting through broken worlds, ignoring plot holes, wearing their nihilism like a suit of armour.

Sounds like 15 minutes on your phone in 2023.

“But some day,” Lovecraft continues “, the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a dark new age.”

When fact is fiction, up is down, left is right (cardinally and politically), who can blame the fragile for growing angry? For writing off entire subsets of society just to clear some disc space in the brain.

I can only lament the sheer bad luck that my knob was the straw that broke the gammon’s back. Transgender bodies are one glitch in the Matrix too far, and it’s much easier to put my tits on trial than it is reality itself.

But there’s a backdoor hack to all this madness. To the LGBT+ and our allies in 2023, cringing at the news, sat in the cinema coveting the sci-fi ability to hop to a more favourable universe: it’s easier than you think.

It’s called “turning off your phone”.

Happy Pride.

Jordan Grays’s award-winning live show ‘Is it a Bird?’ will tour the UK from August to October this year. Tickets can be purchased here