if you want to change the conversation, you really do have to step into the murky waters, don’t you? - Hannah Gadsby

Ever since I can remember, my thoughts have been plagued by a sense that I was a little out of whack, as if belonging was beyond me.

People think that if you get up onstage, a joke is funny or it’s not. No. The audience is participating in this conversation. The audience brings their own baggage. So I would never say you cannot do rape jokes. I’m just saying can we please acknowledge that women get raped? Men also. People get raped, and it’s traumatizing, and we do not have a language or a narrative in which to place that wider trauma. So just having throw-away punch lines, sure, you can do it, but people get triggered, and the reason people get triggered is because other people don’t care. They’re like, “We think it’s funny; get over yourself.” That’s because there’s no broader cultural context for the viewpoint of people who’ve been traumatized. I don’t believe in censorship, but I don’t think it’s a bad thing to say, “Hey, be better.”

I do think conversations are at a point where we’re not listening to people with lived experience anymore. We’re listening to people who have really hostile reactive views, and that it’s caught up in a moral panic, which also has a very, very strong right-wing online presence that is stirring up the debate, and it’s fairly unacknowledged. I want to come from a more constructive point of view, like I am genderqueer. I have a life, and it doesn’t revolve around trying to justify my existence.