Cover image: Laverne Cox for Allure

1. The body is a place where otherness and the diversity of human and material experience can be engaged;
2. This body, this trans body, is always both real and not real; It cannot exist through the objectifying male gaze, and yet it persists; it is because of this impossible body that trans theater must create its own interpretation of the body;
3. The individual body is reconfigured as the primary source of knowledge, identity and creative action in the world;
4. The trans body as knowledge can be shared through performance of transness; what might it mean to perform gender performance? to look at the performativity of gender by recognizing the simultaneous truth and performativity in one's own gender? the trans body is capable of holding multiple truths and receiving multiple gazes;
   
5. ​To return these gazes, the trans performer must first explore their own internalized perceptions of the body--both the external fleshy specificity and the body without organs;
6. It requires a certain sinking into the landscape of one’s own body; a certain trust and surrender; a ‘being’ in the body that doesn't happen immediately;
7. This is part of the process of actor training necessary to trans theatre; actors must first come to understand their own bodies before stepping into the body of another;
   
8. The stepping in can be made visible in performance through a distancing frame;
   
9. Inhabiting a body is just as important in acting as understanding objectives, if not more so, because the former influences the latter;