‘I’m literally an X-Man’ – is trans comic Jordan Gray the next stage of human evolution? | comedy

‘I decided that I wanted to be a comedian on live TV,” says screenwriter and standup Jordan Gray. It was 2016 and she was competing on The Voice as the talent show’s first transgender contestant in the UK under the moniker Tall Dark Friend. Between performances, host Marvin Humes handed the microphone to Gray. “I was just riffing and thought: ‘This is so much more fun than all that other bit.’”

Now when Gray performs songs, they’re part of her comedy act. She is currently preparing a show for the Edinburgh festival fringe, combining her love of superheroes, experiences as a trans woman and Essex roots under the title Is It a Bird? “The concept is that I may be the next stage of human evolution,” she says. “I’m literally an X-Man.”

But her comedy ambitions have already sprawled beyond the stage. She’s currently developing a sitcom with Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, working as Matt Lucas’s script consultant, and has an autobiographical radio comedy in the works. Not bad for someone who has only been in business for four years.

When she started in 2017, her act was made up of jokes about her music career and “naturally, a lot about being transgender. People go into a show with an inherent tension about certain things. If you can pop that, you get an easy laugh and then we can start a dialogue. But even from that very first gig, no cliches.”

Cliches are something she has seen novice trans standups fall back on. “Some are reappropriating the jokes that the public make about us all the time,” she says. “But let’s give the audience stuff they can’t come up with.” The originality of others, such as standup and host of Peak Trans podcast Jen Ives, is an inspiration, “She makes me want to be a better transgender comedian,” says Gray.

Gray, 33, grew up “all over Essex”, and after stints in Scotland and Sweden is now back in Southend. She began her music career before her transition but had an “epiphany moment” at 24 while chopping firewood on a Swedish ranch: “I just had a feeling that it was all a bit wrong.” A year later Gray was dressed as a cat, accepting a trophy for best original artist at the Essex Entertainment awards, when she publicly came out as transgender.

She did her first Edinburgh fringe run in 2018 and, during the infamously raucous Late’n’Live comedy showcase, stripped off on stage. “As a gesture it says: ‘I’m all in, do you want to come all in too?’” she says. Now, it makes for a defiantly NSFW but surprisingly poignant finale. Completely naked, Gray sings a powerful number about the way people project on to trans people. Sat at her keyboard, she ends, softly, with the line: “If I’m going to be a joke, I might as well be in on it.”

She regularly brings audiences to standing ovations and you can sense her energy just from watching footage of previous performances online. “Performing has turned into quite an emotional thing,” she says. “It’s empowering to be what a lot of people might see as incomplete on stage.”

She adds: “There’s a lot of pressure on any minority to fly the flag. While I’m happy to do that, I’m a comedian first.”

Gray brings this ethos to Transaction, her web series for Comedy Central about Liv, a transgender woman who works in a slightly dystopian supermarket with her best friend and supervisor, Tom. In the series, Gray tackles the liberal tendency to put people on a pedestal simply for being transgender. Liv has a colossal ego, she is sometimes problematic, she’s “a steamroller of a human”, Gray says. “She’s a cautionary tale. We’ve created a monster.”

Now being developed for TV by Pegg and Frost, Transaction picks at the question of who can make jokes about what. “I want it to feel like two comedians bantering,” Gray says. “If a friend of mine makes a very good, clever transgender joke about me, it’s a compliment, because it means ‘I know you so well’. Comedy cuts through the bullshit.”

Working with the British comedy talents has been brilliant, Gray says. “Pegg is the biggest transgender advocate I’ve ever met,” she adds. “He’s just a very lovely woke up bloke.”

Gray believes that commissioning a whole variety of trans creatives would be the best response to things such as the controversy over Dave Chappelle’s Netflix special The Closer, in which he made a series of derogatory comments about the trans community. While she enjoyed her previous specials: “It’s painful when a master craftsman trips up and does something lazy. It just wasn’t funny. Transgender people are the ones getting it in the ear off the back of these flippant comments.”

She doesn’t believe in boycotting the streaming platform over Chappelle though: “To turn people into a symbol is dangerous. Maybe that’s why I wanted to do a show about superheroes, because that’s their whole shtick – boiling people down to one symbol.”

Gray is currently working as a script consultant on a new TV show from Lucas and Bert Tyler-Moore. “They were keen they didn’t come across as flippant when portraying transgender people,” she says. “The minutiae of what it’s really like to be transgender can be very funny, but how truthful can we be without losing the comedy?”

She highlighted the importance of distinguishing the stance of characters from the stance of the show. “People are still forming their opinions about what ‘transgender’ is,” she says. “It’s characterizing to have somebody use very old-fashioned phrases like ‘sex change’ or ‘tranny’ if it’s a character we don’t want to like. But until that’s established, it seems like it’s the show’s opinion. If the character is established, then the viewer says: ‘OK, that’s because that character is ill-informed, not the show.’”

Gray is adamant that the main goal of her work is to be funny. But it would be a “nice bonus”, she says, if she can accurately get across how normal life as a transgender person can be. “Ironically, I think there’s something very relatable about the transgender situation,” she says. “At some point, we all look in the mirror and want to be different.”