My medical transition occurred in relative secrecy. When it became clear that my mother was struggling to accept the change in her youngest child, I chose to go it alone.
I had started hormones independently, paying out of pocket so they wouldn’t show up on insurance documents. I arranged to recover from gender-affirming surgery with the help of my brother and some close friends.
It was 2020, and the pandemic had sent me home from my freshman year of college. I was living with my mother, and sleeping in my childhood bed. When the operating rooms reopened and I was given a date for top surgery, I leapt. Before I disappeared for three weeks to lick my wounds and log 300 hours on Legend of Zelda I decided I ought to tell her why I wouldn’t be home, where I was going, and that I’d cover the big insurance bill coming down the pike.
I was incredibly lucky to have the majority of my surgery covered by the insurance I had through her work, and to even receive the operation in the first place. Top surgery saved my life. It is now impossible for Pittsburghers under 19 to receive that kind of gender-affirming care at Pittsburgh’s biggest health care provider, and may remain so for the next 10 years in response to Trump’s Justice Department and their crusade against the bodily autonomy of legal adults.
I sat my mother down two days before the appointment. I told her my brother would pick me up in the morning and take me to the hospital, that I would be at his apartment, and that I had pursued this on my own because I knew she wouldn’t be supportive. I didn’t want her to try and stop me.
Of course she still did. That was the first time I’d seen my mother cry about my transition since I had given her a book about trans teens for Christmas and she told me I’d ruined the holidays.
She begged me to reconsider. She told me how much it hurt that I had kept this process a secret from her. She suggested I’d regret my long-considered choice. And she told me:
“I feel like I am mourning my child.”
That’s when I gave up. Hearing those words from her mouth, something I thought parents only said on TV, was when I realized there was no rhetorical argument I could make for why she should support me. This was not an issue of rationality. It was emotional.
My instinct was to judge those feelings. There is a cliche within the trans community that “my parent told me they feel like I’m dead,” and while I still hold that isn’t the healthiest response, I also wanted to understand why so many people with trans loved ones express a similar sense of loss.
Making space for ambiguous grief
I’m a theatremaker by trade, so I wrote a play about it. I started writing “AURA” while trying to figure out why parents of trans children experience such acute grief around their child’s transition. Generally I am fascinated by grief. My first play “Bone Play” was all about death and mourning, and my next play “Roadkill Bambi” was about grieving one’s imagined future in the face of impending radical change — but “AURA” is perhaps my most personal investigation of the subject.
I don’t think theatre that makes good therapy makes good art, and I don’t think theatre that makes good art makes good therapy.
Which is why “AURA” is not about my mother, who went on to spend several years working through her complicated emotions so that we could continue to have a mutually respectful and loving (though not always perfect) parent-child relationship. That wasn’t an easy task for her. There aren’t many spaces where one can safely express the sense of loss that comes with the transition of a loved one. It’s common enough, though, that a simple Google search reveals countless articles guiding people through this “ambiguous grief.” Alongside these articles, Reddit threads by parents asking for help are dismissed with, “your child is alive, be grateful” rather than exploring what has actually been lost.
Clearly there is a salient experience parents are having, and a sense of complex loss that accompanies it. Probably the ideal place to discuss those feelings would be in the privacy of a therapeutic relationship.
You know what really doesn’t make good therapy? AI.
If my mother’s emotional reaction to my transition was what stood in the way of her support, then what would happen if a woman in a similar position turned to an AI company to help her work through these complex feelings of grief?
That is what happens in “AURA.”
Shannon, a single mother, is struggling to catch up with the changes she sees in her son Dustin as he transitions from female to male. Her solution is to create a secret AI griefbot modeled on Dustin, one that feeds on data she provides to simulate a version of him that never transitioned at all.
In a world where we are increasingly outsourcing our emotional processing, our healthcare and even our grief onto AI agents, the story of “AURA” isn’t a hypothetical – it’s a reality.
This is an issue larger than just artificial intelligence. It’s worsened by our broken healthcare system, and by our broader reliance on technology for social connection.
The context lost by AI ‘forgeries’
In “The work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Walter Benjamin writes about what sets the Mona Lisa apart from a perfect forgery or mass produced print. To Benjamin, it is a sense of authenticity which comes from the object’s context, its position in space and time, and all the “experiences” it has had. He calls this the work’s “aura.”
Benjamin was writing in 1935, as photography and film began to supersede traditional art forms. It is not a coincidence that the title of my play, and the name of the fictional AI company, is “AURA”. I am curious how “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” might be applied to AI, to an attempt to create a “forgery” or a “replica” of an individual, and what context could be lost in the process.
Human beings cannot be boiled down to points of data. The belief that AI can recreate a human consciousness is scarcely different from the belief that a human can slot neatly into the categories of “man” and “woman.” Both are dependent on binary systems and both deny the context Benjamin saw as vitally important to authenticity. If you looked at me today you may not even realize I was transgender at all, or you may struggle to identify what flavor of trans I am. I have experienced life as a girl, as a woman, and as a man. I came to the personal conclusion that all of it leaves me feeling a bit limited. Understanding my personal context requires recognizing that I was raised as a girl, transitioned to a man, and then decided my gender was better expressed abstractly.
This is not exclusive to gender. How many people in our capitalist society identify with their career? Asked to “tell me about yourself,” they start with “I’m a nurse.” What happens when that nurse pursues a PhD, becomes a professor and starts to teach?
Everything they experienced as a child, a medical student, as a practitioner, what kind of nursing they worked in — all is necessary context to understand the kind of teacher they will be. At the same time, you cannot look at their high school marching band photo and insist “you aren’t a teacher, you’re a sousaphonist.”
Complexity is best addressed off screen
Abstract thinking is something AI so far has been pretty bad at, though every day it eerily improves. Humans are actually quite good at it. We learn the importance of time and place very early on in our psychosocial development. Still, we tend to find ourselves uncomfortable when it comes to the ambiguity within. We flock to astrology, gender roles and personality tests like the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, a debunked system which purports to sort the human personality into boxes that reveal some innate truth about the test taker. We long to be given a concrete, objective answer to the question, “who are you?”
Writing “AURA” was for me a deeply personal project, inspired by my own relationship with my mother, responding to the vicious attacks on trans people in our country today and the general lack of representation for trans media narratives that are more complex than “my mom kicked me out” or “my mom accepted me.”
“AURA” is not just a chance to cast trans people and tell a trans story. It’s a message for all of us. There is a reason this project does not take the form of a short film you can stream or novel you can read at a bar while waiting for someone else to approach and ask you about it – it’s a piece of theatre. I am interested in assembly, in getting people into rooms with each other, where strangers are encouraged to laugh at the same joke, to hear the person behind them laugh at something they don’t think is very funny at all, and to generally exist for an hour or so in the same ephemeral sweaty, smelly darkness. That is why “AURA” is a play about the dangers of turning to AI when other humans are complicated and cruel. The recommended course of action when someone you love is experiencing AI psychosis is to convince them to log off and to encourage real human interaction.
“AURA” is me reaching out a hand.
AURA will have an abridged performance at the Kelly Strayhorn Theatre’s Alloy Studio on October 3 and 4 at 7:30 pm.
Mal MacKenzie is a playwright, actor, and educator in Pittsburgh. They can be reached at malmackenzie.com.
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