Performed just before the FWS verdict.
The blurby bit
The room
I think the show was pretty much sold out and likely populated by a good share of Alex Franklin’s friends and acquaintances, given some of the OTT reactions. There was a noticeable contingent of trans-identified males, but otherwise the audience was largely young women. Of note, I recognised Shivani Dave, the trans activist who just a day later flounced out of an interview with Julia Hartley-Brewer.
About Alex Franklin
I was going to say that Gworl Code would have been a much funnier title, but on looking up g-url, it seems may have been a reference to feminine-identified gamers, which explains a lot as Franklin is a gamer and made the local news back in 2017 for an e-sports game held between Cambridge and Oxford and something he bought up in the show. He also appeared on C4’s The Bridge: Race to Fortune show, again covered by local news and comparing the photograph provided to his appearance today, it appears some very successful facial feminisation surgery may have been done around the eyes. Whilst at Cambridge he studied Natural Sciences at Corpus Christi and was a member of Footlights. Franklin has tried at his hand at comedy before, making the final heats in a competition run by Chortle.
However, I’m pleased to say that the show did make me laugh, unlike the clip above. Quite a lot actually and Franklin was a likeable performer, unlike the clip above. I do think the new performance style owes quite a lot to Russell Brand, or possibly Jordan Gray, Brand’s very own mini-me.
The material
The sporty bit
One thing that did feel tired though was the same joke that all trans-allied comedians make; they don’t transition just so they can ace it at sports, you know! And, unfortunately for him, this was the very week when two men had played in the final of a women’s pool tournament. Another coincidental example is below with regards Riley Dennis. Not that he had to worry about that, since the audience was probably oblivious to such facts, or if they weren’t, didn’t care. Obviously such jokes and the show in general wasn’t written with terfs in mind but surely the audience at some point will jade at hearing variations of this joke?
Edgy
On the other hand, he did poke fun at trans issues, and trans people (they make 4 hour video essays), ‘pansexual means I’m bisexual but just very left wing’ and a good gag about Caitlyn Jenner, which I will pass off as my own when an appropriate moment arises.
He also joked that sometimes trans voices didn’t actually need to be uplifted, why was quite a wry observation (relatively-speaking obviously, given that tone deaf is the default position). Or that when he tells his friends something wildly inappropriate about his transition, the friend’s response would be ‘brave and stunning’, rather than ‘weirdo’. He also had many astute and funny observations about masculinity.
(NB: Shivani Dave did not leave the room at any time.)
The sciency bit
Franklin, relaying the impressive fact he had studied zoology at Cambridge, which was all about categorisation (um, not really) and told us that biology was a spectrum. After joking around for a bit, he wanted us to know that terfy people didn’t understand variation and that we’re wrong to say ‘you can always tell’. I admit, you can’t always, – how can you know what you don’t know? Most of the time, however, you absolutely can tell, with Franklin very much falling into that camp, albeit a side-eyer, rather than an instant. Not to mention that none of them can ever shut-the-fuck up about it.
On hormones
On the medical side of things Franklin was keen to normalise that his ADHD and memory had gone haywire on cross sex hormones and that the endocrinologist monitoring his levels had no interest in his mental health. Cool, cool.
Mary’s Room
Franklin wanted to tell us about Mary’s Room (summarised below), the thought experiment he had apparently come across during a PSHE lesson at school. In essence, it is an argument against materialism, which is a neat fit for queer theory that feelings are facts.
… Mary is a brilliant scientist who is, for whatever reason, forced to investigate the world from a black and white room via a black and white television monitor. She specialises in the neurophysiology of vision and acquires, let us suppose, all the physical information there is to obtain about what goes on when we see ripe tomatoes, or the sky, and use terms like ‘red’, ‘blue’, and so on. […] What will happen when Mary is released from her black and white room or is given a colour television monitor? Will she learn anything or not? It seems just obvious that she will learn something about the world and our visual experience of it. But then it is inescapable that her previous knowledge was incomplete.
Epiphenomenal Qualia, The Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. 32, No. 127. (Apr., 1982), pp. 127-136.
Franklin’s twist on it though, was that Mary was learning everything about the colour pink, as opposed to the ‘neurophysiology of vision’ or ‘ripe tomatoes’, standing as a metaphor for his own transition, which was really just a search for an identity it seems. (Which all young people go through and lasts a lifetime.) He had done all the studying he possibly could to learn how to be a boy but found that he was creating a false narrative about himself as ‘no words could describe a feeling’. This was how Mary felt when she left the room, he mused, having the feeling of something new. What mattered was the feeling.
For me, transness is the feeling of waking up every day and seeing the colour pink for the first time, every time. And then the doctor replied: ‘What are you talking about?’
So it was a funny punchline but it was impossible to escape the fact that we had been preached to. Proof, yet again, that transition is merely a quasi-religious experience.
Sad for the older trans gworls
For every cool trans person out there, there are at least a hundred of these. As in much of life, the media gravitates towards the young and beautiful (Franklin would be perfect for daytime TV), meaning many of the older trans gworls out there will simply continue to be seen as anomalies.
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The Lies They Tell 
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