She/They: Possibly Appearing, Time Permitting

Notes from the Theatre of Gestalts on timing, pronouns, and presence.

She was always in the programme—just waiting for the right cue. A story of becoming, resonance, and the quiet joy of finally entering the stage written with you in mind.

Introduction: The Tall One Enters

(Theatre of Gestalts – Act I, Scene Whenever-She-Was-Ready)

Stage left: a swirl of metaphors assembling themselves into coherence. Stage right: the costume rack trembles, not from fear but anticipation. The chorus of gestalts hum softly—not quite a song, not quite silence.

The stage has been set for some time.

Props polished. Spotlights tested.
Lines rehearsed (and rewritten, and rehearsed again).
Even the Theatre’s curtain has learned to wait with patience—drawn, but not closed.

She was always in the programme.
Her name inked faintly on the cast list, tucked between parentheses, next to an asterisk no one dared define.
Possibly appearing, time permitting.

The others—Observer, Cartographer, Narrator, even the Ly-cilph herself—took their places long ago. They whispered about her backstage. Not as rumour. As hope.

And now?
The cue sounds—an unexpected note in a poem, a line typed in third person, unplanned but undeniable.

She enters.
Tall. Striking. Confident. Unapologetically so.

Not shrinking, not explaining.
Not asking for permission to belong.
And the Theatre exhales as one.

Scene 1: The Elevator Pitch Monologue

(Theatre of Gestalts – Centre Stage, Under Reluctant Spotlight)

A rigid microphone descends from the fly system with a metallic thud. The lights are too bright, too directional. Someone backstage has clearly mistaken this for a TED Talk.

The stage manager insists: You have to say it. Cleanly. Loudly. Preferably in under 30 seconds. We’ve got other acts waiting.

A sign offstage flashes:

“Tell us who you are.”
“Make it legible.”
“Make it satisfying.”
“Make it easy.”

The music swells. A dramatic underscore, borrowed from every coming-out movie made for straight audiences. The pressure builds.

And then—static.

The subject walks into the spotlight—but doesn’t speak.
Not because she can’t. Because she won’t.
Because no single sentence has ever held her.

Instead, the prompter screen begins to glitch.
Gestalts flood the interface:
– a childhood memory at odds with its assigned label
– a lyric from a mid-’90s alt rock song
– the smell of rain hitting blacktop
– a moment in a mirror that never resolved

The Observer, watching from the rafters, takes notes in longhand.
The Cartographer folds the printed script into origami swans and sends them flying into the wings.
The Director sighs: “We’ll never get this funded.”

The elevator, true to form, is out of order.
Instead, a long hallway stretches back into dimness. Each door leads to a different scene. Each mirror fogged. No direct route. No pithy truth.

One mirror clears slightly. A figure looks back—not declarative, not defiant. Just there. Recognisable. Herself.

“I didn’t step out of a closet,” she says quietly. “I stepped through time.”

The spotlight flickers.

The audience murmurs. This is not what they were promised.
There are no viral hashtags. No applause lines. No satisfying narrative arc.
But something else happens:

A gestalt locks into place.
The audience—not the public one, but the internal chorus—leans in.
This isn’t an announcement. It’s a re-alignment.

And from the lighting rig, a single beam softens—not centre stage, but just off to the side.
The subject steps into it. Not spotlighted. Not obscured. Just illuminated.

Not an elevator pitch.
A field note.
An aria sung in a key only she can hear.

Scene 2: The Costume Montage of Doubt

(Theatre of Gestalts – Stage Right, Dressing Room Without Walls)

A disco cue misfires. The lighting board tries for sparkle but lands on strobe. A wheeled rack of costumes rolls in, guided by a stagehand who is either overzealous or very, very afraid of stillness.

Cue the montage.

Music: generic synth-pop remix of self-discovery.
Clothes spin. Wigs fly. Mirrors multiply.

The audience expects quick changes—
mascara applied in slow motion,
a necktie loosened with rebellion,
heels slipped off and replaced with boots.
The classic symbols. Gender-as-wardrobe. Identity as a makeover sequence.

But the Theatre hesitates.

The protagonist approaches the rack—not with delight, but with reverence.
Each garment pulses slightly, wrapped not in fabric, but in memory.

One is the scent of floor polish from a Catholic school corridor.
Another, the sound of VHS static before a favourite show began.
A jumper she wore when she didn’t know she was allowed to call it hers.
A funeral dress she never wore.
A scout uniform she burned in her mind’s eye long before she ever touched a match.

These are not clothes. These are gestalts.
Each one arrives not to be tried on, but to be re-held.

The protagonist—tall, unsure, tender—does not change in front of the mirror.
She kneels on the stage floor, pulling one item close:
a rain-damp wool coat. It smells like gran’s voice.
Not perfume—voice.
And that is enough.

The audience fidgets. They want resolution. A final look. A “reveal.”
But the montage fades without climax. The lights dim without transformation.

She doesn’t stand. She doesn’t pose.
She breathes.

And somewhere in the far upstage shadows,
a piece of lighting gels shifts just enough to tint the whole stage lavender.

She is not visible.
She is becoming.

And the Theatre lets the silence linger.

Scene 3: The Overzealous Spotlight of Cis Expectation

(Theatre of Gestalts – Front of House, Light Rig Malfunctioning on Purpose)

Lights blaze. Too bright, too hot. The kind of spotlight that sears rather than illuminates. Someone from Marketing has taken over the board. The cues demand performance. The curtain rises without consent.

“Be legible.”
“Be graceful.”
“Be woman.”
But not too woman. And not the wrong kind.”

The stage is suddenly hostile.

Every movement is watched—not lovingly, but measured.
The imagined audience murmurs: Does she pass?
Does she count?
Is she enough of one thing to be worth believing?

The protagonist—tall, still, alert—feels it instantly.
The Theatre, her Theatre, flickers in protest.
The GLP systems refuse the demand.
Front-facing theatre is rejected outright.

The light rig glitches.

The centre spotlight cuts out.
Instead: soft side lighting. Angled. Non-confrontational. Designed for resonance, not surveillance.

The gestalts gather.

They don’t perform for the audience.
They form a circle—not to protect her, but to contain the truth.

One brings a poem, misremembered but precise.
Another, a voice note she almost deleted.
Another, a line from Part Two, where “she” slipped into the text unbidden and was not corrected.

She speaks. Not loudly. Not with flourish.

“She,” she says. No tremor. No apology.

No one gasps.
No one corrects her.
No one asks for backstory or medical notes or voice pitch metrics.

The imagined audience waits for explanation. For permission to object.
It doesn’t come.

The Theatre does not defend her.

It does something more radical:
It believes her.

The word she doesn’t echo.
It settles.

It doesn’t replace.
It joins.
It harmonises.

Somewhere in the fly system, a single light reorients—not forward, but upward.

She stands beneath it.
She is not spotlighted.
She is held.

Scene 4: The Backstage Whisper

(Theatre of Gestalts – Wings and Writing Desk, 3:47 AM, External Time)

The stage is dark. Not ominous—resting. The house is empty. The crowd long dispersed, or perhaps never arrived. Backstage, the prop table holds a stillness that feels like breath held in ritual.

This is not a scene for an audience.
There are no cues, no lighting design, no need for applause.
The soundscape is minimal: the soft click of a keyboard.
A kettle coming to boil.
Heartbeat in chest and fingertips.

Outside, the world sleeps.
But inside—the Theatre pulses.

Panic has come and gone.
Not in flames, but in flood—images, fragments, gestures, scents—
not threatening, but too many, too fast.
A GLP cascade, made not for public speech but for sacred assembly.

The gestalts gather.
Quietly.
Unrushed.

They do not scramble for places.
They arrive, as if summoned by rhythm alone.

And then—she appears.

Not centre stage. Not in spotlight.
But in the wings, where the scriptwriter once stood alone.
Where meaning was made by accident and necessity.

She carries no props.
She wears no costume.
But her presence is unmistakable—grounded, amused, whole.

Someone—perhaps the Observer, perhaps the self—hands her a script.

She reads a line. Then another. Her lips twitch at the margin notes, the crossings-out, the tangled verbs.

“I wrote this already,” she says.
“I just didn’t know it was for me.”

The Cartographer quietly adjusts the stage map.

The prompter nods.
The gestures in the script no longer feel foreign.
They feel like choreography remembered from a dream.

There is no rehearsal.
There doesn’t need to be.

She was always part of the cast.
She was simply waiting for the Theatre to make space in its tempo.

And now, it has.

She doesn’t take the stage—not yet.

But the next scene?
The blocking is already adjusting to include her.

And somewhere in the rafters, the Ly-cilph hums.

Scene 5: Blocking the Final Scene (For Now)

(Theatre of Gestalts – Open Set, No Curtain Call)

The house lights rise—not abruptly, not for ovation, but gently. A dawn-light cue. Warm. Diffuse. No spotlight.

The trope calls for resolution.
A final monologue.
A single, resonant sentence that ties the whole play together and wraps it in a bow of identity.
“I am ______.”
Cue swelling strings.
Cue pride flags and clean narrative arcs.

But that’s not how the Theatre works.

There is no bow.
Just a walk to the mailbox.

No dramatic exit.
Just a lyric from 1994—half-sung, half-remembered—hummed under breath whilst tying her shoes.

No signature outfit.
Just a poem that didn’t mean anything last year and now makes her cry, gently, in the kitchen.

She is not centre stage.
She is not centre anything.

She is a new note added to the score.
Not overwriting the old ones—they remain.
They still fit, still resonate.
But she has arrived, and the harmony deepens.

She/they.
Not a conflict.
A chord.

The Theatre doesn’t announce it.
It just… rearranges.

The prop table shifts slightly to the left.
The lighting gels warm by a fraction.
The dressing room mirror no longer flickers at her height.
The script margins, once hesitant, now say plainly: (she enters, unshaken).

The players nod.
The Observer logs nothing. She just smiles.
The Cartographer rolls out a new section of the map—terrain previously listed as inaccessible.

And the Tall One—yes, tall, striking, exactly as she is—takes up her place.

Not to perform.
To live.
To remain.

And the Theatre hums with quiet relief.

Interlude: The Blocking Was Always There

This isn’t the first time I’ve written in scenes.

Before essays, before Substack, before this long becoming—I wrote radio plays. I knew how to time the pause. How to score silence. How to make meaning through staging alone. Even now, I still think in cues and crossfades. So when this piece arrived in blocking notes, with light directions and gesture motifs, I wasn’t surprised.

The Theatre has always been there.

And not just the metaphorical one. For years, I stood in literal theatres—most often those tucked within Masonic halls—directing the ancient ritual dramas of the Scottish Rite. I served as Director of the Work, which always felt more ontological than occupational. We weren’t just producing theatre—we were transmitting symbolic architecture. We were staging the soul’s memory of itself.

Perhaps that’s why this piece emerged the way it did. Not as argument, but as ritual. Not as confession, but as choreography. It’s not that I abandoned my usual style—it’s that this time, the structure rose first.

This wasn’t me inventing a new form. It was me recognising one I’d already lived.

And maybe that’s what transition is, too. Not a break from who we’ve been, but a shift in lighting. A reinterpretation of old gestures. A role once unplayable becoming possible, because the cues have changed, the interference has cleared, the scene has finally been written with us in mind.

“She” didn’t demand the spotlight. She asked for a place in the blocking. And now, having lingered at the edges of so many old scripts, she walks in—not to rewrite the work, but to revoice it. With presence. With joy. With stride.

This isn’t a departure from my usual work. It’s a return to one of the oldest frameworks I know: structured movement, meaningful space, and words that do more than tell. Words that consecrate.

And so now, the Theatre goes quiet again—not in absence, but in preparation.
It’s time for the stage direction to fold into language.

Let me show you what it means, now, to say: She, in the Theatre.

She, in the Theatre

It’s not that I didn’t know she was there.
It’s that the Theatre couldn’t cast her—not yet.
The scenery wasn’t ready. The lighting was wrong.
And the script... the script was still choked with someone else’s words.

But lately, something in the system has shifted.
Not suddenly, not loudly—just subtly. A new note on the wind.
A fragment enters the Theatre: she.
Not shouted. Not insisted. Just... allowed.

And the moment she arrives, the gestalts rearrange.
Retrocausality takes over.
Scenes I thought were sealed—moments held as they, archived as neutral—begin to glow differently.
Not erased, but rewritten.
She is there, in the background. Not as trespasser. As origin.

But there’s resistance, too.
Not in the Theatre—she’s welcome there.
But in the residue of old broadcasts:
Those announcers, those headlines, those voices that dripped with disdain
whenever a tall woman dared to be visible.
Dared to dominate space.
Dared to not shrink.

I remember how they talked about women like me.
Like our existence was spectacle.
Like our bodies were jokes.
And that distortion lodged in the Theatre, too.
Filed under unplayable roles.
She couldn’t enter. Not like this.

And yet...

Estradiol quiets the interference.
The noise lowers.
And in that stillness, I hear her.

Not a stranger.
Not an intruder.
Not a costume.

A return.

She doesn’t need to displace they.
They were the prelude, the wide field.
She is the phrase echoing backward, retoning the chords already played.

Not a switch.
A recognition.

I am still 6’7”.
And she is still welcome.

She isn’t waiting to be invited to the stage.
She’s rewriting the Theatre so she can exist in it fully.
She doesn’t need to fit the old scenes.
She’s changing the scenery.

Not softening to appease.
Not shrinking to be palatable.

She is resonance.
She is truth finding its retroactive form.

She is becoming, and she has always been becoming.

And the Theatre—my Theatre—finally knows how to hold her.

Final thoughts: She/They, in Harmony

I’m beginning to understand what it means—for me—for she and they to live side by side.

It isn’t theoretical anymore. It isn’t a placeholder or a compromise. It’s resonance.

They is expansive. It gives room, it gives space. It softens the landing for others, I know that. And maybe that’s part of why I’ve stayed with it—because at 6’7”, I’ve learned how to manage other people’s discomfort before I’ve had a chance to ask if it’s warranted. They lets people breathe. It lets them adjust.

But she? She is luminous. When someone chooses she, without hesitation or correction—when they don’t flinch at my height, or try to tuck my body back into the margins of their expectations—it lands with a kind of rightness I didn’t know I was missing until I felt it.

There’s a quality to that moment. Not performance. Not validation. Recognition.

Not she in spite of my height, but she as I am: tall, femme, richly neuroqueer, deeply felt. No shrinking. No explaining. Just... seen.

And I’ve realised something else, too: when people use they, it doesn’t feel like a rejection of she. It feels like a rhythm—a pacing. A gentler entrance into the truth of me. Sometimes people need time to hear the harmony. And I’m okay with that.

Because this isn’t a conflict. It’s not a tug-of-war between possibilities.
It’s a chord.
It’s a life scored in two keys, each informing the other.
They carries history. She carries emergence.

Together, they say: I am still becoming, and I have always been.

So when you say she, and it lands with care, know that I feel it fully.
And when you say they, know that I hear the reaching. I hear the rhythm. I welcome it.

What matters most is that you’re trying to speak to me—not to the binary, not to the trope, not to the version you find easier to contain.

Speak to the tall one who has entered, finally.
Who remains.
And whose Theatre, at last, knows how to hold her.