Profile Photo Credit: Molly Ahern Photo credit: Bredan Moore
WILLIAM KEOHANE ARTIST AND ACTIVIST
William Keohane is a writer from Limerick and the current writer-in-residence at Ormston House. His essays have been published in British GQ , Banshee , The Stinging Fly , and The Tangerine , and his poetry in Queering the Green , an anthology of post-2000 Queer Irish poetry. Born in Cork in 1996, William grew up in Limerick where, in 2021, he founded Trans Limerick Community (TLC), a peer support group for trans, non-binary, gender diverse and questioning adults based in the Limerick region. “When twenty people joined for our first TLC meeting, I realized this might have been something trans people in Limerick were searching for, only it hadn’t been established yet. It was certainly something that I was looking for when I was coming out, but I didn’t know just how much I needed it, and how much I’d gain from it. TLC has been running for two years now, and we have over seventy members. I’ve met some of my closest friends through the group and the meetings are a part of each month that I really look forward to.” Keohane’s poetry performance Boxing Day explores his experience of gender transition in Ireland, which he has been touring across the country over the last year. Boxing Day is a 52 poem sequence, each poem representing one week of the first year of transition. The sequence documents a year of change, grief and apprehension and highlights the interpersonal scrutiny of existing in the world as a trans person. According to Keohane, the process of writing Boxing Day has been slow, mirroring the long wait trans people face when trying to access gender-affirming care in Ireland. Waiting is a central theme in his work, in the same way that waiting can play a huge role in the lives of trans people in Ireland.
Keohane’s essay pamphlet Son, published by The Lifeboat Press, was launched at the 38th Cúirt International Festival of Literature in April 2023. The essay reflects on the journey from childhood to early adulthood, exploring his changing relationship with his name and parents. Here’s a blurb from The Lifeboat Press for Son : Questions of identity and self realisation are not easily or straight-forwardly accommodated by one literary form. William Keohane’s response to this has been to write something formally myriad, hybridised and resistant to easy categorization. Son is remarkable work of thought and language, and William’s curiosity as a thinker means that in his work ideas are always being made, remade, and made anew once more. This pamphlet is honest, intelligent and moving. William is a brilliant writer, and this is a mind-expanding work. You can order Son online at www.lifeboatpress.com William Keohane is performing Boxing Day at the 2023 West Cork Literary Festival this summer. You can catch Boxing Day on Saturday, July 8 th at 6:30 pm in the Marino (Old Methodist) Church in Bantry. And, If you are a trans, non-binary, gender diverse, or gender questioning adult, and you would like to join Trans Limerick Community’s monthly peer-support meetings, you can send an email to translimerick@gmail.com
Research shows the estimated wait-list time for a trans healthcare referral in Ireland at 10 years, the worst in all of Europe. In October 2022, a study conducted by Transgender Europe found that Ireland ranked lowest in Europe for availability and accessibility when it comes to trans healthcare. To get an appointment with a specialist in Ireland, people can be forced to wait between two and a half to 10 years. Keohane spent 3 years waiting for a phone call after being added to the waiting list. Boxing Day also explores isolation, the fear of coming out, assessment, and the complexities associated with “ideal” masculinity experienced by some trans men. The very first Boxing Day performance was in The Ulster Museum in Belfast last year for ‘Collage: A Political Act’, and since then, Boxing Day has appeared in venues across Ireland—Cork, Limerick, Waterford, and Dublin—and abroad. The sequence, for now, exists only as a performance and not in print. The poems are still being written and edited, so the performance is slightly different each time, echoing the way the body can change gradually through transition. “Many of the poems in Boxing Day are about assessment. In Ireland, in order to receive transgender healthcare, you must first receive a diagnosis of gender dysphoria from a clinical psychologist. When you meet with them, you have to tell a coherent narrative of your gender history to be given a diagnosis, and granted access to the medical institution. By maintaining this work as a performance, rather than in print, in a sense the audience also play the role of the assessor. I read the poems while projecting them on a screen so that the audience has a choice: they can watch me, my body, my face; or they can read the poems. Or, they can do both.”
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