Even before The Axis Of Awesome released their all-conquering ‘4 Chords’ single and video in 2011, the song had been in their sets for a few years.

There was something so fundamentally entertaining in not only watching a patchwork of songs you love and loathe blur together, but seeing performers commit to the task with such (hilarious) sincerity. Five years on from ascending to YouTube fame, their recently transitioned frontwoman Jordan Raskopoulos talks about the curious life of the band, and how her gender dysphoria has fuelled the shape of things to come.

“We have a song in the show called ‘Birdplane’,” Raskopoulos explains from, rather appropriately, the airport. “We’ve been playing it for ten years now – it’s one of the first songs we ever wrote, and it’s a parody of the Five For Fighting song, ‘Superman’. They sing, ‘I’m more than a bird, I’m more than a plane,’ and we sing, ‘I’m a birdplane!’ We performed that song at the end of last year, and we realised it was kind of a metaphor for my transition despite the fact it never was before. But the audience picked up on that as well. A song that never had a meaning, suddenly having one.”

The comedy trio – Raskopoulos, Lee Naimo and Benny Davis – have been touring AoA since 2006, and racked up seven albums along the way. It has been a colourful and unexpected ride, and with Raskopolous’ transition announced on YouTube, they are embarking on a whole new journey of advocacy and support – though without sacrificing any of the funny.

“I think being a comedian, and being in people’s lives in a joyful way already, has been a big deal,” Raskopoulos says. “There was one particular message that was posted on the coming out video on YouTube, where someone had said rather ineloquently, ‘I always thought transgender people were crazy and mentally ill, but I’ve known you for so long and I don’t believe you’re mentally ill, so I think I’ve been wrong.’ I shared that on Facebook and it was this amazing moment of someone being affected by the video and admitting to their prejudice, and making the decision to change.

“For all the support, a lot of people were surprised. A lot thought it might be a joke. A small number were horrible, but whenever we release a video a small number are horrible. One thing in particular is that it’s reached a lot of young fans – people in high school, or parents with kids who are trans – who were already fans and suddenly somebody that they like became a symbol for their own struggles, someone they could connect with. It’s really humbling to know I’ve had that effect, just by being myself for the first time.”

By sheer but genuine circumstance, just prior to chatting with Raskopoulos I happened to find myself watching Louis Theroux’s documentary on transgender children, and the great complexities behind the issue; whether children possess the emotional and psychological capacity to make that decision so early. Hearing Raskopoulos discuss her childhood and teenage years – hearing her voice fall quiet as she recalls those instances of shame and repression – I can’t help but feel certain that simply having that conversation at an early age today would be a tremendously beneficial thing.

“When they talk about kids not being able to make the decision, there are no medical treatments given to a six-year-old or anything like that,” she says. “It’s entirely social, which is mostly a construct anyway. What it means for a child is not having the chance to feel like themselves, to not being able to play with a particular toy, or associate with a particular pronoun. That’s not a difficult thing to help a child with, and it’s not a medical issue.

“For me, as a young person in the ’90s, the only media about transgender people was negative. It was stuff like Jerry Springer, or films like Ace Ventura or The Crying Game. You see a trend in all these that transgender people are victims, or they bring destruction. They’re traps. Ace Ventura kisses a transgender woman and spends the next five minutes vomiting. You watch Jerry Springer, where it’s a revelation to a family or a relationship, and it destroys it. It becomes violent, and that’s all I saw. So no wonder people during that time, myself included, felt a sense of shame and made the decision to be repressed. We’re in a time now where that stuff still sadly exists and is still being made. Deadpool was a great film, and then there was an aside, this little trans joke, and it just kind of broke my heart a little bit.

“But we are making progress in a lot of other ways, and there are positive representations of trans stories. Things like [online series] Sense8, and having people being publicly trans and proud. The Wachowski Sisters, Laura Jane Grace. It’s hard to speculate if I was a child now if I would have transitioned, and I don’t know if it’s helpful to answer, but I know that for me, transitioning at this point has been good. I’ve been very proud of my life and my career up until this point, and the work I’ve done with Benny and Lee is still available, we still sell our old albums with the same photos and art – there’s no shame with the way I presented myself then. But my life is now about the future.”

The Axis Of Awesome’s show,Won’t Ever Not Stop Giving Up,runsThursday April 28 – Saturday April 30 at Giant Dwarf, then moves to The Concourse, Chatswood on Saturday May 7.

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