This is not a good play.

This is a terrible play.

For those of you who came here for the TL;DR, that’s it.

Michael Chiang’s so-called critically lauded Private Parts is a disgrace. It is laden with transphobia, transmisogyny, and worst of all, Chiang was clearly patting himself on the back with how wonderfully progressive he was when this was first delivered to audiences back in 1992, with the audience and critics all too willing to pat themselves on the back with how progressive and accepting they all were.

In fact, Chiang was so sure he had figured out exactly how to portray trans individuals that this 2018 production has not updated anything for its restaging.

Coming to us in a time when trans individuals are facing increasing oppression worldwide (the Trump Administration’s new plan to literally erase trans people from existence springs to mind), Private Parts is, more than ever, the slap in the face nobody needed. In the mind of Michael Chiang, trans people are little more than jokes; trans women are obsessed with appearance, hair, makeup, and the state of their genitals. To him, they can speak about literally nothing else.

The one fundamental flaw that breaks the back of the play is the fact that in Michael Chiang’s world, trans individuals remain the gender they were assigned at birth. This is not subtext, it is literally text.

In Act Four, Scene 1, the protagonist and audience surrogate Warren Lee explains transitioning: “Two … came into the world as men, and are now living their lives as members of the opposite sex. The third was a woman before she, too, went for a sex-change operation and is now living life as a male.”

These lines are an encapsulation of everything that is wrong with the play. In the world of Private Parts, trans individuals are not the gender that they identify as. They “live as” that gender.

This may seem like a non-difference, but this is a fundamental misunderstanding of what it means to be trans, and this is what makes the entire play an exercise in transphobic wallowing.