How Do You Make People Laugh When They Don’t Want You To Exist? Comedian Jordan Gray On Being Trans, Funny & Unapologetically Loud 

“My human rights are under threat from fucking Nazis – let’s turn my pain into a party!” says comedian Jordan Gray, standing onstage in the basement bar of London’s Soho Theatre. She’s playing the piano while joking with the audience – which includes the likes of actor David Tennant – about her rights being eroded. It’s been just over a month since the UK Supreme Court’s earth-shattering ruling that the legal definition of a woman should be based on gender assigned at birth. The ramifications of this decision – the full extent of its impact on Transgender people like Jordan – are yet to be fully realised. 

Somehow, the Essex-born comic is able to squeeze a few laughs out of this terrifying experience. “We’re depressed! We’re anxious! We’re busting for a piss!” she quips of the mismatched guidance claiming Trans women can be banned from both female-only and male-only spaces. The line lands hard and fast – absurd, bleak, yet still funny. It’s a perfect distillation of her gift: turning institutional cruelty into something that can be sung about and laughed at, even if only for a moment. 

Jordan, 36, is no stranger to finding the funny in sobering times. In fact, her new comedy hour, the spam-filter-inducing Is That A C*ck In Your Pocket, Or Are You Just Here To Kill Me?, addresses another majorly dark moment in her life: the online death threats that have plagued her since 2022. It’s one of the frustrating ironies of her success. She’s an electric, energetic performer, as talented at singing into the mic as cracking wise with it. It’s safe to say that Jordan – who came out as Trans at the age of 25 – is at the pinnacle of her career, with her own sitcom (more on this later) and a highly anticipated run at the Edinburgh Fringe fast approaching... just as Trans rights face yet another attack.

Spending time with Jordan, it’s hard to imagine her provoking such hatred in anyone. In person, she’s infinitely more introverted than her ultra-confident onstage persona portends. “I’ll be honest, I’m very proud that I’ve even got a show going on,” she tells me, referring to performing amid the continuously terrifying headlines circling her community. “I just want to hide under my bed.” There is little hint of that cocky comedy character – well, apart from the metal pendant that hangs at her neck in the shape of a penis and testicles.

“Jordan’s gift: turning institutional cruelty into something that can be sung about and laughed at, even if only for a moment”

So, how did a The-Voice-UK-contestant-turned-stand-up-comedian (and self-proclaimed “working-class idiot”) become the subject of such extensive vitriol? Three years ago, fresh off the back of her hit Fringe show Is It A Bird?, Jordan was booked to appear on Channel 4 comedy show Friday Night Live, where she performed the closing musical number from her show, Better Than You. The song reflected her brash onstage persona and, as it did in Edinburgh, ended with Jordan getting completely naked.  

The routine about her superiority wasn’t meant to be taken seriously. “Anyone with fucking half a brain – sorry for swearing – knows that that’s an ironic statement,” Jordan tells me. “It’s only funny because it’s not true.” In the room, it drew raucous applause. Outside, the response was far less generous. Within hours, clips of the performance began circulating online, where they were met with a barrage of outrage, transphobia and thinly veiled misogyny. What was intended as a bold, defiant gesture quickly became a lightning rod for online hate, turning Jordan from a rising star to controversial headline almost overnight.

Today at Fringe, a performer taking all their clothes off hardly raises an eyebrow. But outside of that bubble – and with the song removed from the special’s wider context – the act was considered far more controversial. Not that Jordan immediately felt it. Rather, she still feels very “proud” of the moment. She recalls coming offstage – where her agents presented her with a pink kimono – and lying on the floor, telling herself, “I think you just did something really cool.”

It was only in the taxi on the way home that she became aware of the hate comments piling up beneath any article or tweet praising her. Jordan’s name trended online, as the death threats started rolling in. The naysayers were a “very small group, comparatively”, but she still felt the weight of their hate. “I didn’t expect the backlash to be that much – but then I didn’t expect that many people to be so removed from the irony of it,” she says. Now, onstage, she shifts to silliness when she brings up the barrage of comments, joking: “The biggest irony, of course, is that no professional assassin in the history of time has ever said, ‘Watch your back, I’m gonna murder you with a gun.’” Yet in person, Jordan admits that the “violence” in their words, understandably, “really caught me off guard”.

For a long time, she struggled to talk about the experience with her friends, let alone her audience. Yet the first time she did mention what happened within a comedy context, she recalls the crowd erupting in a “massive laugh”. Did she feel better for it? Jordan nods. “Yeah, definitely. I’m like, ‘Oh, these people get it.’” Stand-up, she found, helped her explain what she’d been through when she was still struggling to understand it herself. “For now, it’s working”, she says, and laughs. “People are having more fun than you’d expect for a show about death threats.”

“I’m trying my best to hold on to all the joy while being realistic about what’s happening out there. The world has changed so much that even if I took the same attitude onstage that I had in 2022, it might seem very combative, or maybe naive”

Of course, performing in the wake of April’s Supreme Court ruling is a whole other challenge. Jordan makes it very clear that she is extremely privileged, but that she sees the ruling as “the worst thing” to happen to Trans people in her lifetime. She describes the “insidiousness” of the so-called debate, the “heinous” questions more removed family and friends have been “emboldened” to ask. “Innocent until proven guilty is no longer a thing. We’re just walking perverts to a lot of people,” she says. “The rhetoric has spread so fast... [and] if I’m not there to stop that conversation from progressing, it just goes [on].” 

For Jordan, simply putting herself out there feels like her way of challenging this hateful rhetoric; lucky, as her kooky supermarket ITVX sitcom Transaction is finally hitting our screens later this month after a lengthy seven years in development, not atypical of TV. The show, which started life as a series of shorts, sees Jordan star as a snarky deadbeat layabout who is hired at a supermarket to improve its diversity optics. With a strong ensemble cast (including comedy legend Nick Frost), Transaction is every bit as darkly humorous as that set-up suggests.

Although Jordan is the first to admit that balancing such highs and lows has left her feeling “emotionally checked out”. “I’m trying my best to hold on to all the joy while being realistic about what’s really happening out there... The world has changed so much that even if I took the same attitude onstage now that I had in 2022, it might seem very combative, or maybe naive,” she admits.

But if this whole horrible experience has offered her anything, it’s the chance to explore her “queerness” onstage. It’s been nine years since her days on The Voice, and Jordan has since seen her role as one of bridging the gap – standing “on the frontline, making straight, cis people feel more comfortable about the [Trans] conversation so we can move things forward”. It’s a bold mission statement, but one that has also come at a cost: the sense that she’s positioned herself on the “outside” of the very queer community she’s advocating for.

“I know so many amazing Transgender people, and they’ve all got an activist mindset,” she says. “I’m too scared. I can get on stage and be naked – whatever – but that’s nothing compared to being in a protest.” With her new show, she’s not aiming to alienate the original audience that has followed her from the mainstream, but it’s also a quiet appeal to the LGBTQIA+ community itself: a request for belonging: “Like, ‘Please, can I inhabit this space with you?’”

Her plea is clearly genuine – and on the eve of Pride Month, she tells me it does appear to be working. Already, she’s seeing more Trans people in the audience at Is That A C*ck In Your Pocket. When they compliment the show’s queerness, her heart swells. “I didn’t think that was going to happen. That’s really cool,” she says, with a small yet hopeful smile. “It feels like I’m doing something that I should’ve been doing the whole time.”

Transaction drops Tuesday 24 June on ITVX and ITV2. Jordan is also returning to the Edinburgh Fringe this August with her show Is That A C*ck In Your Pocket, Or Are You Just Here to Kill Me?