In the opening seconds of Orlando: My Political Biography, a shadowy figure in a quiet city street says: “Someone once asked me, ‘Why don’t you write your autobiography?’ And I replied, ‘Because Virginia Woolf fucking wrote it for me in 1928.’” The scene takes place in the dead of night, with the silence broken only by the swish of a brush as this speaker pastes up a large gold poster. “Orlando,” it reads, “où es tu?”
Moments later, this fly-poster apologises to Woolf for his profanity: “I say it with tenderness and admiration, because your writing seems impossible to surpass. But I also say it with rage, because you represented us – trans people – as aristocrats in colonial England who one day wake up in a woman’s body.”
