Comedian- Twice in Transition
Her joy is making people laugh. Her legacy is promoting acceptance.
FAMILY BACKGROUND
Tan Hoang (TH) was born in Vietnam – as a boy – moving to St. Paul, Minnesota with her sister and aunt and uncle’s family when she was 8. “It was the single greatest thing that ever happened to me,” she said about the move. “I felt like I went on a rocket ship to another planet.”
CHILDHOOD
TH says she was never a funny kid. Even though she loved watching tv comedy shows, being funny just didn’t come naturally to her.
EDUCATION
Following high school graduation, TH moved to New York City to attend the New York Conservatory for Dramatic Arts as a first step along her chosen career path to become a professional stage actor, reading out loud the male actor’s lines assigned by the play’s author.
PERSONAL TRANSITION
Looking back from her adult perspective, TH always knew that she was transgender, sometimes at a subconscious level. “There was such a wall of my own denial. But once that wall was breached, it was so clear,” she said.
TH was pursuing an acting career when she started to transition. It was hard to suddenly switch the kinds of roles she auditioned for; until that point, she’d been practicing and thinking almost exclusively about how male characters should act because ‘female’ was her instinct while ‘male’ was only the gender identity assigned at her birth.
(Editor’s note – “Cis-gender” is the gender identity assigned at birth to every person by others. Thus, while TH believed she was instinctively female, her public persona remained male until she action – either an informal public statement or formal legal filing – to change her gender identity.)
CAREER TRANSITION
As TH navigated the change in her life, she started exploring standup comedy, falling in love with the craft of writing jokes and what it felt like making people laugh. She has been performing ever since.
“I’ve always looked up to stand-up comedians,” said TH. “I watched a lot while growing up, but it never really felt like a goal. Having started acting school as a male but transitioning to female before I graduated, it was hard to find roles suitable to me or even approaching acting because I realized I was on a different journey with myself and with casting.”
“That’s what pulled me into stand-up. They had stand-up as an elective class in acting school. I took that class and realized, ‘Oh, I like this.’ It felt freeing. It felt like it doesn’t matter who I am, as long as I’m funny.”
“I struggled in the stand-up class. I remember writing my first joke and I just felt like I was solving a math problem. And then the wheel started spinning. It was like discovering a new muscle. And as soon as I graduated school, I was just like, ‘All right, let’s do open mics (microphones) and try to get all the shows.”
Eventually, TH had honed her craft sufficiently to be invited to host the monthly Philadelphia comedy showcase Tatooed Momedy. In the suburbs, TH was the emcee and the Bucks-Mont Pride Festival.
PERSONAL CHALLENGE
Early in her transition from male to female, TH recalls “It was really hard. Honestly, those were some of the darkest moments in my life because I was, in every sense of the word, a ‘golden’ child. I was a good student; I went to acting school and no one batted an eye.”
“And then when I transitioned, it was really hard to see your family look at you so differently. And you’re thinking to yourself, ‘What did I do to deserve this other than just put on makeup and a wig?’ They weren’t mean but I could just tell that they wished I wasn’t like this. That’s the one thing that hurt the most.”
“But things with my family are now so good. I cannot stress that enough. Not only am I just a normal member of the family, but the whole culture of my family has changed, too. It took a while, years actually.”
“The thing that always stood out to me was when my mom finally told me, ‘’I love you. I will always love you. I’m just having a lot of difficulty with this because I’m afraid that the world would hurt you.’ That was the first step heading toward the right direction.”
“It was just exposure. That was all it was, them eventually being used to me. And now they’re like, ‘Hey, I bought this skirt; it doesn’t fit. Do you want it?’”
PROFESSIONAL CHALLENGE
One show TH will always remember occurred early in her stand-up career. She and her mother drove together her mother’s home in suburban Philadelphia to TH’s scheduled show in New York City – a two and a half hour drive. The audience didn’t laugh once so it was a long, quiet drive home. And TH had not even been paid. That was a low moment, but TH said, “I’m so glad I stuck it out.”
“I just love it so much. A lot of comedians are addicted to that feeling. Now, I’m making people laugh and it feels amazing. I love that feeling of after-the-show because I could be so tired, I could have been working all day but if I do well in that show, I’m up, I’m like, ‘Who wants to go party?’”
MOTIVATION TO BE UP-FRONT ABOUT HER SEXUAL IDENTITY
As TH recalls, “I remember a time when I thought, ‘I’m not gonna address it. I just wanna be me. But one time after doing a show, the owner of the club came up to me and said, ‘You’re so funny. Do you have any transgender jokes?’ And I told him that is exactly who I am, but I don’t want to mention it.”
The owner said to me in a respectful way, “I think not mentioning it is really dumb because the moment you get on stage, everybody wants to hear about it. In fact, this is probably the only time ever that people are open to it. So, if anybody could make these jokes, it should be you.”
After that, I leaned into it.
CAREER SATISFACTION
“I know that for some audience members at a lot of theses shows, this is their first time seeing a transgender person. So, I like to take the opportunity to represent our community. Because if I can make you laugh and smile, that’s a step toward the right direction of acceptance. If that’s going to be your first impression of a trans person, well why not be me?,” says TH.
“I don’t wanna come off like this transperson on a mission to change the world. I just love comedy. I love to make people laugh. That’s all it is. I don’t care if it’s six people in the room or sixty people in the room. I just love that I can put on a good show with just a microphone.”
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This career story was based on a news article written by Nate File, published by the Philadelphia Inquirer newspaper on June 15, 2023.
Editor’s note – This story is not based on a personal interview. The news article made no mention of the extent- if any – of TH’s physical transition.
