A Woman Unstuck from Time
I am a time traveller.
Perhaps that was inevitable. I was born in 1988 in Subiaco, Western Australia. Specifically, it was King Edward Memorial Hospital – a hospital immortalising a king who was praised for bringing the monarchy into the present, which he did nearly nine decades before I was born. With a beginning like this, how can you expect me to have a healthy relationship to linearity?
King Edward was a privately wealthy man but he was a publicly funded hospital. My mother then took me – her publicly funded baby – to a publicly funded house to meet my three older publicly funded siblings, and to not meet my publicly absent father.
I am a time traveller.
I know that sounds impossible, but when I reflect on my past, it’s the only explanation. Shortly after my 30th birthday, I began puberty. I was born in 1988, and in 2018, I was a teenage girl. Now, a skeptic amongst you might quibble, nitpick, suggest that this doesn’t count, because it was my second puberty. I already began my first puberty in the temporally deferential year of 1999. A second puberty is just gratuitous.
To them I would say, as respectfully as possible, “Shut your smug fucking mouth, you undiluted simpleteon. You improvident dullard. You ossified ephemeristic cunt.” You have only fortified my argument! I – somehow – repeated an unrepeatable experience. I came of age twice.
If that isn’t impressive enough, the second – and superior – puberty went in the opposite direction to the first. I defied the laws of physics – and my mother’s wishes – to reverse the flow of time. An unfathomable hormonal paradox.
Now, having been alive for nearly forty years, I am in the midst of a mid-life crisis – eight years after having been a teenager, and four years past the average life expectancy of a woman like me.
In the words of a cancelled author’s cancelled musician wife, “I am the girl anachronism.”
I am a time traveller.
In 2014, my Facebook feed was flooded with Buzzfeed quizzes. The most popular amongst my friends were the ones for “90s kids” – kids who spent their formative years growing up in the 90s. Of course, unlike my chronological peers, I did not grow up in the 1990s. I sense your disbelief and I reject it wholeheartedly.
I refer you to the words of William Gibson – the author of Neuromancer, the novel that invented The Matrix, the movie that invented trans women.
William Gibson once said “The future is already here—it's just unevenly distributed.” I know how true that is, because I grew up in Perth. Everyone in Perth would joke that we were five years behind the eastern states, not knowing that the eastern states thought we were ten. None of us knew the joke was on us, a country five years behind the rest of the world. Even now it might feel like we are catching up, but trust me – they’re all doubling back.
When you do the math, my formative years began in 1981 and ended in 1991, just two years after I was born. You’d believe me if I showed you my childhood photos. Our furniture, our clothes, our appliances – all secondhand, all in various shades of mustard. My brother and I got our first video game console, the Super Nintendo Entertainment System, the same year our school friends got PlayStations. When you grow up poor, you inevitably grow up in a period piece. I wanted nothing more than to escape. Because period pieces are so fucking dull.
I am a time traveller.
It used to be my mother’s favourite thing about me. My siblings were all, in my mother’s words, “difficult,” and in my words, “emotionally dysregulated due to insecure attachment patterns.” She had no idea what to do with my siblings, but she knew what to do with me. We had a second-hand VHS player. My first time machine.
In my memories, it’s always a Blockbuster, even though I know Blockbuster didn’t reach WA until 1999. Some of my memories must’ve been in a Video Ezy, but that’s not how I see them now. Hazy and shifting memories are a side effect of living the way I do – by which I mean living with undiagnosed complex PTSD.
Video stores are where I first learned the sacred numbers to defy the rivers of fate – five movies for seven days for just $7.
New releases weren’t included in the deal, as was the custom at the time, but this didn’t phase me. Whilst my classmates gorged themselves on Batman Forever, Dumb and Dumber and Ace Ventura, I watched movies from a bygone era, a time when Jim Carrey wasn’t in every movie.
Ghostbusters, Superman, Close Encounters of the Third Kind. I poured over the credits and the box art, learning how to jump from one video to another. Who Framed Roger Rabbit led me to The Looney Tunes. ET led me to Jaws. Willy Wonka led me to Blazing Saddles which led me to The Producers.
Eventually, I watched movies I was way too young for, because I was the only child my age who didn’t want to watch the same movie again and again. I hungered for the new. I yearned to witness the unwitnessed. I burned through all the G and PG films, from every era.
After weeks of unrelenting picketing, work slowdowns and trade negotiations, my mother acquiesced to my demands. Ten years after my birth, I was M-rated – 15 years and older.
She knew that a VHS tape guaranteed her a minimum of ninety minutes where she wouldn’t see me or hear me, because I would be travelling through time.
It did take me a moment to calibrate. Time travel is never precise. When I first saw Dr. Strangelove, I became a perspicacious and astute scholar, with a deep appreciation for all the jokes that I definitely absolutely understood, no question. When I first saw Alien, I became a petrified toddler, and hid behind the couch.
Deep down, I knew I had nothing to fear from the tapes. I could make bad things stop with the push of a button. If a movie was too sad, I knew that I could rewind it. Here, I had the remote. Here, and only here, I had the power.
This is the real trick. If you sit close enough to the screen, and turn the volume loud enough – you can’t see where you are, you can’t hear the rest of the house, you can’t even hear your own thoughts. If you sit close enough to a TV – an old TV, with a cathode ray tube – you can peer through the scanlines and glimpse the future. You can block everything out and whisper to yourself a truth that will save you.
I am a time traveller.
In 2016, I was with a group of friends, doing our best to ignore the election results overseas. Someone posed the classic dinner party question “If you could live in any decade other than this one, which would you choose and why?”
When it came my turn to answer, I answered incorrectly. At every point in the timeline, I do not understand social cues. I do not understand that these broad hypothetical questions do not have an equally broad range of answers. I was just meant to say the 1970s because I like glam rock. I gave an answer that the group all derided as boring. I chose the future.
At the time, I had been reading about fascism, for reasons I can’t currently recall. One of the key tenets of fascist ideology is calling for a return to a mythical past. Fascist propaganda weaponises nostalgia, in order to roll back social progress.
The past is not a place I want to visit. I don’t want to travel somewhere where the homosexuals are unmarried, closeted, dying. Where the abortions are illegal. Where my peers, my equals, are held captive as slaves. Where the only available restaurants are all British.
Obviously, as a woman unstuck from time, I understand the desire to visit the past. There’s something alluring and indecent about violating the laws of physics. Travelling to the future doesn’t have the same appeal. Right now, we are all travelling to the future at a rate of one second per second. It is, like a cishet man at an open mic, unimpressive.
But the real reason why no-one wants to travel to the future is that most people don’t believe it exists. In the 60s, science fiction was filled with incredible futures of abundance. By 2010, they’d all been replaced with post-apocalyptic wastelands and dystopias. And in 2026, we are stuck in an eternal 1980s, as we feed our culture into a sycophantic plagiarism machine that vomits our parents’ childhoods back at us, coated in slick uncanny digital mucus.
In the past they believed in the future, but now, in their future, we only believe in the past.
I am reminded of the concept of capitalist realism – the idea that it is easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism. As we see capitalism crumble, we cannot imagine the world beyond it. We retreat to the past because, for most of us, it feels like the only safe place left.
In 2016, I wanted to go to the future. I wanted to believe the future existed – yes, selflessly, for all of us, for humanity. But also selfishly. I had been fighting against it for years, but even then, I already knew that the future was where I had to go. Because the future was the only place I would ever be a woman.
Transition is a function of time. You cannot transition without a before and an after. To transition is to reject the past, to reject nostalgia, to choose the future, to tell the world that you believe in a tomorrow that is better than today and that you are done wasting time.
I still want to go to the future. I hope you do too.
I still believe in the future. Of course I do.
I’m a time traveller.
This piece was first performed for the Opening Gala at the 2026 Q-Lit Festival: Queer Nostalgia.
Anna Piper Scott is a comedian with over 15 years experience across Australia. She is best known for her stand-up shows – Queer & Present Danger, Such An Inspiration, None of That Queer Stuff – which have garnered a slew of awards, nominations and rave reviews nationwide. She’s also the creator of the queer cult sensation T4T: A Transgender Showcase, briefly wrote for The Weekly with Charlie Pickering, and upset a cavalcade of TERFs when she played a famous children's author in her debut play, An Evening With JK.