‘The Eel Question’ by George Elliott (Bi-curious George), co-produced with Brid Addison-Child

microcommission

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The Eel Question

Introduction by Bi-Curious George

My fascination with eels began in the early summer of 2024. The last few years of my life had been a series of deep, overwhelming upheavals. I’d recently left a fairly serious relationship and was finally properly grappling with the long neglected question of my sexuality and my gender. Drag had suddenly become my full time job and I was fully immersed in queer culture, community and politics.

Bit by bit, I was unpinning myself from the reality I’d spent my early twenties clinging to and all at once, I found myself completely untethered. I felt like I was starting again entirely, armed with zero certainties about anything. The only thing I knew for sure was that somewhere, under all the chaos, I felt better. All those unknowns added up to a sense of total freedom.

So, cut to me, sat in a field, hiding from it all on a 4 day camping trip in Dorset (the best setting for a minor break down), trying to make sense of who I am and how I relate to the world.

This is when the eels found me.

I stumbled across one brief reference to ‘The Eel Question’ in a book and I was hooked. From the confines of my tent, I read every paper, reference, study, blog that I could find – something was unravelling, knots were coming undone and in fixating on these incredible, mystifying creatures, my own grey areas were quietly becoming more comfortable to sit in.

The obvious initial point of interest for me as a trans person, is of course the fact that no one, from Aristotle, to Sigmund Freud, to Hildegard Von Bingen, could figure out what the hell was going on with eels’ sexual biology and reproduction – were they male? were they female? are the whole species born of virgin births?

Their life cycles all follow different timelines, it takes some eels decades longer than others to mature into their final, adult form – and there was me feeling like the only one! Despite decades of effort, humans have still never seen them mating in the wild and it’s near impossible to force an eel to mate in captivity; they simply refuse to do it on anyones terms but their own. They transform so completely throughout their life, adapting to survive in saltwater, then fresh, then back to salt, that scientists mistook them for 4 separate species. You don’t have to do much projecting to turn them into queer icons…

I spent that summer boring (and possibly worrying?) everyone I could find with ecstatic rambles about my eel discoveries, and thankfully, one of these tirades was directed at my friend Brid, who it turns out, had also been captured by The Eel Question.

This audio piece is a snippet of some of the thoughts and conversations we’ve been having about eels, trans-ness, embracing the unknown and dismantling some of the ‘truths’ we’ve let ourselves be defined by without our consent. We were also incredibly lucky to be able to talk to Matthew Gollock, who has a PhD in eels and is the Aquatic Species and Policy Programme Lead at ZSL. I met Matt completely by coincidence right after I was commissioned to make this piece because evidently the eels are in fact calling all the shots and wanted to make sure there was an expert on hand to properly represent them.

The piece is truly only a fragment of the thoughts and conversations we’d like to have. We could make a whole other episode on the fact that European and American eels breed in the Bermuda Triangle and Japanese eels breed around the Mariana trench (?!?!) And don’t get Brid started on organised eel crime.

A plain text transcript of The Eel Question can be downloaded as a PDF here.

About the artists.

Bi-Curious George (he/they)

Once described by Graham Norton as “energetic and charming” and by The Spectator as “a chap, or maybe not a chap”, Bi-curious George is an award winning drag king whose work centres around queer ecology. Through drag, comedy and theatre he shatters the heteronormative lens through which we view the natural world and empowers people to reframe their identities and their relationships to ‘nature’.
Their 5 star solo show, Queer Planet, has been performed all over the UK including at the Southbank Centre, soho theatre, kew gardens, the Oxford Natural History Museum, Nottingham Playhouse and the Hull Truck Theatre. Their next show, Snail Trail, will be touring museums and ecology centres in Spring 2026 before heading to Edinburgh Fringe.

Brid Addison Child (he/they)

Brid is an award winning audio and podcast producer, poet and drag performer. Their work focuses on the UK asylum system, queer and trans liberation and grassroots organising. They have won to ARIA awards in grassroots production as well as two British Podcast Awards.They also perform on the London cabaret scene as The Jester, blending audio, comedy and drag.