top of page
Untitled design - 2.jpg

...how could they prefer her?

  • Writer: yannick-robin eike mirko
    yannick-robin eike mirko
  • Dec 6, 2022
  • 2 min read

Updated: Apr 8, 2023



an escalating metro panic attack at the first smell of your perfume since the last time I was consumed by it's scent, while embracing you. why do I still want/miss transphobic people? why can't I understand it's 'circumstantiality' with you...the wanting. even the made-up-looking words don't seem to help me understand anymore than I don't. neither do the other languages I dream in, the ones I was afraid of speaking in front of you.


why do they still lead me on after i've come out...the feelings, the people. are they too afraid to understand the queerness in the ever present flirtatiousness when in connection to me, upon reconnecting after I've self-actualized? or are they really straight, + i'm a delusional non-trans person, that you still only 'sort of want', like how you only 'sort of' wanted me before. how do I explain/justify the dysphoria, then?


_


you took this picture of me in a practice room in the basement of our dorm building. i had recently chopped all my hair off in a dysphoric fit of rage after an audition. you found me crying under the piano and took it, so I could remember how I looked when I was happy. only, it is when i'm really happy that i feel the most unfamiliar.


you never really saw me, did you? or, is it that you hate how much I cause you to see yourself, which then forces + prolongs this profound solitude for us both. me + e v e r y o n e i k n e w.


i know myself, now. only, it means i'm the only person i might ever know.


how does the smell of you cause me to spiral like this...is this still what you smell like, are we both missing old versions of one another? me, missing your smell. you, missing my fake gender.


-



i wouldn't be surprised if, when reading these lines + assessing the photograph, you're unable to recognize the subject is you. and me. and everything I will never receive. from maybe any/no-one.


dying alone, preserved in the memories of others who exiled me before my physical passing as a person I never was. because they preferred her.

...how could they prefer her?



Comments

yannick-robin eike mirko [who communicates in Spanish, English, + ASL] is a Manhattan-based Biawaisa/Yamoká-hu/Maorocoti multidisciplinary artist, choreographer, writer, doula and disability justice activist with a rare disease. His work sits at the intersection of movement, access, queer and indigenous survival, death care, and institutional accountability, using the body as archive, protest, and living evidence.

​

Her relationship with dance and movement has never been linear or purely technical. From Off-Broadway to online, their work has been shaped by access, interruption, advocacy, and forced stillness. Movement and progress, for yannick-robin, is not simply choreography or activism; it is testimony, how a marginalized body speaks when institutions fail to listen. 
 

In 2021, yannick-robin participated in Drawing Breath, a visual and embodied project by Risa Puno that centered marginalized voices during COVID, with yannick-robin representing disabled people. The work focused on breath, endurance, and visibility at a time when disabled lives were being openly treated as expendable. This project cemented their understanding of movement as political: presence itself became resistance.
 

In 2022, disability justice became inseparable from his professional life. He was the first physically disabled actor/musician [acoustic and electric guitar, accordion, glockenspiel, xylophone, tambourine] to play a physically disabled role written through an ableist lens and publicly fought the theatre and writers for accountability. This work was documented in his blog and a documentary, a social media movement, and ultimately led to his inclusion in the University of Minnesota’s Tretter Transgender Oral History Project, archiving his contributions to disability, gender, and labor justice in theatre (the most recent edition/collection of years awaiting entering the public access archive due to funding and completion of editing. Help fund the preservation of non-cis history here).
 

That same year, he worked on Mr. Holland’s Opus at Ogunquit Playhouse as an actor/musician [bugle, trumpet, drum kit], a fully captioned production where his lived experience as a non-cis deaf and physically disabled artist directly informed their performance rhythm, physical storytelling, and musicality. Also in 2022, she performed in the inaugural Breaking the Binary Theatre Festival on Theatre Row under the direction of L Morgan Lee, delivering work as an actor involving monologuing about wheelchair use, access failure, and systemic injustice, using their body not as metaphor, but as evidence. 
 

In 2024 after a year and some change prioritizing deathcare work, they returned to theatre at New York Stage and Film (NYSAF), contributing to the work of disabled choreographer Jerron Herman as an actor/dancer. They also released their multi-genre EP passing that year, which catalogs their multi-instrumental writing and use of music for processing as they fall deeper into grief, hearing loss and deafness, and a world of being misunderstood for not being cis.

​

In 2025, yannick-robin worked on the developmental process for Jay Alan Zimmerman’s upcoming show Songs for Hands on a Thursday, following Jerron Herman’s recommendation. The project included a residency at New York Theatre Barn’s Choreography Lab and a music workshop premiere, where yannick-robin served as both choreographer and dancer. The piece centered a Deaf father’s death and a CODA grappling with silence; yannick-robin’s role was to integrate sign language into choreography and bridge gaps between sound, access, and movement for d/Deaf performers.
 

Alongside his performance work, yannick-robin has been active in nonprofit and advocacy spaces since 2020. She worked for Imara Jones of TransLash Media, one of TIME Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People of 2023, where they were nominated for a Webby Award as an associate and digital producer for The TransLash Podcast, contributed to The Anti-Trans Hate Machine series, and wrote obituaries for TGNC siblings lost to violence. He has written for TalkDeath on racial disparities and discrimination in death care and other deathcare and injustice related topics and now offers obituary writing, death doulaship, and bereavement counseling for TGNC decedents and their families, people with rare diseases, and disabled communities.


for commissions, death care, speaking engagements and more, press the contact button.
_____________________________________________
yannick-robin eike mirko is represented by Arise Artists Agency

© 2026 yannick-robin eike mirko

bottom of page