QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS

‘What’s wrong with you?’ It’s rare that a person asking this question is looking for anything resembling a friendly response, and even rarer that they should receive it. However, the seven guests in You Can’t Ask That’s ‘Facial Difference’ episode take the callous start to their interview with a smile. It’s easy to imagine that each of them has come across this question countless times before – if not in words, then certainly in the curious stares of strangers. Their answers are patient, open and intimate as they explain potentially life-threatening and often debilitatingly painful medical conditions, benign birth defects and devastating accidents. Elly, who was born with only one eye and one ear, and Carly, whose body’s lack of a certain protein severely affects her skin and hair, stress a point that, in You Can’t Ask That, is raised again and again: We’re not wrong. Just different.

It’s the common thread that unites all the diverse interviewees of the ABC show. Transgender people are not mentally ill, children of gay parents are not disadvantaged, Muslims are not dangerous and practitioners of BDSM are not perverted; their lives are just different from what dominant Australian culture would term ‘normal’. Bridging these differences and showing the human beings behind the labels is at the heart of the show, which borrowed its concept from the wildly popular Reddit AMA (‘ask me anything’) threads that have allowed participants to ask frank questions of – and receive honest answers from – everyone from former US president Barack Obama to a man claiming to have two penises.

Interviewees often disagree with one another,