Bisexuality
is still very new to me. The colors are still bright and shiny, untarnished by
the repeated washings that a cherished garment inevitably suffers so, forgive
me if my optimistic and cuddly viewpoint of bisexuality comes across as naive.
That could be true, and I’m okay with it, because the initial idealism of a new
identity can contain values worth clinging to even if the world turns out to
disappoint you.
My
initial decision to take the leap and claim bisexuality for myself started out
as my appetites expanded, but my journey into it so far has been about
receptivity and empathy. When I first saw bisexuality defined as “attraction to
your own and other genders,” it captured my sexuality exactly where it was: a
trans woman whose dating history included other women and nonbinary partners.
The idea
that I could assert myself as bisexual without being into cis men felt
revolutionary, but I was held back by the knowledge that no matter what I said
my bisexuality meant, it would be interpreted to mean that I was sexually
available to cis men, a kind of being seen that I very much did not want to
experience. Until I met the right guy: impossibly pretty, extremely queer,
incredibly soft, and absolutely fictional.
His name
is Indigo Hanover and he’s the warm cup of cocoa at the center of Tini Howard
and Nick Robles’ wildly surreal end of life horror comic Euthanauts. The magic
of fiction, and art in general, is that we can see things and try them on
without the risks that go with them in real life and sexual attraction to cis
men is precisely the kind of thing you want to try out in art before you do it
for real, if you can. The problem, of course, is that is it takes queer
creators like Howard and Robles to produce the kind of enchanting femme of
center guys who entice me, and the opportunities for creators like us to bring
characters like Indigo fully to life are exceedingly rare.
It’s a
reality that’s been at the front of my mind as I dive deeper into making erotic
journal comics about my medical transition and the ways that it’s reshaping my
relationship to my body and sexuality. A blank page is a space of unlimited
possibility for me to project whatever shape my desires take, which feels
harder to take for granted than ever thanks to the raging COVID-19 pandemic
and, as I write this, choking smoke from west coast wildfires.
When I’m
drawing, I can fill in the kind of gaps in the culture that Howard and Robles
did for me with Indigo, and it’s a particularly electric feeling as a trans
woman cartoonist given that trans women’s sexuality is still bound up in
stigma, exploitation, and extreme violence in the mainstream. In the age of
bathroom bills, it frequently feels like the only time we’re granted any kind
of sexual agency in the wider culture is to be framed as predators or infiltrators.
So
there’s a kind of bittersweet privilege to knowing that articulating my
personal sexuality in any way possesses far more revolutionary potential and
the frisson of taboo than the equivalent work from any cis man could, even if
he’s expressing desire for trans women. But that also comes with the weight of
being seen, and making my sexuality so nakedly visible to the public brings
back the same problems of inviting cis male attention that initially held me
back from asserting myself as bisexual. The social dynamics and economics of
hosting erotic comics about myself on OnlyFans and using them as a vehicle to
open myself up to making porn means that navigating cis male attention and the
dreaded male gaze, whatever that means, is going to be a prominent aspect of my
professional life for the foreseeable future.
For a
lot of women in the arts, cis or trans, straight or queer, the male gaze is an
invisible enemy to be grappled with, to be counterprogrammed. There’s
voluminous discussion about how women creators in particular strategize about
how to misdirect or baffle said male gaze as a condition of expressing their
sexuality in their work, and while I recognize the validity of those
approaches, I find them exhausting and stifling.
After a
decade of anguish and self sabotage between my initial gender epiphany and
starting HRT, I resent the idea of diminishing myself or my flowering sexuality
for anyone or anything irrespective of the risks attached. I don’t want to
adopt an oppositional or harm reduction stance towards any aspect of my
audience, it feels like a violation of my agency as both a trans woman and an
artist.
Instead,
I want to open up my work to everyone and anyone while keeping hold of the
specificity of my queerness and desires. To me, conquering the stigmas and
suppression of trans women’s sexuality means granting access to a self
directed, unapologetic vision of trans sexuality. It’s a position that requires
an incredible amount of vulnerability and comes with all kinds of dangers and pitfalls,
but it’s one that I’m finding myself thriving in and rewarded by.
The
emphasis of my personal sexuality right now is embracing being a woman with a
penis attracted to other women with penises, a territory that creates all kinds
of opportunities for the conventional cis het male gaze to see itself and its
desires reflected in. Again, it’s a fact that comes with all kinds of potential
anxieties, but I’d rather accept it and exploit it to my own ends than pull
back one inch from my own desires because they have the potential to overlap
with the demographic that has the most prolific history of violence against
women like me.
Because
when I’m drawing, I’m in control. In the same way that consuming art can be a
safe way to try things on, creating it can be a safe way to reassert control.
There’s always a push and pull, the commercial success or failure of my work
depends on how I navigate the space between my desires and that of my audience,
but I can dictate the terms in which my sexuality and the artistic depiction of
my body are seen and consumed with far more confidence than under any other set
of circumstances.
If I’m
drawing one woman sucking another woman’s cock, I’m depicting women’s pleasure
no matter who’s getting off to it, but I also get to decide what perspective
I’m showing it from, which is one of the reasons why I love referencing the
cinematography of porn in my work and why I’m increasingly eager to turn the
camera on myself.
One of
the most explicit ways that cis het ablebodied white men are centered in the
visual arts is POV porn because it’s shot to simulate the world from their
eyes, their penises are centered in the frame, and the assumptions about the
market held by those who control the major studios mean that it’s rare to the point
of extreme novelty to see anyone else shot from that perspective.
It’s
easy enough for trans women with penises to transpose ourselves onto that kind
of POV porn if the dynamics of the scene fit our desires, but why settle? The
rising popularity of platforms like OnlyFans and current self isolation
conditions means that some trans women performers can, and are shooting more
from their own perspectives and it’s a key reference point for both my current
comics and my future ambitions.
Drawing
explicit porn from a trans woman with a penis’ perspective is a fascinating and
incredible way for me to address very different segments of my audience in very
different ways simultaneously. I can let trans women in my audience see
themselves reflected in ways they never have before while challenging my cis
male audience to see the overlap of our desires through my eyes instead of
theirs, to experience the decentering of their own bodies in pursuit of
pleasure not as a means of revenge, but as a means of extending an opportunity
for empathy and understanding.
The
spectre of cis male violence towards trans women is ever present
psychologically even if I’m largely sheltered from it as a white trans woman
exposing myself primarily through drawings. I can only let my guard down so
far, but that’s increasingly matched in my mind by the reality that violence
towards us isn’t a universal condition. That when we say that feminism aims to
liberate men from patriarchy as well, one of the most acute examples of that is
the pain, stigma, and violence that patriarchy metes out to cis men who are
seen or thought to be attracted to trans women.
That
stigma does nothing to exculpate violence or a cowardly unwillingness to be
seen with us in public that cannot recognize how many orders of magnitude
harder it is for us to exist in public on our own. That said, the closet is a
hellish place for anyone and it costs nothing to recognize that transamorous
cis men struggle with their own kind of closet. If my work provides a context
and opportunity to weaken that closet, then I want to pursue it to the best of
my ability. Not just for them, but for myself, my sisters, and our community.
Loving trans women isn’t a painful or shameful experience. It’s ecstasy. It’s a
privilege. It needs to be protected and celebrated.
It’s a
perspective that I first started to come around to through trans women I was
close to who were dating men at a time when it held no appeal for me. I
initially had a lot of resentment about the level and kind of attention that
cis men could get in the media for being transamorous, and some of that
resentment was valid: transamorous cis men can certainly feed media fixations
on trans women in very detrimental ways, but I was deeply skeptical that they
had anything to add to the conversation even under ideal circumstances.
That
changed with the experience of having the compulsion to remind a friend to text
me when she got home after every time she went out to hook up with a guy she
met on a dating site. She came home safe every time, but once I had someone to
lose it became a lot easier to see how breaking down the stigmas that fuel
transphobic violence as a community safety issue. Wanting to see my sisters
safe, happy, and loved meant that I had to take the way that the men they date
are talked about in the public sphere seriously, and it got a lot more personal
once I asserted myself as bisexual.
It all
came to a head when an artist I admire followed me on Twitter and, by visiting
his profile, I noticed that he was mutuals with several of the trans porn
performers that I follow. It should have been worth nothing more than a giggle,
but it turned into a spiral of insecurities and anxieties instead because I’m
at least as brain poisoned as anyone else into being skeptical about any
interest that cis men have in trans women.
Even
just trying on the idea of hooking up with a guy like that was too much because
all it did was bring back the painful memories of another trans woman I knew
being subjected to anonymous harassment over social media that her boyfriend
was a “chaser.” What started out as an idle daydream reduced me to a sobbing
wreck because, as I discovered in that moment, those stigmas cut both ways. All
of the ways that cis men are targeted and demeaned for expressing interest in
trans women create insecurities and anxieties in us about our worth, the nature
of anyone’s attraction to us, and the potential consequences of publicly dating
cis men.
It’s
something that I’ve started thinking about a lot when I consider the audience
for my comic and my choice to engage with and manipulate the perceived male
gaze rather than work to evade it. I want to have idle thoughts about hooking
up with a guy that don’t lead to catastrophizing. I want a creative space where
I can work on pulling down the barriers inside myself in a context where people
who are struggling with the same issues, whether from the same perspective as
mine or a different one can see it. To see that they aren’t alone in struggling
with the ways that trans sexuality has been violently stigmatized for both
trans people and anyone who dares to love us.
Which is
why I’ve come to view my bisexuality as a journey into receptivity and empathy.
I want to reciprocate the sense of freedom that the validation of my work gives
me, to invite desire, to dare to hope that desiring me through my work can be
healing, freeing, or both. To me, embracing bisexuality as a fundamental part
of my nature has meant opening up myself to new possibilities and find ways to
dismantle the fear and insecurities that have kept me walled off from both
myself and others for far too long.
Remaking
Myself and My Desires on the Comics Page. By Véronique Emma Houxbois. Autostraddle, September 17, 2020.
I want
to say that Trans Girls Hit The Town profoundly altered the course of my life,
but that’s a phrase that might not carry a lot of weight with me these days.
I’ve
related, in various ways over the years, how integral The Invisibles and
Promethea were to the gender epiphany that lead me to assert myself as a trans
woman. I recently wrote about how a character from Euthanauts was critical in
asserting myself as bisexual, then immediately drew a comic strip about it.
You
might start to think that I’m exaggerating or that I’m just too suggestible to
be left alone with a comic book, because imagine what could happen if I ever
found out about The Punisher, or God forbid, Transmetropolitan. Not every comic
has the capacity to make us re-evaluate how we see ourselves and the world
around us in a way that pushes us to manifest the results in our everyday
lives, but the comics that do are the ones exercising the full potential and
purpose of the medium.
What
binds The Invisibles, Promethea, and Euthanauts together as transformative
forces in my life is that they showed me new ways of being. The former two
granted me access to femininity in a way that I had never conceived of before
and the latter exposed me to desires I didn’t know I had. In all three cases,
they exemplified how comics as a renegade medium has more breathing room in
representing a broader range of identities than most mass media, but more
critically, the minds behind them had the level of fluency and empathy in those
possibilities necessary to inspire me to make them manifest in my life.
Trans
Girls Hit The Town didn’t show me anything new about myself, though. What it
did was remind me that I have a voice, and a specific voice that could
articulate itself in an urgently needed way. Instead of the rush of a new self
or the heady buzz of a new desire, I felt the kind of familiarity that comics
has never offered me in such a literal, quotidian way. I saw myself and my
relationship with the trans women around me mapped out directly on the page.
It
wasn’t the primal rush of J.H. Williams III’s Kate Kane giving me the perfect
fantasy of myself. It was me as I am feeling the things I feel and saying the
things I say.
Trans
Girls Hit The Town is very limited in scope and scale; it’s a pair of trans
women, Winnie and Cleo, having a night out at Dave & Busters and dealing
with all the hurdles that go along with being trans in public. It’s the kind of
comic that elevates the intimate in the everyday that raises serious questions
about what comics as a medium is doing with the legacies of trailblazing work
in the same vein like Love and Rockets or Dykes to Watch Out For. In a sense,
Archie Bongiovanni has offered up a seminal response to the latter in Grease
Bats, but the medium has so far come up with precious little that lives up to
the particulars of the legacies of comics that are ubiquitously cited as
indispensable.
Love and
Rockets is part of the firmament now, as unshakable in the canon as Watchmen or
Maus. But when encountering a comic like Trans Girls Hit The Town, it’s
critical to remember the level of audacity and confidence that propelled Los
Bros Hernandez (Mario, Gilbert, and Jaime) into the prominence that their work
enjoys today. The specificity of the Latinx experience and punk scene central
to the seminal Locas stories could be easily framed as “stumbling blocks” by
audiences unwilling to step outside their own frame of reference, but the
series’ enduring success puts the lie to the “conventional wisdom” that
continues to stymie urgently needed voices to this day.
Love and
Rockets deserves to be seen as a monument to the fact that the specificity of
our experiences are our greatest assets as cartoonists, and for queer
cartoonists like Emma Jayne, the specificity of our queerness is our greatest
asset. Which is a difficult belief to hold onto in an industry that, when it
comes to trans women, prides itself on talking about us to itself while rarely
including us in the conversation outside of opaque and poorly compensated
consultant roles.
I first
understood that Trans Girls Hit The Town was going to be something truly
special when Winne asserts that muffing should be taught in sex ed. It was a
supremely jarring moment that put into perspective just how disconnected I was
from so much of trans life.
I hadn’t
heard or thought of muffing since I’d first encountered it in the Fucking Trans
Women zine a decade ago on Tumblr, and have only seen one trans porn performer
do since. These specificities, these conversations aren’t in service to a narcissistic
secret language They serve as a pointed
recognition that trans, as with queer more generally, is a deeply fragmented
diaspora that rarely has the opportunity to speak to itself in its own
language, if it even has that language.
Working
out of Ann Arbor, Michigan, Emma Jayne leverages her experiences in a uniquely
dense trans community in a way that recalls one of the primary functions of
strips like Archie Bongiovanni’s Grease Bats, Alison Bechdel’s Dykes to Watch
Out For or Paige Braddock’s Jane’s World: to broadcast what queer life can look
like to people without access to in-person community and to affirm the lives
and perspectives of those who do against the crushing outside pressures of
heteronormativity.
By
bringing Cleo’s anxieties about presenting as female in public and the cross
directional envy that the pair have about each other to the surface as the
night progresses, Emma Jayne creates an incredibly rare and desperately needed
opportunity to affirm, validate, and deconstruct insecurities ubiquitous to
trans women.
I’ve
been Cleo, or at least close enough: out in public pre-HRT and not explicitly
feminine presenting with a close friend who was both on hormones and
genetically gifted with flowing locks and full lips. The most charitable
external view of us wasn’t the reality, a pair of gal pals catching up over
coffee. It was the stereotypical straight couple with the dude punching far
above his weight. It’s a hard space to inhabit.
As I’m
entering my fifth month of HRT, I still feel impossibly far from where I want
to be yet have trans women on the cusp of starting treatment looking to me the
same way that Cleo looks to Winnie. It’s a dynamic that guarantees Trans Girls
Hit The Town’s place as a perennial hit that trans women can come back to again
and again in their lives to appreciate from a different angle as the context of
their own transitions allows them to see Cleo and Winnie in fresh ways every
time.
More
immediately, my first reading of Trans Girls Hit the Town forced a complete
re-evaluation of the way I see the direct market and its place in trans
representation. Being immersed in that space and engaging it on its own terms
for five years has been a punishing experience that has largely been punctuated
by moments of careless disrespect for trans lives or flagrantly transphobic
provocations. It’s a situation that left me little to no time to contemplate
whether or not the direct market is even structurally capable of supporting
work that does full justice to the beauty and complexity of trans lives.
Encountering
Trans Girls Hit The Town in the midst of an industry shut down and a
distribution crisis that resulted in DC Comics breaking the Diamond monopoly
gave me all the time and space I needed to answer that question with an
emphatic “no.” The direct market, monthly comics specifically, are culturally
and structurally organized around the conventions of superhero comics with no
serious breaches in evidence. It’s proven capable of the kind of stories where
acknowledging the existence of trans people is seen as a victory but little
else.
Saga can
only speak to a cisgender father’s anxieties about his daughter discovering
trans bodies in his abscence. Bombshells can only convey a second hand, cis
oriented description of the darkest elements of trans embodiment. Bitch Planet
can offer solidarity and empathy, but it can’t deliver interiority. These are
the bounds of current representation in the direct market -leaving aside the
extreme and sublime outlier of SFSX depicting a trans woman getting fisted by
her girlfriend — and it isn’t entirely down to willpower.
Even a
cursory examination of Judd Winick’s surreal career offers a great deal of
insight into the limits of LBGTQIA representation in the direct market. Both
Green Lantern: Brother’s Keeper and Pedro and Me are ostensibly informed by
Winick’s time on The Real World: San Francisco that kindled his transformative
friendship with Pedro Zamora. The latter, a graphic novel, allows the time and
space necessary for Winick to articulate his experience of the friendship and
how it changed his outlook on HIV/AIDS and the LBGTQIA community.
The
former is an almost unrecognizable reduction of the same principles into a
story about Kyle’s rage and violent retaliation for his gay assistant Terry
being beaten outside a gay club in his absence. The issue that portrays the
beating itself, Green Lantern (Volume 3) #154, comes with a gruesome Jim Lee
cover depicting a closeup of Terry’s face beaten and swollen held up by his
attackers. The story itself doesn’t do much better, charting out a rampage that
begins with Kyle breaking into prison to torture one of the suspects into
giving up the others and culminates in Kyle storming off into space, unwilling
to protect Earth anymore.
Despite
the massive praise the two part story received, it ultimately took the attack
completely away from Terry and his gay identity, turning it into an emotional
crucible for Kyle that conferred the typical role of the maimed or murdered
girlfriend onto Terry. The only meaningful difference between Terry and Alex
DeWitt, the namesake of “fridging,” is that he lived.
Instead
of creating a framework for empathy between gay and straight men the way that
Pedro and Me did, the language of superhero comics delivered a paternalistic,
feminized conception of gay men whose safety is underwritten by the violence of
straight men.
Instead
of problematizing the bizarre gap between Winick’s groundbreaking contributions
in two deeply dissimilar aspects of comics, superhero comics (and the direct
market at large) took on Brother’s Keeper as the template for inclusion, a
status quo that has barely shifted in the 20 years since its publication. Trans
people in particular have not moved far beyond Terry’s role, serving the narrow
dual purpose of acknowledging the existence of a trans readership with a
cypher-like supporting character while giving the cisgender protagonist the
opportunity to model ally behavior typified by Alysia Yeoh’s Batgirl
appearances.
The
industry continues to congratulate itself on anemic, cis centric portrayals
like this because it insists on holding up Brother’s Keeper as the exemplar
instead of looking for a higher bar. So the clearly visible gaps in
representation and depiction in the work of any creators who have done LBGTQIA
focused comics in and out of the superhero sphere remain just as evident now as
in Winick’s work then.
That gap
could be emblematic of a lot of different things, depending on the creator
under consideration, and in some cases it’s probably attributable to their own
expectations about what’s achievable within that space. But in other instances,
something much more sinister is at work. A related footnote in the wider story
of Eddie Berganza’s misconduct during his time at DC that continues to burn
white hot in the back of my mind is the ways in which he acted as an actively homophobic
gatekeeper when evaluating new talent and how his reputation alone prompted
Sophie Campbell to decline work on Supergirl.
There’s
a further sinister aspect to the gap in the richness and texture of LBGTQIA
cartoonists’ work when they take on projects at the Big Two that emerges in the
case of Sina Grace. The exceptional difference in his more autobiographically
focused work for Image and Iceman was always plainly visible, but it took
personal disclosures on his part about the opposition and ill treatment that he
received from editorial staff who clearly had no interest in working on an
LBGTQIA focused title to make plain why Iceman came across as so diminished
relative to his wider body of work. Grace’s experiences and the professional
risks he took to disclose them illustrate the point that it takes a lot more
than just recruiting LBGTQIA talent to improve representation on the page: it
takes a broader infrastructure willing and capable allowing those creators to
thrive and bring their full selves to their work.
In that
sense, Trans Girls Hit The Town is probably more emblematic of what we can’t
have than what we could have and a strong indication that the struggles and
compromises necessary to get trans representation through the superhero machine,
and maybe even the direct market as a whole, are not worth the brief glimmers
of visibility that they offer.
What
good is the visual of Alysia Yeoh explicating misgendering in an obscure web
first series if we never see her meaningfully interact with another trans
person? If we never see depictions of gender euphoria or trans joy articulated
by trans creators unencumbered by oppositional editorial staff? The rhetoric of
visibility has gotten us nowhere in the mainstream, while the indie and DIY
scene is producing truly transformative work like Trans Girls Hit The Town. I
think that should prompt a very serious re-evaluation of what constitutes
“visibility,” “representation,” and “progress” in every corner of the industry.
Of
course I’m not holding my breath on that happening any time soon, which enters
into the other reason why the timing of getting my paws on Trans Girls Hit The
Town feels supernaturally serendipitous. When I was sent Trans Girls Hit the
Town, the comic book industry was in a seemingly apocalyptic shutdown but my
life was anything but: I was two months into HRT, finally having taken the leap
I’d been struggling to make for the last ten years.
At that
point, I’d started undergoing a massive internal shift in my emotions, a facet
of HRT that I’d never seen in any media depictions or heard about aside from
the oblique assurances that I would “cry at nothing” sometimes. The anger
issues that have haunted me my entire life dissipated as the cyproterone, my
“blockers,” drained my body of testosterone. Rage, one of the most abiding
emotions of my time covering trans representation in comics since 2015,
disappeared from my body and my vocabulary. Had I known just how far HRT alone
could go in liberating me from that rage, I would have pushed for it so much
harder so much sooner.
I didn’t
spend long wondering about why I’d never seen depictions of that change,
because the conversations in Trans Girls Hit The Town clarified for me that I
could just do it myself. I could have the conversation that I wasn’t seeing
anywhere else, and for the first time in my life, I felt an attraction to the
vulnerability and openness that I was going to need to convey that
transformation.
As of
writing this, I’m in my fifth month of HRT and I’m closing in on #70 daily
comic strips that started out as a compulsion to share my emotional journey and
has since exploded into a surreal journey into my rapidly evolving sexual
imagination. That’s maybe a strange place to end up with an initial inspiration
like Trans Girls Hit The Town, but it was the conversation about muffing that raised
my eyebrows first, so maybe that’s exactly where this journey always had to go.
The
fundamental irony of Trans Girls Hit The Town having to come out of a more
obscure space in comics than the hidebound direct market for it to exist as
beautifully unfettered as it does is the urgency with which it needs to be seen
at scale. Despite the fact that comics is very good at making us think we have
to see each other as competition and there’s a proliferation of bad actors
happy to spark and exploit lateral violence between trans women, we need to see
each other thrive. We need to see each others’ successes to turn our gaze away
from the dire prospects offered by the corporations that will likely never
value us. To remind us what we’re capable of without them.
Comics
needs Emma Jayne. Comics needs me. If you’re a trans cartoonist reading this,
then comics needs you too, no matter what part of the vast continuum of the
medium you want to participate in. Please know that the specificity of your
transness is the greatest asset you have as a cartoonist and never let anyone
tell you different.
Transmyscira:
Finding My Voice in Trans Girls Hit the Town.By Véronique Emma Houxbois. Comicosity, September 25, 2020.
Véronique
Emma Houxbois ‘ current project is Transcription, a daily comic strip about her
transition and evolving sexuality.
This
week we talk to drag star Judith Slays (the persona of Veronique Emma Houxbois)
about trans sexuality, trans representation in comics, and her brand new
educational trans YouTube series.
Reading
Transcription during the pandemic has felt like a lifeline for me. While being
physically isolated from my queer and trans friends and family has been
challenging, it's also been a time for me and many other transgender people I
know to explore what our genders feel like, what they look like, how we move in
them — when we're not performing for a predominantly cisgender audience at work
and in life, a gift rarely afforded most trans folks. And as I've been
exploring my gender and transness, Veronique Emma Houxbois's diary comic about
her transition and her sexuality has made me feel less alone.
As both
the creator and the protagonist of Transcription, Houxbois invites readers to
explore ourselves through her self-exploration, to see how what we've been
taught differs from who we are and who we choose to be.
Houxbois
first came to my attention as an incisive critic who held the comics industry
accountable for transphobic failures, both the horrific and the more quotidian,
though nonetheless harmful. From responding to the abject transmisogyny on
display in AirBoy Issue #2 to calling Saga to account for using inaccurate
language and at best muddling the message around trans bodies in Issue #31,
Houxbois found herself at the center of the debate around trans representation
in comic books.
Though
she longed to have a more constructive and trans-centered and -driven
conversation, Houxbois tells me that there was "so much traumatic,
horrible sh** happening in this industry that I felt compelled to respond
to." Houxbois felt stuck in a defensive posture, bracing for the next
terrible thing she would have to write about.
"It
took a pandemic for there to be a ceasefire on transphobia in the [comics]
industry," Houxbois says, noting that for the first time since wading into
the conversation in 2014, she felt like she could breathe.
In
addition to consulting behind the scenes on some big-name comics (including Bitch
Planet), Houxbois had previously drawn a few comics she never published and
written a short comic for IDW's Love Is Love anthology. That one-page comic
about the important role of queer bars in gender exploration showcased
Houxbois's narrative strengths and reminded readers of the interconnectedness
of trans, nonbinary, and queer communities in the wake of the Pulse nightclub
shooting.
When the
pandemic offered Houxbois a critical respite, she was poised to launch her
webcomic on her own terms. Around the same time, she started taking HRT and it
turned out that was the missing element for her. Houxbois describes feeling her
anger melt away and finally having "the emotional space and the time to
really think this through and to start creating for myself."
Houxbois
knows her influences and is generous with crediting them. Conversations with
her are like reading syllabi on queer and trans representation in comics, and
her comics themselves are just as metatextual, or perhaps transtextual — which
seems a more fitting term for a comic and creator so deeply entrenched in
transness.
At
points, my cheeks flush while she's talking because I can't write down the
works she's referencing quickly enough. She jumps from Blue Is the Warmest
Color and Sex Criminals to Wet Moon and Grease Bats with breathy excitement.
And her influences aren't restricted to comics. She references popular and
deep-cut films and TV with ease, from Poltergeist to the Wachowskis' oeuvre to
the work of Christopher Nolan. She tells me about how porn creators have taught
her to wield point of view in panels and build suspense over multiple panels
through micro-moments. She theorizes on how to give comics kinetic energy. When
you talk to Houxbois, you understand you're in the presence of a deeply passionate
storyteller who sees herself clearly among the body of creative work around
transness and sexuality.
If
Houxbois were to choose a single influence that made her flip the switch and
start creating her own comic, however, it would be Emma Jayne's Trans Girls Hit
the Town. This tender and intimate black and white comic follows two trans
women as they grapple with online dating, friendship, jealousy, and being alive
in a cisheterocentric world. "I read it within my first month of HRT and
it really shook me out of a fog," says Houxbois. "Even on the
brightest, shiniest day, direct-market comics are holding the conversation back
so far from where it could be. Trans Girls Hit the Town reminded me of where
the line should be."
During
her early days on HRT, Trans Girls Hit the Town lit a fire inside Houxbois:
"I felt a compulsion to share about myself that I hadn't felt
before." And she knew that if she was going to make her own trans comic it
was going to center trans sexuality.
Transcription
is a rare kind of comic. Yes, it's a journal comic, but it also contains a
creative reimagining of canonically and non-canonically queer and trans
characters from comics and elsewhere. Yes, it references other comics in panel
composition and easter eggs, but it also shows the creator, or at least a
fictionalized version of her, having an emotional reaction to reading comics.
Yes, it's an explicit webcomic, but it's also a porn experience, particularly
due to it being hosted on OnlyFans. Yes, it's evocative and entertaining, but
it's also political and unapologetic. And that expansive breadth of content and
reach of the creator has a remarkable impact, which was, of course, Houxbois'
goal.
"I'm
mixing porn with politics," she says. "When I put everybody into
Mystique's POV as a trans woman with a penis [looking down at Daken], I'm
getting you to question all of your assumptions about the sexuality of this
scene. How do we feel about bisexual men? How do we feel about trans women and
trans women's bodies?" For her, that's the political aspect of
Transcription: "My ideological goals for the comic don't necessarily match
my own personal desires." That's part of what makes it such a powerful
project: It pushes the reader and the creator to consider those things that
might regularly lie outside their frame of reference.
Mixing
the personal and the political in an innately sexual way reclaims trans
sexuality from the ways it's been represented in mainstream comics and,
frankly, most of popular culture. And Houxbois is fully aware of what a weighty
task that is. In a recent essay for Autostraddle, she writes, "To me,
conquering the stigmas and suppression of trans women's sexuality means
granting access to a self-directed, unapologetic vision of trans sexuality.
It's a position that requires an incredible amount of vulnerability and comes
with all kinds of dangers and pitfalls, but it's one that I'm finding myself
thriving in and rewarded by."
Reading
Transcription makes me feel a little less afraid about exploring my gender and
my sexuality at the same time. From thinking about what HRT could do for my
life to reinforcing my belief that the gender binary is killing us, she's shown
me how to love myself and my transness a little better, a little kinder, a
little harder than I might have before. And if that's not the purpose of a
trans journal comic, I'm not sure what is.
Veronique
Emma Houxbois is Changing the Representation of Trans Sexuality in Comics.
By
S.E. Fleenor. SYFY Wire , September
25, 2020.
“Transcription”
is a collection of daily strips that chronicles Houxbois’ transition experience
and sexuality. It’s for adults, and brims with unabashed honesty and
tenderness. Warning: spoilers ahead.
We’re
all mostly familiar with, and hopefully supportive of, the concept of trans
creators telling trans stories, but the stories that still gain the most
visibility and popularity tend to be sexless, or heavily edited for the cis
gaze. Trans sexuality is often approached as a fetish, as deviant, as
salacious, as shocking. At best, it’s treated as a mystery incapable of being
penetrated. At worst, it’s commodified for the pleasure of the outsider.
The
thing is, trans sexuality is only shocking if it’s outside the bounds of your
experience and if you’re unwilling to acknowledge that trans and
gender-nonconforming people have a right to safe, fun, raunchy, pleasurable,
cute and naughty sex. Houxbois does an incredible amount of wholehearted work
in “Transcription” to invite us into a deeper knowing.
“Transcription”
documents exploration, joy, orgasm, and, most importantly, connection. Houxbois
challenges all norms by putting her sexuality on full display. She’s in charge
of how we see it, but she lets us see the humor, the vulnerability and the
hotness of it all. Together, we explore the changes in her sex drive, and her
experimentation with toys and the joy and innocent, comical shock she feels as
she sizes up a bit too fast. We see a woman who’s falling in love with sexual
exploration and with a lovely other, unnamed in the comic, but clearly
precious. And, importantly, we experience the joy and heartbreak of embodiment
in a society and industry that does not value self-actualization.
Craft-wise,
“Transcription” is deceptively simple. Each strip is 3 borderless panels,
hand-lettered, with a strict color palette of baby blue and pink. The art is
expressive, with bubbly eyes, simple anatomy and blissful, pretty face and body
details. The first few strips are a bit too pale, but Houxbois adjusts the
tones for readability and contrast against the white background pretty quickly.
The colors are obviously those of the trans flag, but they’re also a commentary
on the gender binary and the simultaneous infantilization and fetishization of
trans women. They’re also pretty, and nice to look at. Lettering can be a touch
small at times, but Houxbois finds increasingly creative ways to place the
text, and the hand-written style complements her line.
Houxbois
experiments with what sequential art can do in interesting and economical ways.
Comic strips force a creator to pack a lot of meaning into each choice. There’s
one wordless strip of a sex toy experience that ends with a delightful zigzag
background, against which the fictionalized Houxbois’ blissful, tongue,
accented by a few cartoonish flecks of saliva, pops adorably well. A small
moment of sublime pleasure, at once cute and dirty but owned. In another strip,
Houxbois talks about how HRT changed her emotional responses, and she holds a
pony plushie close to her as she cries. Though we can’t see her face, the tear
falling from the pony’s eye is an innovative way to communicate that emotional
moment, and the “HONK!” sound effect is gentle, funny and well-executed.
Another Sunday strip features Houxbois detailing a joyful meditation on what
she wants from her partner. One poignant moment features her desire to be both
dominant and submissive, and places the lettering along the forearm and wrist
of the dominant hand and the next phrase in the palm of the open, submissive
one. It’s a beautiful and clever use of the comics page, and the lack of border
between the two moments perfectly captures that multi-faceted, simultaneous
desire. It’s a bit of comics poetry that, frankly, I come back to over and over
to admire.
In
“Transcription,” readers will get a deep love letter to girl cock, yes, but
they’ll also get a full and nuanced look at what it’s like to want, and be
wanted, as a trans woman. The pieces are educational, provocative and informed
by external politics without centering them as a convenient frame for entry. We
enter “Transcription” sensation and experience first, and Houxbois builds up an
impressive and beautiful document of desire and vulnerability.
The
Verdict: 9.5/10 – “Transcription” wraps two tender, beautiful hands around our
hearts and holds it close as we journey through an honest and unique journal of
one trans woman’s sexual awakening and transition.
“TRANSCRIPTION”.
Knowledgeable Cabbage , September12, 2020
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