Erica Rutherford : That Which Is

 

Frames within frames. A bed and an orange chair. The black-dressed figure kneels against the bed. Her clothes capture light in folds. Her terribly pink face is faceless—a flat surface missing its features. Her hands are fingerless. She is plains of paint, just as she is flattened by kneeling. Grief, anguish, or pleasurable submission, her facelessness refuses to show the emotional demand I place on her. Just as the canvas frames what it frames, the chair frames the body, frames the shape a body takes held in its rigidity. These frames—like the white framing of the figure itself, that pleated light—become indistinguishable from the flattened edges of the figure. Her body is a frame; she is flattened and does not so much struggle to emerge from the frame but, curiously, becomes the frame.
 
The more I look, there is nothing to see but framing. The painting proposes “her” as a frame, reflexively gesturing to the function of gender as frame. Framing as a technology of representation. Also, framing as a setup: gender is a setup, even those we choose or refuse (no-gender is also a gender setup). All these framings discipline, something that this figure yields to. But in doing so, I wonder if this figure also enacts a refusal to be known through the frame by being known as a frame. That is to say, in fore-placing the work of framing, the painting also gestures to what a frame never captures, never knows, never can show.
 
About her own painting, Erica Rutherford (1923–2008) writes: “Featureless faces opened their mouths in silent screams, as if horror at their deformity. Bodies were shockingly naked, with nothing to conceal their hermaphroditic lack of differentiation. If they had arms, they flung these out in despair into the surrounding darkness.”
 
Rutherford finds her figures trapped between the absolutism of visibility (the role vision has in classification) and embodiments that have no representation. A paradox: overly visible and unseen. Existence that is nonexistence—that does not exist as existence itself. This is not utopic or liberatory; it is catastrophic. Her painted bodies witness the violence that the viewer (me, for instance) inflicts upon them in wanting to know—simultaneously naked (transsexual women are always already naked, contrived to be our sex first) and forced to scream out of mouths that are not theirs, not ours. What better description is there for the representation of transsexual women? “Her”—the race and sex that make this pronoun mean—is a problem that is central to Rutherford’s self-portraits in the 1970s.
 
1.

Bodies remain trouble. Irrefutable, unknowable, and seductive, bodies are what thought wants to escape but never can. All thought emanates from bone, muscle, skin, and nerve, and yet to think is as far as we can feel our own disembodiment. Audre Lorde and Judith Butler puzzled over the contradictions of embodiment, recognizing how systems of power and domination—particularly white supremacy and patriarchy—shape and reshape bodies as well as the feeling of bodily life. Even as they both suggested bodies are potentials—erotic and performative, respectively—everywhere violence defines the concatenation of bodies. They recognized that the unbearableness of bodily being thwarts every effort to represent—to think—bodily potential or plentitude. It is no wonder that thought—for this thinker—longs for a reprieve from—to literally, get out from—the impossible demands of bodily existence. And yet, Lorde and Butler both understood that disembodiment or transcendentalism were the very drive of white supremacist patriarchy.
 
In trans studies, body trouble is paramount. Through ever-changing names—transsexual, transgender, trans, trans*, genderqueer, nonbinary, and gender nonconforming—trans studies has no more central a problematic than embodiment. Trans studies has followed the feminist principle that gender ought to be capacious, disrupting the presumptions that biological assignment of sex (male/female/intersex) scripts gender. Following this feminist tenet, trans studies has shown: 1) gender is relational, shaped as much by sociohistorical forces as by subjective processes; 2) nonbiological agencies override anatomy and the material body, contesting ontological orders; 3) gender is a condition of the autopoietic subject that can be invented and destroyed even as the social order (patriarchy and white supremacy) hyper-invests in ever-narrowing sex conscriptions.
 
Gender promised a reprieve from the difficulty of bodies—from sexed and sexual bodies—that thought wanted, especially in trans thinking. The capaciousness of gender—indeed, its ability to suggest ideation, agency, and sociality—emboldened proposals for trans heuristics. Trans is no longer obliged to be about gender or bodies, subjects or identities. Trans now finds attachment to any number of objects, disciplines, media, histories, and much more.
 
Many of these are arguably advancements in theory, but there remain reasons to question how an ever-expanding trans—built upon a logic of dematerializing gender—has made questions about bodies and sexes difficult to ask, even politically precarious to pose. Are there differences between bodies framed by the general term “trans”? For instance, are there material divergences between estrogenic and androgenic hormonal changes to bodies, or for those trans subjects that maintain their endogenous states? If not essential differences, might there be consequential and material differences between, say, white transsexual women (with a pronoun “she”) and brown gender nonconforming femmes (with a pronoun “they”)? Do these differences shape livability, survivability, not only in terms of racial embodiments but sexual ones as well? And most troubling for the maxims of trans studies, does embodiment differently materialize the experience of trans masculinity from femininity? How might the generalizability of trans have enabled transsexual men to mis-conceptualize the lived experiences of transsexual women? What attention is needed to think well about differences that a trans theory simply distorts, often with transsexual women remaining unthought or worse?
 
This essay is an effort to think sexual differences—specifically, those of transsexual women who became through estrogen and surgery, which is also to say some women. Possibly, it means women who took canary-yellow Premarin® tablets as an act of wanting one’s self so exquisitely that only the language of necessity could approximate this desire. Needs are often primal wants that are too unbearable to describe as lust. These estrogens might have been prescribed with anti-androgen and progesterone pills. Likely, it means women who have been oversubscribed, undersubscribed, or mis-subscribed to the point of panic attacks, blood clots, strokes, unending nausea, and heart attacks. But also, women who have experienced nongenital orgasms that feel like bones cracking into lush velvet; a woman whose nipples achingly leak milk when she is afraid. All these—and numerous other contradictory effects of medicalized anti-trans violence, structural racism, and economic inequality—define them.
 
Premarin® meant, as it did for me, a woman who is sensorially redone—not male to female, but a sexed subject differently done in the effort to feel her body. Hormones, in this way, are not the same as medicalized embodiment, but instead are a supplemental register of sensation that is limited by sensory anatomy even as senses are excited over the edge of themselves. Simply, hormonal change remakes sensoria, and this begins to modify corporeality that subtends the senses. Touch, smell, and sight are disarranged, but not in the manner of some reductive “I see now as other women see”—that narrative is a hope for becoming a woman through her re-essentialization. Instead, bodily sensoria are percussed beyond our sense of sensed self. Sense vibrates, deranging the “feel of this” or the “look of that.” These transsexual women do not become “more woman” with hormonal change. No. But they do—I do—become another sex, not female and not male, but no less materialized sexually. This sexuality is not biologism, not essentialism, not absolutism. Which is not to say this sexuality is not consequential, differential, and substantial.
 
The bodies of these estrogenic women, these differently sexed women, are altered by social forces responding to them just as they are anatomically reacting to biochemical changes. Patriarchy and white supremacy—both are what make gender/sex, they are also the materials that make her—are cataclysms that all bodies are processed through no matter their resistances or privileges. Every effort to resist sex is also a confirmation of the racism and sexism of cultural and historical orders that translate such efforts.
 
Transsexual women are no different; we too become through these same catastrophes, we self-fashion with, from, and through the carnage of this violence. Even though my transsexuality makes me other to female or male, other to essentialism but no less material, my survivability (how I will die) is shaped by a very narrow social translation of my otherwise-ness. And yet, this is not to say that the desire to refuse social order is only purposeless, uninventive, or simply regressive. This is one of the paradoxes of wanting to change sexual difference into sexual differences.
 
Sexuality and sensation are these transsexual women. Not just in euphoric or positivist senses. Some wants are conscious and intentional fantasies that shape decisions. While others—often held hidden within those choices—are unrepresentable and intolerable, a negativity that magnetizes beyond what we know but is no less than what we want. Sensation sounds luxurious, but it is also the noise of “you fucking faggot” that vibrates into her body. A white man’s fists punching as he rapes is also assembling, as did his earlier oeillades. The systemic neglect of a neighborhood, planning decisions made to immiserate and segregate, environmental degradation and other structural forces are also the sensuousness that makes these women’s pharaonic bodies even as the curvature of her eye is altered by estrogen, seeing differently her place in this same neighborhood.

 
Both want and sensation necessitate bodies, and even the wish to be bodiless is a bodily fantasy. There is nothing new about this statement, but the discourse of trans (from its study to its activism) is framed not by differences or specificities but by generalities, sharedness, and cohesions. Dean Spade recently posted on Twitter: “Black feminist thought and Black lesbian analysis and organizing are and have been essential to trans liberation. We can’t build a trans politics that actually improves trans lives (instead of just using trans lives to justify and decorate the status quo) without it.” Rightly invoking the centrality of black feminist and lesbian thought for thinking about the racial logic of sex/gender systems, Spade’s “trans” and “we” eschew a similar commitment to difference and specificity. Could it be that an unspoken white trans masculinity is this “we”? Is this “trans liberation”? The very distortions that Lorde diagnosed—a repudiation of difference—are evoked here in a call for justice. This is not specific to Spade—he is but an example—but a more extensive problem within trans discourse—so many different subjectivities talking as one.
 
The generalizability of trans—not unlike the whiteness of liberalism—Spade’s point—obliterates the different (and often contradictory) organizing and building required to improve transsexual women’s lives, to improve black and brown transwomen’s lives. I agree with Spade: black, brown, and white transsexual women must grapple with the problem that femininity is capacitated through the fungibility of black femaleness. Femininity is a racial logic, and the desire for femininity is made possible through the sexuating capacity of antiblackness. This complexification of transsexual women’s lust for femininity deserves attention; we deserve the work of nuanced and difficult thinking. We can grapple with the racist logic of our own figuration—something that a generalized “trans theory” or “trans liberation” or “we” cannot provide. It is time to deconstruct “trans.”
 
 
 
2.

Frames in frames. A frame splits the figural body and the rectilinear shapes, canvases, pictures of the space the figure occupies, her space. “Her” is framed through style, but it is no less a frame, no less a structure of perception. What frames her space are fragmented language and blocks of color. The frame of language is foregrounded through its fragmentation; since I do not know the meaning of “new” or “ter pape,” I am confronted by the representational force of language, its hold for meaning. Her pinkness, her color is repeated in surrounding squares—surfaces that come to mean skin, epidermalization. Her and her pinky-whiteness are framed as frames. The frame we call gender is here a surface, an epidermalization. “Her” is produced out of surface, produced out of the racialization of her surface. Everywhere the painting points to the technologies of seeing, to the frame’s administration. And again, this faceless figure is a refusal of the frames that make her up, but only through the contradiction of becoming frame herself.
 
3.

How to think about a transsexual woman’s differences? By “a,” I mean a specific account among many. It could be called my transsexual method—I turn to art. For me, there is artfulness in transsexuality, and it is not her physician’s. Trans studies and activism advocate for the conservative position of transsexual women as needy literalists. Given that anti-trans violence imbues the sociopolitical climate, this position is understandable, but it conceals lustier questions with ontological certitudes—it is anti-sexual. The very act of her need for Premarin® or breast implants, or facial feminization and orchidectomies, are wants in the form, style, and feel of one’s sensuous self.
 
The misogyny and racism of surgeons and endocrinologists are obstacles for her want. Medicalization does not define a transsexual woman—just ask her. Medicalization is what repudiates her want even as it makes her otherwise to herself and others. She is not plasticized through medicalization. On the contrary, she is confronted with the limits of a cultural order (what structures her consciousness and preconsciousness, and the authority of the super ego) that materially translates her bodily sexuality, her art. Transsexual women’s bodies are accretions of intimate and subjective want made legible and experiential through the aesthetics of the cultural. What is art but a constant fight with—if also a reliance on—the protocols of aesthetics? Susan Stryker writes, “Nothing other than my desire brings Him [surgeon; but also, Medicine] here.” She continues: “Materiality always resists the symbolic frame. I beg it, then, to throw all language off and become ungendered flesh, but language clenches this meat between its teeth in a death-grip.” Invoking Lacanian terms, Stryker describes a paradox of transsexual women’s “desire”—what we desire happens within materiality’s resistance to representation, to representation’s commitment to the cultural. But, transsexuality is not the return of a real materiality stripped of the symbolic—of the really real—but about how sexuality intensifies and invents matter, even as it is conscribed by the cutting relationship between symbolic and real registers. In begging materiality, Stryker wants to reverse the cutting relationship that the symbolic performs. But perhaps her desire reveals that some women want what is also foreclosed—they want their want. If transsexuality is sensuous intensity, it is so because of sexuality; what I would call her artistry.
 
Art and aesthetics produce a fractious join. Transsexuality is sexuality’s inventiveness with an impoverished reality, nothing more than the alibi for a brutalizing symbolic. It may be too contentious to say that transsexuality is artistry with modifications of sex as indexical signs of wantonness, but I offer this as an-other imaginary, an-other ego ideal for transsexuality. An artfulness at lusty odds with (and within) the cultural. This conversation risks but must avoid collapsing artistry into self-fashioning. Might her transsexual art-making aim toward a reprieve from the technology of selfhood? If art is the work of passion, her art also wants more than the cultural prescribes, more than the frameworks provided her. The art of transsexuality must not be confused with technologies of the self—seeing transsexuality as art places it as intervention in the material, rather than as confirmation of the reality’s authenticating and totalizing function. By “art,” here, I mean transsexuality’s sexualization of the sexed body, and the fashioning of sex as an act of artistry.

 
4.
In Nine Lives: The Autobiography of Erica Rutherford, Rutherford documents her varied life as an actor, filmmaker, theater designer, printmaker, painter, activist, and professor in England, the United States, Spain, South Africa, and Canada. A member of the Canadian Royal Academy of Arts, she painted for over forty years and was shown in major galleries in North American and Europe. Rutherford’s style ranged from abstract expressionism—murky fields of color that give way to swaths of luminosity that defined her work in the 1960s—to an oneiric modernism akin to Ken Kiff. Rutherford’s work in the dreamlike paintings of the 1990s step past the divides between abstraction and figuration by suggesting that fantasy is not opposite material reality but a contingent force in making the world.
 
During the late seventies, while undergoing sexual transition, Rutherford experimented with self-portraiture. Starting with a posed photograph of herself, she would paint from this photograph not to achieve realism, but to look at the function of photography, particularly its frame. Her flattened figures seem to merge with the apparatus of framing, both the photograph and the canvas. She pushes against portraiture’s cromulent function, and with it a modern conception of photography as capture. This period of work, I argue, refused photography’s privileged relationship to rendering transsexuality visible: from linear progressions of before and after to seeing transition as sexual binarism from zero to oneness, male to female, and also the collapse of the referent to the image-matter. Photographs accompanying transsexual memoires confirmed this narrow understanding. For the reader, the photograph demonstrated a seeing it—the indeterminate pronoun “it” working to materialize the transsexual transition. In contrast, Rutherford’s painted-self challenges photography’s conceit that it captures what really is.
 
In Second Skins: The Body Narratives of Transsexuality, an inaugural text for trans studies, Jay Prosser writes about the connection between Rutherford’s paintings and her transition:
 
‘’A painter, Erica Rutherford paints self-portraits based on photographs she first takes of herself dressed as a woman—also concretizations of an imperceptible self … These portraits begin by envisioning the woman Rutherford wishes to become and are gradually transformed as she transitions into a record of that becoming.’’
 
For Prosser, Rutherford’s paintings are the sexual abstraction of her photographic becoming—to be, to be a woman, is photographic. Through photography, a transsexual emerges as a subject materialized into a real self. Here, Prosser pivots around the photographic referent to cohere the transsexual real with bodily matter.
 
 
In discussing the above photograph in Rutherford’s autobiography, Prosser goes on to say:
 
“A painted self-portrait is situated behind the photographic Rutherford. In the painting, the seated figure is feminized through body contour, posture, and clothing, but the face is featureless—a blank space as undetailed by the feminine as the still-masculine face of the photographic Rutherford seated before her.”
 
Prosser continues: “The self-portrait is a blueprint for the transsexual subject in transition: like the photographs in the autobiographies for readers, visual means of making the transsexual’s gender real.” The real of her photograph, for Prosser, is her feminine failure—a failure the painting does not record. But, what if Rutherford’s painted portrait reflexively argues against the framework that her transsexuality is forced to represent here? Might the photographs she takes of herself be what Rutherford paints against, knowing that the photograph aims to render her transsexuality in terms of male to female, a sexual transition predicated on authentication and autopoiesis? Rather than collapsing her material body with the photographic referent, or confusing the real with matter, Rutherford’s paintings provocatively attend to the imperceptibility of perceptual frames.
 
Prosser understands how the apparatus of representation—for Second Skins, it is the narrative form of biography, which values a linear timeline and conflict resolution—attempts to capture the subject represented. Narrative progression has few better tools than transsexual transition to organize time and the arc of a story. However, Prosser concludes his book with the realness of sex as photographic, showing how the indexicality of photography’s referent substantiates the logic of sexual becoming. His study of “second skins” (his theory of transsexuality) ends with photography to lend it its own narrative resolution. Instead of recognizing the linear role photography plays in biographical accounts of transsexuality, Prosser turns to the photographic image as his theory of transsexual realness and bodily being. For Prosser, transsexuality is photographic: to be (seen/skinned) is sex itself: “For transsexuals surgery is a fantasy of restoring the body to the self enacted on the surface of the body.” Taking literally Roland Barthes’s assertation that photography is an indexical (literally “light … is a carnal medium, a skin”) record of “that which has been,” Prosser’s account of transsexuality is about that which is, about the realness of transsexuality as image, as photographic. Prosser is certainly not alone in building an account of transsexuality on a modern presumption of photography, but more consequentially, it seems to me that much of trans studies—what we might call its canon, its political orientations, its central commitments—has relied on an investment in the being of trans that it draws from photography as its defense and—perhaps even more impoverishing—as its logic. Trans studies has a photography problem.
 
Prosser’s meditation on Rutherford initiates his argument about trans becoming that he theorizes through a particular photographic reading of Freud’s enigmatic statement about the ego as “not merely a surface entity, but … the projection of a surface,” that ultimately collapses the image-matter of skin and transexual being. In Prosser’s careful critique of Judith Butler, he demonstrates how she misreads the distinction Freud makes between body and ego. For Butler, the body becomes “itself the psychic projection of a surface.” For Freud, Prosser notes, the ego is a “product of the body, not the body as a product of the ego.” Butler conflates materiality with the mental projection of the surface of the body—collapsing the differences between Lacan’s mirror stage and Freud’s conception of the ego. Prosser makes the case that transsexual phenomena “illustrate the materiality of the bodily ego rather than the phantasmatic status of the sexed body: the material reality of the imaginary and not, as Butler would have it, the imaginariness of material reality.”

 
In structuring this critique, Prosser turns to the cinematic imagery of Jennie Livingston’s Paris is Burning (1990) to show how Butler’s account of transsexuality is metaphorized away from the sexed and raced materiality of the body. In Butler’s own discussion of this film, she defines the camera as a metaphor of transsexualization: Livingston’s camera performs phallic maneuvering through transsexual women who want sex change (specifically, genital surgery), turning black and Latina transsexuals into confusions of phallus and penis. Prosser explains this confusion as a repetition of Butler’s misreading of Freud, again de-literalizing transsexuality. But what is interesting here is how similar Prosser’s turn to photography as metonymic of transsexualization is to Butler’s cinematic approach.
 
If, as Prosser suggests, the transsexual’s body image “is radically split off from the material body,” then the description of feeling “trapped in the wrong body” becomes uncannily similar to the capture of the referent in the emulsion of the photograph. An interior negative of the body image is printed—with surgery and hormones as processing fluids—onto and as the material body. “The skin is the locale for the physical experience of body image and the surface upon which is projected the psychic representation of the body.” Prosser recognizes the problem of Lacan’s occularcentrism of subjectivity, noting that that Freud emphasizes bodily sensations as forming the ego. However, he pursues the substantiation of the transsexual feeling of wrong-bodiliness such that
 
‘’surgery deploys the skin and tissues to materialize the transsexual body image with fleshy prostheses in the shape of the sentient ghost-body. The surgical grafting of materials endows the transsexual with the corporeal referents for these imaginary and phantomized signifieds, restoring their substance.’
 
Photography, it would seem, is the form of transsexuality, creating a photo-ontic. Haunted by referents—appeals to the real—transsexuality happens between referentiality and representation. The problem with transsexualization as photograph is revealed in Prosser’s wish that the referentiality of transsexuality is captured (trapped) in photography.
 
The consequences of the photo-ontic of Prosser’s reading become clearer in his later book Light in the Dark Room: Photography and Loss, where he critiques his own autobiographical impulse in using a photograph of himself to end Second Skins. Guided again by his reading of Barthes, Prosser recognizes that his literal (what Barthes described as studium) reading of transsexual photographs missed what photography cannot show (the photograph’s punctum) in its capture: affect. In returning affect (punctum) to transsexual photographs, Prosser writes, “This failure to be real is the transsexual real.” For Prosser, transsexuals never achieve their referents, never achieve the longing for their sexed referent. It is the un-becoming of sex bound with an overdetermined sexual visibility that defines his transsexuality. Yet, transsexual being remains, problematically, photographic.
 
Yes, Prosser’s punctum allows for the affective, but it continues to rely on a photo-ontic. By “photo-ontic,” I mean how the seduction of the photographic referent produces a collapse between image-matter and being in theorizing transsexuality. Even the trauma inflicted by the surgeon who cuts her up through an acting-out of racialized sexism—any transwoman who has modified her body knows exactly what I mean, either as fear or actuality—remains within this photo-ontic framework for understanding transsexual beingness. Prosser writes “The photograph incarnates because it takes the body of the referent ... I may never recover my first skin. But the realization of that loss is my second skin.” His photo-ontic: not being is transsexual being as enacted through the logic of photography. Image-matter, even in its most evanescent and affective form, defines transsexual being. The implications of transsexual-as-photograph are that the transphobic logic of spectacular spectacle defines transsexuality, obscuring other “bodily sensations” that mark the work of sexuality.
 
5.
Rutherford writes:
 
‘’Then, at the moment when they seemed most to threaten me, they staggered, dropped to the floor and in helpless crouched postures withdrew themselves. In this position, though smaller, they still thrived, fattening themselves, assuming sensuous curves of a sexuality they could never know, growing breasts that obtruded indecently from their infantile bodies until they appeared malformed infants, aberrations of nature. Capriciously, they now assumed joyful colors, reds and yellows, as if to ensure that no one could ignore their presence.’’
 
Instead—and what I can read from Rutherford’s refusal—let us take seriously the sexuality of sex change: the want that cannot be fully metabolized by the social (ego ideals that refuse ideal egos) while modifying the real’s own becoming, its ongoing materializations, sexualizations, and concatenations. Perhaps instead of Rutherford’s paintings as naive accounts of her becoming a woman, her painting proposes that photography is the naive technology for representing transsexuality (let alone for modeling transsexuality on). Rutherford does not show who she is becoming but shows what forces—and cultural aesthetics—are at work in delimiting that emergence, that potential. Working against photography as record, against becoming real through photographic logics, Rutherford’s paintings draw attention to those technical modes of perception that limit what the body is or might be. And more specific to Rutherford: What if a realist theory of photography has produced reproducible narratives about transsexual women’s lives—even to ourselves—that refuse bodily difference and those experiences that exceed the sex/gender schema?
 
But Freud continues to define “projection of a surface” as a sensuousness that is derived from the body, but not as a literalization of the surface of that body. Embodiment—the sense of feeling bodily—is a sensuous rapport between affective states we might call inside and outside. At every point in this relay, fantasy makes sense of sensations refracted through an inaccessible, but no less significant, materiality. In other words, bodily sense is produced through sensuous excess, not through a precise organ of sensation. Might, then, transsexuality not be simply about skin—one organ dedicated to touch and vision—but an excess that has no representative? Despite Prosser’s critique of Butler’s imagistic (and as such, performative) reading of the body ego, he also organ-izes the body ego through a phenomenology of photography (a studium-only account of the body—what literally is present-ed—as described by Barthes in Camera Lucida), with transsexuality as idealized example. The referential surface—what I read Rutherford’s art working against—is the frame that delimits transsexuality into a visibility, into a logic of the photo-self as sex. For Rutherford, transsexuality is not ontologically a skin to be imagistically realized. Instead, transsexuality is what infuses the body (even as limit) with sexuality as a register of fantasy always aiming toward what is yet unknown, the otherwise that designates transsexuality.
 
What would it mean for Rutherford’s paintings if we returned sexuality (not identity, but libido) to transsexuality? To “assume sensuous curves of a sexuality [we] could never know”?
 
Painted Camera, “”Her”. By Eva Hayward.  e-flux. April 2021.
 

Transcription, Véronique Emma Houxbois on her Desires in a Daily Comic Strip

 

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.

That would be impolitic. Bitches on Comics, July  29, 2020. 

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