One of the many beautiful things about the trans body is that it’s built, not inherited. You author your form, edit it, decide what it is you want to keep and what you want to change. I have heard other trans people refer to their bodies as “vessels,” which I think is apt: it’s the thing with a head and a heart that carries your soul, and you can (and should) modify and bedazzle it all you want.
You are not it and it is not you. Cis people frequently make this mistake, treating their bodies as their identities and trying to modify them to fit some predetermined form. I want to ask them: why not let your body be what it wants to be? Why not cover it in sequins, drape it in gold lamé?
I had a large chest with what I referred to as “leaky” breasts: they sagged to either side when I reclined in bed, distractingly heavy like gallons of water in roomy plastic sacks. When they ached, I became worried that I had cancer. I dreaded the mammograms I’d soon have to get—the idea of one of my sacks flattened under a pane of glass made me uneasy. My breasts flopped and bounced when I ran, so much that I joked one of them was going to slap me in the face. Button-downs gapped when I tried to close them over my chest; t-shirts, too, were tighter on top than on bottom.
My breasts were a favorite of gravity’s: they sagged tremendously, and needed to be supported by industrial-strength bras I was too careless or annoyed to buy. Indeed, I was completely unsure of my cup size—I must have been a spacious E or F but persisted in the comforting belief that I was a C, and bought small bras with wire that dug into my sides and that I’d eventually donate to friends whose chests didn’t torment them to the extent mine did. Worst of all, I never felt like I could give a proper hug: the fleshy sacks stood between myself and my loved ones.
In June of 2020, I wasn’t sheltering in place alone. An old friend had come from the city to join me in my rural quarters: it was easier to stay home in the country, and there were fewer people to contend with. At that point my friend had been on hormones for just under a decade, and we would talk, bathroom door open, as she gave herself her weekly shot. The shots were subcutaneous: she pinched a bit of fat on her stomach and gently slid the needle in, never flinching or exclaiming like I knew I would have. These shots no longer hurt her, she told me.
I had watched her do this for years, but I was seized with a curiosity about the effects as I had never been before. When did she first start to notice changes, and what were they? Slowly, her skin had grown softer, her chest had developed, the veins had receded from the tops of her hands. How did she get the hormones? She’d gotten a prescription from an LGBTQ clinic in Chicago. She could refer me if I wanted.
“Maybe,” I hedged.
Conservatives claim transness is catching, and they’re right, but not in the way they think they are. Instead of spreading like COVID or smallpox, transness emerges at the sight of other trans people living happily in the world. Transness is an inborn quality—a beautiful quality—but it carries such stigma that it must be tended to and encouraged by other trans people who have, by some miracle, carved out a place in the world to live authentically.
And there I was, just weeks after my friend offered to refer me to the clinic in Chicago, Googling “trans man” and looking at photos of chests ribboned with scars.
“I don’t want breasts,” I said at last. My friend turned to me over the half-wall between the kitchen and the living room.
“Yeah?” she said.
“Yeah,” I said. “And I want to be a man.”
*
Without trans and queer elders, there would be no blueprint from which to build the structures we inhabit: the safe spaces created by surgery, activism, and chosen family. Without the trans men of the twentieth century, I would not have been able to make a case to any doctor—much less any insurance company—for the medical necessity of my top surgery. During my recovery, I decided I wanted to know who these men were.
In 1942, Michael Dillon became the first trans man to undergo a double mastectomy. Dillon was a sensitive person, a seeker of truth—born in Kensington, England, he’d spend the final years of his life as a novice Buddhist monk in India. Between his birth and premature death at 47, he would be twice publicly outed, once by a chatty psychiatrist and another time by a newspaper reporting on a discrepancy in naval records. Vexed and ashamed, Dillon abandoned his life wherever he was and moved somewhere new, where he passed effectively after years of testosterone therapy and no one questioned his gender.
Little is known of the doctor who performed Dillon’s top surgery, though it’s been suggested that it was a plastic surgeon by the name of Dr. Geoffrey Fitzgibbon. Fitzgibbon—if that’s in fact the doctor’s name—was a remarkable ally to Dillon. Dillon had entered the hospital after a hypoglycemic fainting spell and stayed a few days; while there, he happened to meet Fitzgibbon, who not only agreed to perform the mastectomy, but helped Dillon change his gender marker on his birth certificate and other identity cards.
This sort of luck seemed to happen frequently for Dillon: though he certainly met with plenty of transphobia in his lifetime, he also crossed paths with some trailblazing doctors who were happy to help him with his medical transition.
In his biography Out of the Ordinary, Dillon writes of his top surgery: “I was delighted from this operation when I had recovered from it. At last I was rid of what I hated most. I sat out on the verandah letting the sun help to heal the incisions.” Photos of Dillon before his top surgery show someone ill at ease in his body: he poses next to his brother in an ankle-length dress, he smiles nervously into the camera wearing a cloche hat. He seems happier with himself in the photos from St. Anne’s—Oxford’s women’s college—the short-haired, square-jawed captain of the rowing team.
It’s likely that he was binding then, a process which relieves dysphoria but which few enjoy: flattening one’s chest takes significant pressure, and whether you’re wearing a binder or wrapping yourself with bandages (as Dillon must have done), you’re going to sweat a heinous amount and be very uncomfortable. Top surgery was obviously liberating for Dillon, as it is for all of us: no binding, no hiding, pure freedom.
In 1946, Dillon published Self: A Study in Ethics and Endocrinology. In addition to a detailed unpacking of the human endocrine system and the concept of free will, the book described the transgender experience before there were words for it: Dillon referred to “masculine inverts” born with “the mental outlook and temperament of the other sex.”
Self brought Dillon to the attention of Roberta Cowell, a British trans woman who was a former fighter pilot and race-car driver. Dillon, who had studied medicine at Trinity College in Dublin, performed an orchiectomy on Cowell, an operation that was illegal in Britain at the time. Dillon thought he’d found in Cowell someone who could understand and even love him. He wrote poetry for her and eventually proposed, but she rebuffed his affections. The two parted ways in 1951.
Sources are conflicted over Dillon’s death: some say he died suddenly on his way to Kashmir, while others claim he died in a hospital in Dalhousie after a period of declining health. What we do know was that he lived triumphantly in the body that best suited him. I think about this often, the joy Dillon claimed for himself at a time when trans surgeries were even more stigmatized than they are now. What love he had for himself, how thrilled he must have been to live authentically. It’s a feeling unlike any other.
*
Breasts always seem to belong to everyone but the wearer. Freud tells us that infants’ polymorphous sexuality is first expressed through their oral attachment to the breast, leading them to identify their mother as their first external “love object.” Media tells us that breasts are among the most important thing any woman can have, and that they should be full and perky and grabbable. Breasts nurture infants, feed sexual desires: nipples are sucked for both milk and pleasure. One can start to feel like a Christmas tree, branches sagging with ornaments for others to ogle and touch and break.
A very witty friend of mine, a trans woman, once told me that breasts are like boats: fun for a ride but a hassle to keep. This has been true for many of my friends who have breasts—they sweat and chafe, they cause back problems, they become a “uniboob” when squished into place by the wrong sports bra.
My partner, a nonbinary person who also had top surgery, frequently received compliments on their “great tits,” which they resented. “And these compliments were coming from fellow trans and nonbinary people,” they told me, a look of disappointment on their face. Even the most gender-enlightened among us still see breasts as objects of pleasure without a second thought given to their (oft beleaguered) wearer.
I was lucky: I only had to bind for a year, and only after I realized I needed top surgery. Binding did little for me other than create a blunt lump on my chest, and that was when my breasts managed to stay in the binder or under the TransTape. All too often they leaked or flopped out, insistent, pernicious—knowing, perhaps, that their days were numbered and wanting to make some kind of vindictive statement.
The day of my surgery, the plastic surgeon—a small and imperious man who often posed with his toy poodle on Instagram—drew lines across my chest in Sharpie, marking where he would cauterize my flesh and sew on fake nipples. He held one breast in his hand, made some markings on it, and let it flop down, then did the same for the other. He told me impatiently to calm down, which had the exact opposite effect on me. Then I was on a gurney being dosed with Ativan, worrying to the anesthesiologist that the dose wouldn’t be sufficient to knock me out.
And then I was awake, my chest sealed under a binder. I was rushed out of the surgery center and into a friend’s car, and then we proceeded back to our Airbnb. For days I sat on a slim leather couch of a kind heavily unsuited to top surgery recovery, watching the same episodes of Succession over and over and fretting that what I’d done would have no effect on my hopelessly low self-esteem. I worried, as I often had, about my weight, my skin, my hair. A part of me was lagging, still trapped in my “cis” body. It wouldn’t be until two weeks later that I’d discover the joy of being trans.
The cis have got transness all wrong—but who’s surprised? We’re sexualized, reduced to genitalia and flashpoint conversations about bathrooms and perversion. We’re assumed to always be miserable and dysphoric. In truth, some of the happiest people I know are trans, and that’s because we’ve built our happiness from the ground up, making our exteriors match the particularities of our interiors.
When I emerged from my post-op fog, I was shocked and overwhelmed by how great I looked. I took shirtless selfies—too many to count—and felt my posture improve, my heart creak open. My partner, who had gotten their top surgery two weeks before mine, held me in bed: we had just begun to date, but we could already recognize how bonded we were by the scar tissue forming in our chests. We talked about how medieval it was to get your breasts sliced off, and how great it would be if all trans kids had access to puberty blockers. My partner has an enchanting smile and gives incomparably warm hugs. As I was falling in love with them, I was falling in love with myself, too.
*
Before Elliot Page and Gottmik, there was Lou Sullivan. Sullivan was born in 1951 and grew up Catholic in the town of Wauwatosa, Wisconsin. He kept journals from the age of 10 until his death of AIDS at age 39. The journals, which contain outdated words like “transvestite” and “crossdresser” and describe cruising in the gay bars and public bathhouses of 70s and 80s San Francisco, keep Sullivan frozen in time. A trans and queer boomer, he was a radical by default.
For years, Sullivan lived in the territory between binaries, going to work in a dress and coming home to change into slacks and a men’s undershirt. His desire to be a gay man was incipient: he was thrilled when his boyfriend—referred to simply as “J” in his journals—was called a fag by a group of teenagers on a Milwaukee street.
When he and J broke up, Sullivan pursued hormone therapy and sexual reassignment surgery, but he couldn’t get any of the gender clinics to take his case on. “I had a lot of problems with the gender professionals saying there’s no such thing as a female to gay male,” he said in one of a series of interviews he gave to psychiatrist Ira B. Pauly between 1988 and 1990. But Sullivan was anything if not persistent, and was finally able to get his top surgery in 1980.
On preparing for the surgery, he writes: “To wash my body with surgical soap, according to instructions, washing, washing, and watching my body that is there, that isn’t there, that won’t be there in 3 days. How can I share this emotion; how can I find an outlet for these incredibly strong feelings?” In conversation with Dr. Pauly, he says: “[The mastectomy] was really nice. It was so good… Finally I could take my shirt off, I could breathe, I didn’t have this binder around me all the time.”
I know what Sullivan is talking about in both cases. I, too, washed my chest with surgical soap three nights before my surgery—I, too, contemplated what felt like the amputation of a stubborn, vestigial limb. And after the surgery, the air felt easier to breathe, the ground softer to walk on. I didn’t realize how trapped I’d been, how right transness was for me. This was the difference between Sullivan and me: for years he had a clear vision for himself, an inborn knowledge that he was a gay trans man. I, on the other hand, stumbled into my identity on the same day I decided I needed surgery. But then there’s no right path to the truth.
Sullivan was an activist. Little had been said of the transmasculine experience in his time—especially the gay transmasculine experience—so he took to writing about it. He wrote newsletters for F2M, which was described in a mailing from 1989 as “a newly formed support organization created by and for female-to-male transsexuals/crossdressers.” He was a founding member of the San Francisco GLBT Historical Society, to which he donated his photos and papers upon his death.
These miscellany have been posted on the OutHistory website, and they’re quite revealing. Here’s a photo of Lou completely naked pre-top surgery, eyes closed and mouth tight as if he’s holding his breath. And here he is after top surgery: chest flat, scars healed, smiling comfortably. In one of his few clothed photos post-surgery, he’s relaxed in an armchair, holding a beer, legs crossed with a serene look on his face. He appears profoundly comfortable in his skin.
In December of 1986, Sullivan was diagnosed with AIDS and told he had 10 months to live. Though the news must have been devastating, it had a silver lining: “I took a certain pleasure in informing the gender clinic that even though their program told me I could not live as a Gay man, it looks like I’m going to die like one,” he wrote. In the videos he filmed with Dr. Pauly, Sullivan withers away.
In 1988, he looks like the kind of healthy, mustachioed queer you’d see in stonewashed jeans and a white t-shirt at an ACT UP meeting. By 1990 he’s practically a scarecrow, his rodlike neck emerging frailly from the roomy collar of his dress shirt. Even in the throes of death, he wanted to destigmatize his condition. “I think it’s really important that people do talk about [AIDS], be upfront about it, try to educate,” he told Dr. Pauly.
I often roll my eyes when trans people are described as brave, but it’s really true in the case of Lou Sullivan. In an era when the gay trans man was publicly unaccounted for, he spoke about his experience. He blazed a trail that those like me and my contemporaries have followed. And for that I am incredibly thankful.
*
Both of the early recipients of top surgery I’ve discussed have been middle- to upper-middle-class white men. There are obvious reasons for this—reasons we all know well by now—and it should be noted as well that trans surgeries remain expensive and frequently inaccessible to working class people. In the top surgery groups I’m in online, photos of people of color are far and few in between—people in larger bodies are more often accounted for, but they, too, face significant fatphobic barriers to surgery. I myself am a professor and writer who makes money off my day job and my books: surgery was accessible to me.
My partner, on the other hand, would not have been able to get surgery had Illinois Medicaid not covered it, and the same goes for many people I know. It’s my dream to one day become rich enough to donate thousands of dollars to the many top and bottom surgery GoFundMes that are floating around online, especially those of marginalized people. I want to do my part to make all trans surgeries as cheap as possible. Realistically speaking, all trans surgeries are necessary and life-saving, and they should be free to everyone who needs them.
I got top surgery in July of 2021 and began taking testosterone in November of that year. My voice has deepened and I’ve started to grow sideburns and hair on my knuckles. My jaw has squared and I’m slowly beginning to see the veins in my hands. I don’t look much different in photos unless I’m unshaven: then you can see a small, teenaged goatee on my chin and traces of a mustache.
I identify as a nonbinary trans man because, while I am transmasculine, there are also aspects of me that are uncategorizable: he/they-ness radiates off me. It’s a vulnerable thing to go through puberty as an adult, a reminder of your inevitable visibility as a trans person. But it’s an indescribably lovely experience at the same time.
Top surgery opened me up to my life—I didn’t realize the extent to which I’d been sleepwalking through it. I had resigned myself to hating my body and obsessing over its fluctuations. Now I could care less what shape my body takes or how I look in photos. I’m mercifully at peace. I’m grateful to my friend and her subcutaneous estrogen shots; I’m grateful to the many trans men who made themselves visible online.
I’m grateful to men like Michael Dillon and Lou Sullivan whose euphoria is well-documented in the annals of trans history. I’m grateful to myself, that fragile and scared person once puny with self-hatred—grateful that he found a way out of the thicket of his confusion and self-doubt. I’m grateful for my emergence into the world, and I’m grateful to be home.
The Beauty of the Trans Body: Building a World to Feel Safe In. By Rafael Frumkin. LitHub, April 3, 2023.
While the art of drag has swept mainstream in recent years, knowledge of its origins and the real lives behind the glam is still severely lacking. Particularly, when it comes to gender rhetoric.
Welcome to Body Week 2022. This year, Them’s annual exploration of queer and trans embodiment comes at a time of crisis, as state-led attempts to restrict our bodily autonomy seem to multiply by the day. And yet, in every nook and cranny of this country, we persist. In the stories that form this special series, we sought to document not only the look of this persistence, but also its sensation: How does it feel to be LGBTQ+ and have a body today? Read more from the series here.
To be trans and to have a body in 2022 is to be the baddest bitch at the event while concerned you'll be forcibly removed from the restroom. It’s to be surveilled, regulated, and scapegoated by those who don’t understand you, but also to be rendered invisible within your own community unless you have a six-pack, or demeaned for growing hair in the “wrong” places. Let’s be honest: moving through the world as a trans person is work. It's a long process of affirming the value of your own gaze, of ridding yourself of those Eurocentric beauty standards that so many of us have internalized. It's the even longer process of reckoning with the reality that those standards don't magically vanish once you take your seat at the trans table; that we police each other, too.
And yet, to be trans and to have a body also encompasses the liberatory delight of uprooting these internalized expectations, of planting new seeds and watching them grow together. It’s the community project of forging our own ideals, characterized by an unbridled abundance of fat bodies, dark-skinned bodies, hairy bodies, bodies with disabilities, and all the other forms that we're taught to shun.
That sense of abundance was on full-display last week at a studio in New York City, where we invited a glowing cadre of trans and nonbinary people to spread body love and beauty while sharing thoughts on everything from the politics of desire to the internalization of harmful ideals within trans community. The timing remains disturbingly urgent, as this nation continues to offset the sagging dreams of trans visibility with the thickening doom of anti-trans policies aimed at our extinction.
Yet there we were: A cast of poets, models, organizers, and more, coming from myriad experiences of gender, ethnicity, body size, ability, and age, buzzing around a room in all our self-styled splendor. I didn’t realize I’d be joining my interviewees in front of the camera, but I had come dressed for the occasion anyway. As a Black trans woman of the world, my daily fashion is not only my armor. It’s how I show off who I am, from my ever-evolving desires to how I love myself.
In that spirit, one of the first questions I asked each model was, “When do you feel your hottest?” The range of answers showcases a shared politics springing from the kind of liberated embodiment characteristic of lived trans experience, including all the doubt, fear, and self-hatred we often overcome to get there.
As the day came to a close, we posed for a group shot, where we offered expressions of fierce solidarity. With Beyonce’s “Party” playing in the background, the cast collectively burst into song. A moment later, the audio disappeared as the camera flashed. Yet we kept singing Bey’s rebellious refrain, “cause we like to partaaayyy,” long after the final frame.
To be sure, to be trans and to have a body in the year 2022 is cause for justified anxiety and righteous rage. But when we’re together, as we’ve known for generations, nothing can curb our joy.
— Michael Love Michael
Coral Johnson (they/them, artist & DJ)
Coral Johnson grew up in gay clubs around the small town of Tyler, Texas. That was their mom’s impact. She took the young Johnson to see drag while affirming their earliest queer longings. “It was hit and miss, though,” Johnson recalls, as not too many of their friends were exposed to the same things. When the young artist started getting into edgier modes of expression, trouble followed. Now based in Brooklyn, the 25-year-old DJ has found a home in the borough’s underground rave scene not only for their avant-garde style, but also their love of community building.
When do you feel your hottest?
I feel my hottest whenever I completely erase whatever society wants me to be. Even growing up in Tyler, I dressed pretty much the same way I do now. And I would get trash thrown at me. I would have people going out of their way to harass me, people trying to clock me, figure me out. But it’s like, you can’t. I’m an enigma. I’m a mystery. I’m an alien. And if you’re afraid, you should be afraid. Run away.
Do you have regular practices that ground you in feelings of self love?
Sharing music. I found the rave scene when I started DJing. You make your playlist, feel what you’re feeling, then once you blend it, you can share that energy with a crowd. Whether it’s your friends, or people you don’t know in the community, feeling music is something you can share silently. You can have a relationship with somebody that you don’t even know, just by feeling a certain rhythm together. It’s like a hug. And you can come as you are. I know people that feel like they literally can't step out of the house in broad daylight as themselves. But between 10:00pm and 4:00am, they can wear those heels, or wear that wig, or wear the makeup. That's when they feel like they have space to be that doll, to be that ken doll, to be whoever they want to be.
Alyza Enriquez (they/them, documentarian)
Alyza Enriquez is a documentary filmmaker and photographer based in Brooklyn, New York. Born in Hialeah and raised in West Palm Beach, Florida, Enriquez developed many of their early masculine ideals on the beach. “Of course, I was after some form of masculinity that’s perceived to be attractive, which is actually a patriarchal, bullshit cishetero toxic mess,” they recall. “I grew up thinking that it would feel good to achieve that.”
Nowadays, the image-maker resists these harmful standards through cultivating an inward sense of desire. “It’s been really important to prioritize my own gaze and the gaze of others like me, and to just see each other,” they explain. “Trans people deserve that fucking pleasure. God, we do. It’s our birthright.”
How do you navigate the politics of desire in your life?
I think that desire, especially when you're a trans person, is something that feels kind of elusive. I don't really know what it means to be desirable in the greater world, but I know what it means to be desirable to the people that matter to me. When you're walking on the street and you see another trans person, you feel that. Growing up in Florida, where beach culture is really strong, a lot of the ways I interpreted desire were predicated on whether I could be attractive to a heterosexual person — on whether I could pass. In the past few years, I’ve been growing into being more desirable to myself, which is one of the things that helps us survive in this world, as beautiful and cruel as it can be.
Being raised in contemporary American society, it’s easy to internalize some of culture’s white supremacist, fatphobic, transphobic, and ableist standards. I’m curious if there are ways you’ve seen these tropes reenacted within trans community?
Generally speaking, when it comes to trans visuals, the people who are the most cis-passing are the ones that are constantly on the magazines talking about the same things — about body positivity. I'm like, don't talk to me about body positivity when you're a stick; no one looks twice at you. In particular, I'm very disappointed with transmasculine representation. I think it sucks right now. Everything feels really binary…We keep hearing about what it’s like to be a trans woman walking through the world with the male gaze, or what it’s like to be a trans man trying to get women to love you. Can we just talk about being trans?
I want more nuance. And I want to see us as a community question ourselves a little more. People are afraid to have hard conversations, but that is queerness. It’s okay for things to be messy. It’s okay to make mistakes. That’s part of revolution.
Kaguya (she/they, artist & entrepreneur)
Don’t let Kaguya’s scintillating online presence fool you; the 33-year-old model and self-described “East Coast baby” is actually a cancer, though they do concede their cuspiness with Leo means “the fire wants to pop out.” That firiness abounds whenever Kaguya steps in front of the lens, where she’s equally comfortable modeling for high-concept beauty projects as she is manifesting sultry circus shoots.
When do you feel your hottest?
I mean, I feel hot all the time.
How do you navigate the politics of desire in your life?
Honestly, if I want it, I'll get it. [laughs]
From an early age, too many of us are made to feel ashamed for how we looked — whether too trans, too fat, too dark-skinned, the list goes on. What advice would you have for earlier versions of yourself navigating reductive body-based expectations?
Silence the noise. I saw an article that said any negative emotion technically lasts only 30 seconds, but if you put power into that negativity, it can last weeks, months, even years. That’s how grudges prolong [our pain].
maya finoh (they/them, human rights advocate & model)
maya finoh chooses their words carefully. In speaking with Them, they express their ancestral reverence and anti-capitalist politics through invoking lines from Nina Simone (“Freedom is no fear”) and Jesus (“It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God”).
A self-described “fat liberationist,” finoh believe too much focus is given to the politics of beauty; that a potentially more instructive lens is staying vigilant to the imposition of “Ugliness, with a capital ‘U.’” As the Durham-born, Brooklyn-based cultural worker explains, “Who we deem ugly in this world is directly tied to all the isms. It’s the people who bear the brunt of racism, colorism, transphobia, texturism, ableism, and on and on.”
These standards influence more than just our romantic lives, finoh adds. “They also tie directly into your socioeconomic status; there are studies that show people hire those who they find more conventionally attractive, who fit more Eurocentric beauty standards.”
Do you have any regular practices that ground you in feelings of self-love?
"I am" affirmations. I write in my journal: “I am loved, I am safe, I own myself,” and it feels like putting this prayer out into the world. Also, I like to wear bright colors, clothes that force people to feel my presence. Because I’m not going to hide. I know they want me in a frumpy outfit, but I’m actually going to give legs and hips and body.
What advice would you have for earlier versions of yourself navigating reductive body-based ideals?
I grew up in the church, you know what I'm saying? I grew up in a space where being queer, being trans, all that shit is an abomination. Today, I refuse that. No, I rebuke it, because queerness and transness existed in my ancestral lands. We quite literally are the blueprint when it comes to living outside the gender binary. So how can I be wrong when my ancestors did this for generations upon generations? I have a deep knowing, a body wisdom, that my ancestors love me just the way that I am.
Where do you see mainstream society’s limiting expectations reenacted within trans community?
Fatphobic standards as far as the medical industry’s regulation of transition. I know too many trans fat people like me who’ve been trying to get surgery for five, even 10 years, but can’t find a surgeon because their BMI is considered too much of a risk. In terms of representation, popular culture continues to uplift the skinniest white non-disabled trans folks — those who are most palatable. It’s the people who don’t make you think, who they don't want to put in jail, who are not critiquing capitalism and U.S. military intervention and all the systems that need to be destroyed for trans liberation to actually exist.
Katia Perea (they/them, sociology professor)
Katia Perea is an activist and professor from Miami, Florida. When not teaching sociology at CUNY, the 54-year-old Brooklyn icon is a mainstay at play parties and revolutionary actions across the city. Coming of age in New York in the 80s, Perea’s organizing roots are grounded in the days of Act Up, the No AIDS task force, and Queer Nation, where they learned to combine the struggle against state power with queer socializing. “What made activism so fun in those days was there was a lot of hooking up,” they remember. “We made it sexy.”
What advice would you have for earlier versions of yourself navigating reductive body-based expectations?
Looking back, you realize that as a child, when you were identified as different, you were just being yourself. It wasn’t bravery to be that; it was just called being alive. I would affirm to my younger self that it’s okay to want to experience life, to chase the passion of feeling — whether that means strolling down the sidewalk or hooking up with a partner. Just feel yourself when you do it and go for what feels best. Like Sylvester said, you have to love yourself first.
Mae Eskenazi (they/them, visual artist & ritualist)
Every Sunday, Mae Eskenazi reads their tarot and takes a bath in water infused with herbs of protection. These practices are essential for the Philly-based artist and ritualist, who’s currently doing graduate research on the intersection of BDSM and disability. After falling ill a few years ago, Eskenazi turned to herbalism when Western medicine wasn’t giving them what they needed. “Plants hold so much knowledge and have so much to offer,” they say. “Interspecies relationships are so important. I especially take a lot of lessons from plants rooted in Jewish mysticism as I move through the week.”
In what ways do you see mainstream society's reductive beauty standards reenacted within trans community?
Often those who are most marginalized end up having to make themselves smaller to fit the now-accepted trendy mold of transness, which is usually skinny, white, rich, passing, boring Instagram famous or whatever.
What does remaining vigilant to these kinds of intrusions look like to you?
We’re in a state of emergency. Trans people are literally under attack. We’re also greater in numbers and complexity, which means conflict will take place. Just because we’re trans doesn’t mean we can’t harm one another. We have to recognize that white supremacy and ableism and fatphobia all very much exist within our communities. We can’t be in community if we don’t have conflict. And if we don’t know how to deal with conflict, then we’re just being carceral.
Jimena Lucero (she/her, actor & poet)
The other day, Jimena Lucero was at her local bagel spot when one of the workers “started being really flirty,” the Queens-based actor and poet shares. “I wasn’t sure if he was flirting with me because he was interested, if he was attracted, or if he was trying to mock me in front of his coworkers. Why do I even have to think about that?”
It’s a question too many of our trans siblings are left asking — one rooted in the aggravatingly repetitive ways we’re forced to entertain cis folks’ dehumanizing curiosities. In her poetry, Lucero sets readers adrift along new and personal tributaries of trans experience, providing a breath of fresh air from the stories we’ve heard (and lived) over and over again.
How do the politics of desire come up in your life?
When I walk in the world, I am always thinking, do people know I'm trans? And if they do, are they playing out some kind of fantasy onto me, or viewing me through a certain kind of lens? When it comes to desire, sometimes I wonder if people are into me because I’m trans, or if they’re into me because of who I am. Are people interested in my multitudes, or just one part of me?
Why is it especially important for us to pay attention to how mainstream society’s beauty standards get re-inscribed within our spaces?
As trans people, we’ve been bombarded by so much violent thinking, so much white supremacy and patriarchy. We have to be really intentional that we don’t project that, or bring it into our community. So we have to always be vigilant.
Andrea Abi-Karam (they/them, poet)
Andrea Abi-Karam is a trans Arab-American poet and performer. They are the author of two collections, EXTRATRANSMISSION (Kelsey Street Press, 2019), and Villainy (Nightboat Books, 2021) and were co-editor of the all-trans blockbuster anthology, We Want It All. An orgy of revolutionary violence and T4T fucking, Abi-Karam’s poetic worlds envision the sexiness of liberation as a comprehensively anti-capitalist struggle. Off the page, they are a Leo with a penchant for convertibles and Riis beach.
When do you feel your hottest?
I feel my hottest wearing mesh. It's both comfortable and explicit about my transness, which I want to be, even though it can be dangerous sometimes. It's important to me to be really myself in public space.
Do you have any regular practices that ground you in feelings of self-love?
I like doing active, embodied things, like running or biking or roller-blading. Another thing that’s really important to me is collaboration. That's why I really love performing. When you’re in a room with other people, this collective energy emerges, and that feeling is so powerful and exciting and sexy.
MTHR TRSA (she/they, visual and performance artist)
Dylan Thomas, better known as MTHR TRSA, is a Brooklyn-based visual and performance artist and the founder of Actively Eating, a sustainable garment practice. Recently, TRSA was sitting in a green room when a stray comment caught her off-guard. “I said something, and one of the dolls turns to me and goes, ‘Yeah, but the girls…’ It was the first time I ever had someone exclude me like that.”
The creator continues, “I was like, Oh, so if I shaved my beard, would I be in this conversation? If I lost weight, would I be in this conversation? If I wasn’t wearing cargo shorts, would I be in this conversation? What doesn’t make me a girl?”
TRSA’s art, bursting with trans, fat, hairy beauty, is a rebuke of expectations that the girls have to serve traditional “femininity” to be accepted as femme. “Not everyone is puss, not everyone is going to be emulating whatever the fuck you think transness is,” she says. “Everyone has a different version of whatever that may or may not be. Respect that.”
When do you feel your hottest?
I feel the hottest when I am wet, so either covered in sweat, not showered in three days, and literally disgusting, or when I'm in a breast plate and a wet human unit gallivanting for a bunch of gays.
Speaking of feeling hot, how do you navigate the politics of desire in your life?
Honestly, I am teetering on being a smelly bro and being a diva at the same time. How do I go about that? I'm still unsure. I just made my first Hinge profile where I am completely honest about who I am as a person. I feel like on sex apps, on dating apps, I definitely have been holding up a masculine front, as some may call it. I may or may not have been catfishing people for years. Now that I put my whole fucking pussy out on this Hinge profile it's been a ride trying to find someone who is able to understand that, especially as someone who's hairy and trans.
What advice would you have for earlier versions of yourself navigating reductive body-based expectations?
Put the fucking dress on. Also, get on that J Train and go into the fucking city. Oh, and if a group of kids empties a water bottle on your head on the train, just remember how cunt you look with wet hair. And although I do want to say, “Hold back on some looks,” at the end of the day, if you feel amazing in it, then fucking do it. Also, there’s going to be an Amazon basics celery chopper in your bag, honey.
A Signature Beauty : 9 trans and nonbinary people on bodies, desirability, and revolutionizing beauty. By Michael Love Michael and Wren Sanders. Them, August 15, 2022.
Long before we had the vocabulary to define what the "perfect body" looked like, those beauty standards were placed onto women, men, and everyone in between throughout cultures around the world. These ideals have changed from decade to decade, yet the pressure to conform has remained constant. This undeniable truth holds particular weight among trans individuals as the concept of the perfect body takes on new meanings.
As I took a bite of my breakfast, I heard the guy at the next table at the diner say, “Just give the check to him.” It felt like lightning coursing through my veins. As a trans woman, it'd been months since I’d been misgendered in person, and frankly, I had forgotten the imposter syndrome and feeling of failure that comes along with being misgendered. However, it's actually what happened next that best exemplifies the impossibly gendered tightrope that trans women are expected to traverse.
The owner of the diner, a cis gay man, actually pulled up a seat at my table and asked if I had overheard the exchange. I nodded yes. He replied, “You know, you don’t try very hard. If I were you, I would be dressing to the nines every day. Nails done, hair done, makeup flawless. Right now, you’re not fooling anyone.”
Mortified, I awkwardly took stock of my appearance that morning: black leggings, tank top, a black-and-white button up, no makeup, hair in a ponytail. The feminist inside me wanted to fire him into the sun, but my imposter syndrome drowned everything out. Of course, these two men must be right, I couldn’t ever be a real woman, who was I kidding? I came for the breakfast potatoes and left in an existential crisis.
The diner incident starkly contrasts with my experience as a well-known trans woman on Twitter, where a steady stream of wannabe trolls and radical so-called "feminists" chide me as a parody of womanhood while critiquing every inch of my online appearance. If trans women present ourselves in a very feminine manner, we’re accused of being parodies; if we come off as more masculine, we’re chided for not trying hard enough.
Female beauty standards are a double-edged sword for trans women. It is a never-ending balancing act, getting the "right" combination of feminine and masculine in our appearance to align with society's impossibly narrow criteria in a way that offers us safety in passing as our true genders — and that line is very thin. Sometimes I know I’m a real woman because everyone has an unsolicited opinion about my appearance.
What Happens When Compound Pressures Mount
“Passing” is the term the trans community uses to describe those instances when others assume we are the gender we’re presenting as rather than our assigned sex at birth, and it can be especially critical for the safety of trans women. In our society, beauty, especially for women, is based entirely on cisnormative beauty standards, and the concepts of “passing” and “beauty” are often conflated and can even be internalized by trans women.
“I was confused by this for a long time. I sort of assumed that it was necessary to 'pass' before I could aspire to be considered ‘beautiful,’ " explains Alice, a 37-year-old trans woman from Chicago, who transitioned four years ago. “Now, of course, both of these things are subjective estimations and they're both, to varying extents, ascribed to us by others rather than experienced ourselves. But I have learned to cultivate a sense of myself as beautiful that is somewhat independent of social expectations, that simply has to do with how well I meet my own expectations for my appearance and presentation.”
Finding that sense of self within an endless litany of societal expectations can be fleeting for trans women, as it is for any woman. If we weren’t "too trans," we’d be too heavy, or too broad-shouldered, or not white enough. The central feature of patriarchy is to remove agency from women to develop a sense of worth that’s removed from how much her appearance appeals to the sexual desires of men, and that applies to trans women even if we never transition at all.
Trans women and cis women are basically confined to the same appearance-related criteria. But we are all judged on cis-centric beauty standards, and it’s a formula that leads to an unhealthy conflation of looks and value. “Similar to cis women, trans women are constantly told how we are supposed to look. Just the right kind of feminine, wear the right kind of clothing, [and so on]," Serena Sonoma, a freelance writer and a black trans woman from North Carolina, tells me. "It's conditioning us to live in a box that not all of us can fit into because we literally can't help it and we are not cis.”
Serena continues, “Sometimes I catch myself conflating my looks with my value, or what I bring to the table, which is not the case. But when everyone around you constantly nitpicks at what you're supposed to look like, it's hard to not center your looks instead of your voice. Why not both?”
Before I transitioned, I had a very palpable sense of the “too”: I was too tall, too fat, too bald to ever be a “real” woman, so what would be the point of even trying to transition? It’s a common sentiment among trans women and a direct result of the impossibly narrow box within which society confines women's appearances. For many trans women, male puberty puts cisnormative beauty permanently out of reach; for others, the idea that the world could see them the same way that they see themselves is the stuff of fantasy.
The Dangers of Exclusionary Ideals
“Feminine beauty standards are intimidating in a way that has limited my expression of myself in public since childhood," says Riley E., a 27-year-old nonbinary person from North Carolina who was assigned male at birth. "I've never felt at all comfortable with masculinity, but because of my height and shape and voice, I have also never felt able to express myself as femme.”
These expectations are at least partially at fault for keeping trans women from coming out or transitioning, thereby allowing gender dysphoria to run rampant in an effort simply to fit in. It’s an especially dangerous circumstance for a population that struggles with suicidality.
Riley recalls a bad experience when, as a 19-year-old, she attended a party wearing makeup and a skirt — an incident that is typical of the unique way society punishes trans femme people: “The reception from the other people, their assumption that it was specifically some kind of humiliation fetish, reinforced so heavily in me the idea so deeply that I could never be femme passing that I fled from addressing my own gender identity for eight years.”
From Ace Ventura to The Silence of the Lambs, popular culture has combined with pseudoscience sexology — where "autogynephilia" is still a thing — to brand trans women as creepy perverts with sexual fetishes. But isn’t that assumption in itself a projection of misogyny? If women and men are truly equal, it wouldn’t be humiliating or creepy for trans women to embrace femininity and a female gender role. In fact, it wouldn’t be a big deal at all.
Cis assumptions are at the heart of transmisogyny, says Riley: “The frequently cited caricature of trans women as stereotypical 'men in femme clothing' plays into the normalization of hatred toward trans people in real and damaging ways.” Even radical feminists use cisnormative beauty standards to sort out which trans women deserve their support, like citing the “male appearance” of trans rape victims to justify excluding us from rape support and shelters.
In the end, trans women are out here dealing with the same ridiculous expectations as cis women, and it’s bullshit for both groups. Don’t we all deserve to live our lives and present ourselves free from scrutiny? It was Serena who perhaps best summed up the desire for all trans women and femmes when it comes to our appearance: “I wish trans and nonbinary people, and everyone [else] can live a life above reproach. Where cisnormative standards do not necessarily have to be the normative standards and we can all have the freedom and agency to exist in our own spaces. And just plain ol' be left alone.”
Navigating Beauty Standards as a Trans Woman Is an Impossible Balancing Act. By Katelyn Burns. Allure, April 12, 2018.
Nearly
every trans and non-binary person I know has stayed home because they didn't
want to explain themselves, didn't feel valued or safe in public spaces. To be
trans and non-binary is to seek life in places not guaranteed by society, to
find beauty in our ability to move in every direction.
I have broken down in clothing stores and at bathroom stalls. My best friend asked if they needed to shave their legs and beard the day they wore a skirt for the first time, at the age of 22.
In navigating a world with few role models, I interviewed five trans and non-binary creatives known for carving out space for queer bodies and voices. Together we discussed beauty standards and gender expression and identity under the public eye. Meet Alok Vaid-Menon (a gender non-conforming artist with a lot of feelings), Jacob Tobia (a writer, producer, and part-time fashion icon), Jamal T. Lewis (a super nova girl from the future), Sawyer DeVuyst (a visual artist, model and actor, a Leo, and a middle child), and Asia Kate Dillon (an actor, writer, director and co-founder of MIRROR/FIRE productions).
What do you love about yourself? Where have you seen reflections of it?
I have broken down in clothing stores and at bathroom stalls. My best friend asked if they needed to shave their legs and beard the day they wore a skirt for the first time, at the age of 22.
In navigating a world with few role models, I interviewed five trans and non-binary creatives known for carving out space for queer bodies and voices. Together we discussed beauty standards and gender expression and identity under the public eye. Meet Alok Vaid-Menon (a gender non-conforming artist with a lot of feelings), Jacob Tobia (a writer, producer, and part-time fashion icon), Jamal T. Lewis (a super nova girl from the future), Sawyer DeVuyst (a visual artist, model and actor, a Leo, and a middle child), and Asia Kate Dillon (an actor, writer, director and co-founder of MIRROR/FIRE productions).
What do you love about yourself? Where have you seen reflections of it?
Alok: I’ve been trying as much as possible to find validation outside of my body. I love my creativity, my performativity, my drive, and my emotionality. I love that I can hold conflicting ideas and emotions, can bear witness to struggle, can turn trauma into art. I love that I keep finding ways to recreate and transform myself in a world fixated on categories and borders.
Jacob: I love my snarky edge and my messy sense of humor. I love my big ol’ brown eyes, my big ol’ nose, my lil’ hairy belly, my fuzzy legs, and my superhuman ability to grow my nails out without breaking them. I’ve often seen reflections of my own beauty in mirrors, shop windows, ponds, and other relatively still bodies of water. On a good day, there is so much that I’ve learned to celebrate about myself, about my body, about my outlook on life, about the energy that I bring into a room. I’m proactively working to surround myself more often with people who affirm that life energy, rather than people and institutions who take away from it.
Alok: Who I am is a reflection of all of the love and support I am given. So, I would say my friends are the representation I’ve been looking for my entire life.
Jamal: I love how committed I am to prioritizing my wellness and my future. I love that I choose me selfishly. I love my black, dark skin. I love my southern roots. I love how self determined, audacious, and creative I am. I love the many ways I exist and show up in this world. I love how deeply I love and give of myself to others and the things I believe in. I love that I am Carmon’s 4th born child. I love that I am Jafari and Stephen’s mentee. I love that I am Marcus and Kenny’s best friend. I love the way my body moves in the mirror each morning after I’m finished showering and listening to music. Each roll. Each dimple. Each stretch mark. I love my energy in the morning time singing aloud on a Manhattan bound A express train. I love the way I’m listening to, connecting with, and trusting my inner eyes, my intuition, and my feelings. I see my reflection every time I walk past my mirror and raise my phone to take a selfie — the most important media to me.
Sawyer: I love the compassion and empathy I hold for other people. As a child in church, I learned the bible verse, “Do unto others as you would have others do unto you.” My love of this saying grew as I came out as queer and eventually as trans. Thinking of myself as a small piece of a larger picture, or maybe a large piece of a gigantic picture, has helped me realize that I can only control myself and my actions. You can't change other people — that has to come from them. I definitely didn’t see reflections of empathy in the churches I grew up in. But as an adult, I’ve seen reflections of it in a few people — an actor friend, Chad, who I take a class with, a few people, Veronica and Chelsea, at a company I modeled for, and my Aunt Elaine.
I also love my ears, which were given to me by my dad, and which are reflected back at me every time I look at my brothers and sister.
Asia: I love that although the world is a dangerous place, I still find it to be beautiful. I love that I dream big and go after my dreams with all I’ve got to give. I love my ability to generate empathy and compassion within myself and others. I love my work ethic and that my work is representative of my commitment to support and uplift historically marginalized and disenfranchised people because when I support and uplift others I am truly supporting and uplifting myself. I love my struggle. And, I love all the hurt places in myself. Because those places have allowed me the extraordinary experience of healing through which I am continually awed by, and in love with, my own resilience. I see reflections of what I love about myself in the love and care I receive from my friends, family and co-workers who, in turn, allow me to love and care about them.
What do you feel pressured to be?
Jamal: Inspirational; strong and never scared, fearful, or capable of hurting; a mammy; extraordinary; visibly tragic, but never well, sustained, and at peace.
Sawyer: Masculine. Most people I came out to didn’t call me he/him until I started passing as male 100% of the time. People I was close to would misgender me constantly, but isn’t it funny that that stopped as soon as I grew a beard? I also feel pressure to be polite and understanding when microaggressions are being tossed at me.
Jacob: I feel pressure to “make sense” within the binary, pressure to “pick a side.” To either fully butch it up or to physically transition my body by taking estrogen, removing my body hair, getting top and bottom surgery, etc. I feel that pressure a lot, like I can only fit into the equation in the world if I’m one of two variables. We see gender on two-dimensional graphs, but I’m a three-dimensional curve, arcing elegantly through space.
Alok: I am constantly made aware of my difference and pressured to be “normal.” But what no one wants to talk about is that by “normal,” they mean: white, cisgender, gender conforming, straight, and respectable. Why should I have to erase all that I am in order to be accepted? I’ve developed coping strategies to deal with this pressure from most places, but it’s the pressure from within my own communities that stings the most. Women and trans people telling me I would be more believable and desirable if I was more binary hurts so much. Hurt people hurt people.
Asia: For many years I felt pressured by culture at large to either look more traditionally, patriarchal, feminine i.e. shave my legs, armpits and vagina, have long hair and wear feminine clothes or to look more traditionally masculine/androgynous, when it came to my hair and clothes, in order to be desired. That pressure was bullshit and I knew it but, I couldn’t free myself from it. Then I realized, as Alok said, that it’s not the trans, non-binary and gender nonconforming people who need to confront their complexity; it’s the cis and gender conforming people who need to confront the fear of their complexity.
Do you preserve yourself in a binary world? Why do you think people are so attached to binaries?
Sawyer: I’ve preserved myself by physically transitioning, specifically taking HRT. After I came out, I found myself in some unsafe situations, both physically and emotionally. It’s scary and humiliating to be screamed at, to be called names, to be followed and have things thrown at you. I realized that I’m not an Everyday Gender Warrior. Even though my identity lies in the middle of the gender spectrum, it was and is more important to me that I feel safe.
Alok: I’m not sure that I do preserve myself. The toll of existing in this world as a gender non-conforming trans femme of color often feels insurmountable and like I’m just staying afloat by the skin of my teeth. I also sort of reject the premise that I should be the one who should have to do the work of this preservation.
Jacob: My sisters, my siblings, and my chosen family are my everything. They are the only way that I get through all of this bullshit. For me, a key part of survival and self-preservation has also been learning how to pick my battles. I will be spending most of my life fighting against the people who produce pop culture, urging them to include people like me in it and to break out of the traditional gender stories. I can’t do that and bother correcting every person on the street who misgenders me or every person at a deli counter that calls me “sir.” I am not a 24-hours-a-day-7-days-a-week trans 101 robot.
Jamal: I preserve myself through everyday intimacies: I talk to my grandmother on the phone as much as possible; I spend time with friends who make me feel alive and joyful and seen; I listen to music and dance around my room naked and carefree; I talk to myself and practice voice inflections when I speak; I laugh at almost everything, especially racist, anti-black, transphobic, and fat-phobic people in physical and digital space.
Asia: I preserve myself by spending as much time as possible with my family and friends, when I’m not working. I preserve myself by working. By drinking water, eating healthy foods and getting lots of sleep. By taking baths. Long, quiet walks outside. By giving and accepting love. By listening. By keeping my priorities in order and expressing gratitude. By reminding myself that I am multi-dimensional and infinite, existing ultimately beyond time and space, beyond any binary and that I am here, now and that’s a miracle. People are attached to binaries because a binary creates an ‘us’ and ‘them’ which is useful for social, economic and political gain. Without binaries there is only ‘us’ which means ultimately we are all equal. Binaries are meant to keep us unequal and I’m not about that life.
Jamal: They are attached to it for what it affords them — convenience.
Sawyer: I think religion, specifically Christianity, has a lot to do with it. Right in Genesis, it says God created a man and a woman, Adam and Eve. Boom. Binary. But in so many other cultures where Christianity isn’t the dominant religion, there are records of three genders, Hijra in India, Muxe in Zapotec cultures in Mexico, Fa'afafine in Samoa, etc. And in many Native American tribes, upwards of four and five genders were recognized.
Alok: I don’t believe in trans or non-binary issues, I believe in cis issues. It’s cis people who have issues with themselves and extrapolate them on me. Binaries are so tantalizing because people have been made to feel like they do not deserve their own complexity. It is easier to belong to one word, one identity, one fixed story than a universe. That’s why I rely — no, I need — other people to get through it all. I shouldn’t have to clean this mess up alone.
What's an early memory of feeling beautiful on your own terms? What would you want to say to that person?
Jacob: When I first learned to walk in high heels, it was in a McDonald’s parking lot with two of my friends from high school. I loved how my legs looked, and while the shoes hurt, I loved how I felt. But deep down, I couldn’t let myself have the fullness of that beauty.
Alok: When I was a little kid I always used to wear some of my mom’s clothes and dance for all of our family friends at our weekly Indian potluck dinners. Everyone enjoyed it because there was a space for my femininity back then. I often think about that moment as one of transcendent beauty because there was no shame. Shame prevents me and others from recognizing the beauty of transfemininity.
I suppose I would tell that kid to be prepared, that they will try their best to destroy you and call it love, that you have to try your best to hold onto that confidence and that beauty because they will punish you for it.
Jacob: In my teenage years, I spent so much energy hating my femininity, I spent so much energy trying to bottle it up, to regulate it. I told myself that that couldn’t be who I was. I wish I could sit down with my past self and help them feel an iota of the love that I feel for myself now. I wish I could sit down with my past self and say, “Why do you hate this part of yourself? Don’t you know how beautiful it is?”
Asia: I grew up being told by culture at large that girls and women were expected to have long hair; that was the beauty standard. As someone who was assigned female at birth and identifies as non-binary, I knew in high school that part of my journey would include cutting my long hair short so that I could challenge other people’s, and ultimately my own, standard of beauty. I had big ears that I didn't like and I thought, "This is you. This is who you are and you better start loving it now." Cutting my hair short was a way of giving love to myself. To that person I say, keep going. Keep loving yourself.
Sawyer: I don’t remember feeling beautiful until I was 18-years old. My neighbor was in art school and she asked if she could take photos of me for one of her classes. I didn’t understand why. A few weeks later, she gave me a copy of the photos, printed in black and white. Her professor loved them, but the other students didn’t like them at all and felt like she had cheated because they thought she hired a model and that, “the girl was too beautiful.“ I was floored because I’d only been called names and told I, “wasn’t pretty enough to model.” But in that moment, I felt beautiful.
Jamal: My earliest memory of feeling beautiful on my own terms had to be the first time I purchased a digital camera and began taking pictures of myself. There was something so magical about seeing myself. Perhaps, that was my first selfie before I became obsessed with the front camera on my iPhone. If I could tell that person anything, it would be to never lose your selfie. Your selfie is a powerful thing.
What would you want to share with teens who don't see themselves reflected as “beautiful” or at all in the media?
Alok: Don’t wait for mainstream media to include you, create your own media. Creating your own archive is one of the most powerful and important things you can do. Just documenting: I exist, I was here, you can’t erase that fact. I started writing poetry because I needed to write myself into existence — I realized I didn’t even have the language to describe who and what I was, so I had to make it. It’s not easy or glamorous, but it’s incredibly rewarding work: you have the potential to create new worlds, new ideas, new ways of being. Don’t wait for others to catch up with you, just go ahead.
Sawyer: Like Alok said, create your own work! A few years ago, I was fed up with the lack of trans male visibility in the media. I’d spoken to two people in the film and TV industry who I look up to, and both of them stressed to me the importance of creating your own work. It shares your voice and vision. It shows the world you’ve created or the world you live in. With this inspiration, I created a photography project called Mine, a growing collection of daily fine art self-portraits, which turns an eye towards transgender men.
Jamal: If you don’t document your existence and the magnificence of your beauty in this world, no one else will. Don’t ever wait for the media to tell you that you are worthy and beautiful, look in the mirror and gift those things to yourself. Then take your cellphone out and capture the moment. Do this often. And share with your friends. Take pictures of them. Print them out. Make a zine. Find joy in this and continue to make art from it. Show the world new possibilities and make it catch up to you like Alok said. Queer and trans archival is work of the future and critically important counter narratives that disrupt the status quo. Disrupt! Create anew! And watch how it constitutes a new world order.
Jacob: Feeling beautiful can take a lifetime of work, and it’s still something that I struggle with on a daily basis. There are some models out there who make me feel terribly about myself, so I unfollowed them. I know that if I pick up a fashion magazine, I’m going to feel ugly from looking at it, so I pick them up less often. Certain TV shows and films have narratives that I know are going to make me feel bad about myself, so I don’t engage with them. Instead, I focus on creating the world as I want to see it, with representations that empower my beauty rather than hurting me. You don’t need national publications or advertisers in your instagram feed making you feel ugly; you need glorious queer cuties who make you feel good and energized about your body.
Asia: I say, I hear you. I know how that feels. It’s so very hard to constantly come up against images and standards that are simply for profit and therefore so damaging to all our precious psyches. I will humbly echo everything that has already been said and just add this: in the moments where you feel that you are alone, that no one loves you and that you don’t matter, because you feel invisible, remember that I am there with you. I love you, I see you and you do matter to me. Remember that no matter what anyone says, you are awesome and anyone who tries to deny your awesomeness is missing out and that’s their loss. Keep Ya Head Up.
Sawyer: Just by existing in this world, you are beautiful and you are valid.
What Beauty Standards and Identity Mean to These Trans and Non-Binary Creatives. By Lexie Bean. Teen Vogue, May 23, 2017
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