The idea of being marginalised is referred to often and holds special attention for artists, who know all about the importance of what is happening at the edge of the frame. The frame is in itself a censorious thing, being the limit of what is seen and what is not. Sometimes the transgender community, through history, has sneaked inside the frame and we have an image here or there of Molly Houses or portrayals of folk with indeterminate genders. Mostly however, the trans community is kept out of the image. In recent years some trans folk have started becoming the focus of images, but this tends to mainly be transgender women who fit a certain representation of beauty.

This image fits the worldview of the trans community, perceived as an offshoot of a reality show about drag queens. The symbolic image for the whole transgender community is a hyper-sexualised version of womanhood. The potency of this image is enshrined in the fear mongering about transgender women using the toilet, where caricatures of us as predators in drag are thrown about like candyfloss. This grossly distorted image is sadly still acceptable, where so many crudely prejudiced cartoons have become rightly rejected by society.

This reduction of the infinite complexity of transgender personalities to a single, jaundiced symbol, lazily portrays gender divergence as an addendum to sexuality and belittles the community. The reality is that the transgender community is every bit as diverse as the non-trans, cis world…..except that we are a community who are largely hidden. Working with transgender youths, Transmission Art Project had created an event designed to highlight our experience of being alienated from the mainstream public world. This difficulty in engaging with public life is perhaps the single most common experience to all transgender people, whether it is about going to the loo or accessing the appropriate documentation. The event was designed to turn the tables and give the audience an experience of being outside the action, looking in from the outside, at a group of trans young people having fun – replicating the trans experience of marginalisation and exclusion, whilst engaging with the imagery. However, the covid crisis hit and we all became isolated. For most of society, that isolation will become a memory, as the frame fills up again with cis-folk rightly enjoying their return to freedom. If we return to that world which preceded the crisis, we transgender folk will remain outside the frame or in the margins at best. We will by and large continue only as an audience, looking at the world through the frames of our TV screens or windows, unable to participate.

Most of the younger transgender community do not identify as wholly male or wholly female, but rather as non-binary or fluid about their gender. They pick and choose, which aspects of the different genders fit them most comfortably & are forging a path of incredible beauty, which is more or less completely missed, as the lens passes them by to focus on a face which is of interest largely because it hides the fact it is transgender. The question of visibility has a long history within the wider LGBT+ community, where the intensely visible nature of transgender women was seen as an embarrassment and lead to trans individuals being hidden, in the pursuit of accommodation to mainstream society. The other side of this coin has been the way the image of Rosie the Riveter has become so potent, that transgender men have struggled to make themselves seen. The co-option of traditionally male clothing for all genders has become so ubiquitous, that where differences in biology are foregrounded for transgender women through the spotlight on hypersexualisation, transgender men are subsumed by a sea of utilitarian clothing, forever out of frame.

Words: Kelly Stubbs

Images: Kerry McSweeney