Whose look?

[Butterfly]

Whose look?
Questioning Transphobia
17 February, 2010


http://questioningtransphobia.wordpress.com/2010/02/17/whose-loo/ 🔗


One thing that I encountered, over and over, early in transition was the suggestion (demand, even), that I document my transition.  It'd be fascinating, document something important etc.  The suggestion seemed nonsensical–I've never been a very visual person, I'm a writer, a poet–but worse than that, it annoyed and upset me.  Like a lot of trans people, I have a fraught relationship to photography.

This post by Rebecca articulates a lot of things.  She writes compellingly about the anger she feels at her parents for displaying photos of her pre-transition:

"I'm angry at them for remembering as joyful (or even merely placid) the time I felt as painful and turbulent. I'm angry at them for happily framing and mounting photos that remind me of how horribly trapped I felt at all times. I'm angry at them for mourning the loss of someone who was never really there, regardless of how 'normal' he was or how little 'fixing' he seemed to need. And that anger, I haven't really even started to address."