It was announced today that the new Barneys New York catalog features nearly 20 transgender models, all photographed by Bruce Weber. One of the models—Ryley Pogensky, who identifies as “gender queer”—is quoted in the portfolio as saying: “What is between my legs is not thoroughly who I am. If gender is black and white, I’m gray.” The portfolio is beautiful, touching—many of the models are photographed alongside their family members, with arms slung around each other—and it offers a more nuanced understanding of the fluidity of gender than we’ve seen in recent media.
Following multiple heated exchanges in which Dr. V asked Hannan to keep her personal life private, Dr. V killed herself while Hannan was writing his article, and though she had previously attempted suicide, her fear of being outed by Grantland was implicated in her death. The tragedy has sparked numerous conversations about journalistic ethics, personal privacy, and perhaps most importantly, the danger of ignorance. Because for Grantland—a website created by Bill Simmons, a straight white man—their mistake was ultimately one of ignorance, particularly about the risks of outing a transgender woman, and about the disproportionate rates of suicide, violence, poverty, and social discrimination experienced by the trans community.
In the many, many responses to the Grantland story, one statistic repeatedly stands out: a staggering 41 percent of all trans people attempt suicide—a rate, according to the Los Angeles Times, nearly nine times the national average. That I hadn’t known this fact made me feel both scared and embarrassed. I’m a sexually fluid person with many friends in the LGBTQ community, some of whom are trans. I have dated people who fall within a gender-gray area: females who don’t relate to certain parts of their body or the social implications of being a woman, which has taught me firsthand about the vast and complex spectrum of gender.
I called my acquaintance Nomi Ruiz, a singer-songwriter most known for her vocal performances with Hercules and Love Affair. Nomi, 27, is a transgender woman who grew up in NYC and is all too familiar with the experience of being outed. “I started making hip-hop at a young age, working alongside rappers and producers,” she told me. “I never thought about being trans, I was just doing what I loved.” But when Nomi was 19, a journalist published an article on a music blog outing her, after which she says her producers stopped calling and the record deal she’d been offered was revoked. “Everything fell apart,” she said. “I was afraid and ashamed, and it took me a long time to gain my confidence back.”
But then it happened again, while doing press for Hercules and Love Affair. After Nomi specified that she didn’t want to address her gender in interviews, she says a British newspaper ignored her request, as if by virtue of being trans she somehow owed the world intimate knowledge of her body and her past. She recalls, “From then on, I was the ‘transexual singer Nomi’ . . . like the word transsexual would literally come before my name,’ she says, laughing at the ridiculousness of it. But this time she handled things differently. “What hurt me the most was that by hiding it, people assumed I was ashamed, which I wasn’t—I’m very proud to be who I am,” she said. “And then I began to feel a responsibility—when I started talking, I saw that people were finding their own strength in my story, and that made me stronger.” Ultimately, Nomi was willing to sacrifice her personal privacy, in hopes of creating a future where others won’t be robbed of theirs.
Earlier this month, Katie Couric invited Orange Is the New Black actress Laverne Cox and model Carmen Carrera to appear on her daytime talk show—since both are trans women, it appeared to be an opportunity to raise awareness about transgender issues to a massive audience of moms across America. However, a naive Couric made a familiar mistake: She asked her guests invasive questions about their genitals (“Your private parts are different now, aren’t they?”) and focused on their transitions. Of course, it would be considered awkward and rude to ask any other guest a direct question about the state of their genitals, and why should these women be treated differently? But Cox gave a brilliant response: “I think the preoccupation with transition and with surgery objectifies trans people . . . by focusing on bodies we don’t focus on the lived realities of that oppression and that discrimination.” She shared the story of Islan Nettles, a 21-year-old black woman who was recently beaten to death in the street in Harlem after, according to witnesses, a man discovered she was transgender. Sadly, this is just one story of the hundreds that happen each year. As Nomi put it to me, “We need to start taking responsibility for the holocaust that’s happening now to trans girls around the world.”
Why are we more preoccupied with the body than the brutality? What makes us so uncontrollably curious about the intimate physical details of those who are different from ourselves? It feels like we’re operating on a very primal level: Man has penis, woman has vagina, penis goes into vagina to make baby . . . . And anyone who challenges that order is so perplexing to us that we demand an explanation—we feel entitled to it, even—even if it means violating another person’s privacy. The person under question is not seen as human, but rather as a curious creature being dissected for our own peace of mind. It’s sort of like how if you’re a woman who sleeps with women, you constantly have to deal with people who you barely know asking, “So which one of you is the man?” or “Wait . . . how do you guys have sex, exactly?” As if those questions somehow suggest a flattering interest in the way that “you people” live. And of course, “us people” have sex in an infinite variety of ways that are based on an infinite variety of factors, just like straight people. David Sedaris, who’s full of comical insights into life as a gay man, put it well in his essay, “The Way We Are,” for The New Yorker:
It’s astonishing the amount of time that certain straight people devote to gay sex—trying to determine what goes where, and how often. They can’t imagine any system outside their own, and seem obsessed with the idea of roles, both in bed and out of it. Who calls whom a bitch? Who cries harder when the cat dies? Which one spends the most time in the bathroom? I guess they think that it’s that cut and dried, though of course it’s not.
But as Weber’s photographs illustrate, in the past few years, there’s been an increase of trans visibility in the mainstream media. Back in 2010, Givenchy broke ground when they used trans model Lea T in their fall ad campaign. The popularity of Cox’s character in Orange Is the New Black is unmistakable. This year’s Dallas Buyers Club—a current nominee for the Academy Award for Best Picture—cast Jared Leto as a transgender woman suffering from AIDS in the 1980s. Of course, this is all a step in the right direction, though many people still remain oblivious to the casual transphobia thrown around on TV and in movies, and even within liberal and queer social circles. Leto recently insulted the LGBTQ community in his acceptance speech at the Golden Globes, making cheap, unsympathetic jokes about having to wax his entire body to play the role of a trans woman, thereby trivializing the struggles of the community his character represents. And then there is the highly publicized case of Chelsea Manning, the U.S. Army soldier who was sentenced to 35 years in prison last year for leaking classified government documents to WikiLeaks. Born with the first name “Bradley,” Manning is a trans woman. Despite much evidence that Manning identified as female, her decision was greeted with skepticism. Major national news outlets reacted with confusion concerning the proper pronoun usage in their reporting. Even individuals who were Manning’s supporters, and considered her an American hero, reflected a cluelessness around the self-identification of transgender people.
We cannot be what we cannot see, which is why having idols to aspire to is so important. Nomi feels like this is starting to change, though, and sees progress from when she was a kid, saying, “When I was young, I didn’t really have anyone to look up to who was ‘like me,’ and I had no idea what I was going through. But now if you’re queer, you [might] think, “Oh, that’s me, that’s what I’m dealing with. And that allows you to carve out a vision of your future. The more visible trans women are, the better. Ours is a beautiful and unique experience, and we should see ourselves as special on this earth, and as more evolved, rather than as an error we have to correct and cover up.”
Karley Sciortino writes the blog Slutever. Read her last post, “The Business of Beautification: Considering the Vajacial.”
On Sciortino: Uniqlo cardigan; For information: uniqlo.com
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