Illusory Anima

The reason I'm a trans woman is dysphoria. The reason I medically transitioned is that I do not, as much as possible, want to appear like I have undergone androgenizing puberty. The thought of having certain anatomical features is upsetting to me, which is not a moral or aesthetic judgement of these features themselves or people who have them. It also does not mean that I believe that you have to look a certain way to be a woman. It simply means that because the thought of looking a certain way is painful to me, I transitioned. This is inextricable from my being a trans woman. This is not the case for all trans women. But it is the case for many of them and the interests of those for who it is not do not nullify the interests of those for who it is. That being dysphoric is not a requirement for being a trans woman does not mean that trans women who are not dysphoric can speak for trans women who are, can deny the legitimacy or urgency of the needs they have as a result of being dysphoric. I can speak as a dysphoric trans woman because I'm a dysphoric trans woman, not because I'm a trans woman.

I occasionally get upset when I see what is ostensibly meant to be representations of trans women in illustrations. This is because I understand such representations not as "an accurate rendering of the likeness of an arbitrary person that actually exists in a fictional world who happens to be a trans woman" but instead as an indication of how the artist views trans women. It is indicative of which features the artist finds noteworthy in trans women. If the features that are prominent are the same ones that I feel dysphoric about (or that are otherwise strongly associated with men or are part of the visual vocabulary that is used to communicate maleness), I interpret this as being depicted in a way that I dislike being seen (that I would much prefer not being seen at all over). It doesn't make me feel dysphoric, it makes me feel insulted like an offensive caricature - except for the fact that an unintentional insult (a microaggression) is more hurtful because it isn't motivated by a desire to hurt. Be that as it may, representational art is not reality (not even "fictional reality") - it is a form of communication. It says something about what it depicts.

When the artist herself is a trans woman, my perspective changes. In such a case, a (non-antagonistic) illustration representing a trans woman isn't necessarily indicative of how she sees other trans women, it could also be an expression of how she sees herself or how she wants to be seen. Because I don't understand her to be making a statement about me when she draws a trans woman, I am generally unfazed regardless of how much I would not like to be seen in that way.

We are already embedded in ideologies that assign values to physical features. An artistic representation is not placed into an ideological void. It is naive to assume that straightforward depiction of certain features could function as "normalizing" them, as destigmatizing them, as resignifying them as attractive etc. If this were the case it would be enough to passively observe the general population to lose one's aversion to features that are designated as unattractive. But we do not operate on a principle of "everything that we see is good and beautiful". We do not think "ugly" features are "ugly" simply because we haven't been exposed to them enough. Seeing a feature that is regarded as unattractive in a fictional representation of a character belonging to a population you also belong to may simply uncomfortably remind you that you share this "unattractive" feature. The emancipation of the dissonance is a process that happens through acclimatization. In order to resignify a feature generally regarded as "unattractive" as "attractive", it needs to be contextualized as "attractive". This is done through framing, through visual language, through careful omissions, through association with features that are generally seen as "attractive", etc. Perhaps you feel that it is ideologically impure to make such selective use of same the ideology that makes a feature into a signifier of unattractiveness to begin with, but there is no realistic alternative. You cannot browbeat people into developing an appreciation for certain physical features by simply exposing them to them and telling them that they have a moral obligation to find these features appealing - not because it's wrong to do so, but simply because it doesn't work. It doesn't do anything. At most you shame people into being afraid to make aesthetic judgements at all.

Having aesthetic preferences is part of being human. They are shaped by ideology. We can participate in shaping them, we don't have to place ourselves entirely outside and above the cultural production of beauty ideals to gain nothing but a sense of moral superiority. If you refuse to draw fat people beautifully because their worth does not depend on being beautiful, or because all the other factors involved in shaping beauty standards are also regressive, your art will do nothing to disassociate being fat from being unattractive. We must "use the tools of the oppressor" because he is using every tool there is. Get over yourself. Get your hands dirty. Your ultimate goal cannot be to be a better person than an artist reproducing hegemonic beauty ideals, you have to actually succeed in changing those ideals. How guilty you feel about it is immaterial. Either get serious or stop pretending you believe in the possibility of achieving your goal. You must not settle into your role as a sinless outsider to cultural production, you must throw yourself against the mainstream. For a gear train to transmit motion, the teeth have to engage. Don't accept blamelessness in exchange for consigning yourself to uselessness.

If you don't allow yourself a point of attack, there is no attack. You simply agree to disagree with the status quo and voluntarily sequester yourself in your counter-cultural niche. Coward!

What's more, conventional attractiveness in fictional representations is (although it shouldn't be) conflated with moral goodness while features regarded as unattractive are (although they shouldn't be) conflated with immorality. When an artist renders a trans woman in a way that would generally be considered "unattractive" by the standards that are applied to women (which trans women are held to) then regardless of their intention, they risk villainizing them.

You cannot simply "draw a trans woman as you see her" when your perception is rotten with transmisogyny. You do not see reality "as it is", you see it filtered through layers of abstraction informed by ideology. What you take note of and what becomes invisible by being unremarkable is not a feature of reality "as it is". You cannot take the way you would draw cis women as your baseline and then modify all the features that stand out to you as different when you draw a trans woman. The way you would draw a cis woman (barring a photorealistic rendering based on carefully measured photo reference depicting a randomly sampled cis woman) is not a value neutral representation of how cis women actually look, it is an idealized representation of cis womanhood constructed in opposition to an idealized image of cis manhood. If your perception tells you "compared to cis women, trans women look like this" then you need to ask yourself which cis women you are comparing them to and how you would draw those cis women and how those drawings differ from the real cis women they represent.

In the stylized, abstracted, partially symbolic styles commonly found in comics, cartoons, manga, anime, webtoons etc. detail gesturing at realism is often a way to dehumanize the subject being depicted, it has an alienating/distancing effect. An abstracted, simplified, iconic animal or person is a projection surface that lends itself to identification and empathy. The absence of detail is readily filled in with our default assumptions. Fidelity that allows differentiation is a hindrance to identification. A realistic depiction is inscrutable, its symbolic "essence" is obscured by meaningless detail, in its specificity it represents only itself. Instead of being presented with an abstraction that through its visual language communicates to us things we couldn't possibly know from looking at its real world counterpart, we are presented with a facsimile of a real object full of ambiguity and noise that we have to abstract ourselves in the process of making sense of it.

I think a large part of the humor found in "Junji Ito's Cat Diary: Yon & Mu" consists of the cats being depicted in a style that generally refuses to humanize them by way of significant stylization/abstraction. It isn't simply a photo that contains details because reality contains details, it is an artist going out of his way to make you aware of those (sometimes unflattering) details.

This isn't how you draw when you look at the world normally, it's how you draw when you carefully take stock of which parts of your observation actually correspond to physical reality, which requires sustained conscious effort and practice. When drawing from life, a significant hurdle is learning to draw what you see as opposed to drawing "what you think you see". The abstraction your mind inadvertently creates of whatever you observe constantly gets in the way, it encroaches upon the sensory data, it has to be kept in check and accounted for - sometimes literally by learning about the ways in which your perception distorts what you see and drawing what you infer is the ground truth, e.g. reminding yourself that "the lightest shadow value is darker than the darkest halftone value" while rendering, even if it doesn't look that way. "Caricature" and symbolism are much closer to the default, intuitive way to see and depict the world than strict realism.

Children's drawings for example are often highly symbolic. Whether the sun in children's drawings is red or yellow doesn't depend on the actual appearance of the sun or even just the child's personal impression of it, it depends on the cultural norms shaping their understanding of reality and the visual language representing it.

What you notice about your subject is generally only what stands out in comparison to your preconceived notion of what it should look like, your default assumption. What trans women look like to you is not just a function of what they really do look like, it's also a function of what you think women should look like. Which details you find noteworthy enough to represent often says more about how you think about your subject (where she fails to meet your expectations of what a woman should look like) than about your subject herself. In the same way that female character designs are frequently dominated by their "femaleness" in relation to male characters (who have a wider range of designs), trans female characters are frequently dominated by their "transness" in relation to cis female characters. This is not a good thing. It's transmisogyny.

Even when some difference actually does exist in reality, that is not sufficient justification for representing it in a non-photorealistic style. If a difference is represented, who is allowed to become the default and whose appearance is altered to represent that they are "different from the default" is a political choice. In stylized art, you don't actually draw cis women the way they look in reality (instead the depiction is governed by aesthetic, cultural, symbolic considerations that have no equivalent in physical reality), the stylized visual representation refers to its real world counterpart partially by convention, as a symbol, an item of vocabulary in our shared visual language, not simply by literal correspondence to reality. Much like the word "women" doesn't refer to women by looking or sounding like them or otherwise resembling them in some way but simply because that's what we use it to mean.

Take a look at these character designs:

Can you visually distinguish which of these characters are ethnically Japanese, which ones are white and which ones are Half-Japanese in the text of their respective works? Can you tell for which of these characters hair and eye color are representational and for which ones they are symbolic or aesthetic choices? Can you tell the sex/gender of these characters? Can you tell their "anatomical sex"? Can you tell their assigned sex? Can you tell which of these characters are trans? Is it necessary that you are able to discern any of these things from their appearance? Is it a problem if you are unable to? (Do you perhaps think that Japanese artists owe it to white people to draw Japanese people as visually distinct while assuming a perspective that considers whiteness the default, because these characters may all appear white to white people or people living in predominantly white contexts, who project whiteness into the absence of distinguishing characteristics?)

Whether or not (and to what extent) a difference is worth the fidelity required to represent it is not a neutral choice. Art is communication. What you leave vague and what you deem worthy of visual disambiguation is a choice you have control over. If you think it's so important to visually represent the fact that a female character is not cis that you sacrifice the aesthetic appeal and relatability of a simpler and cuter design (which you reserve for cis women because you have never questioned the presupposition that cis women are the default women) in order to do so, for whose benefit are you doing that?

How have you managed to convince yourself that this skull-measuring impulse that has you trying to make a visual argument for the validity and immutability of assigned sex categories is progressive? If you project cis womanhood into the absence of distinguishing characteristics, that is a problem with your perception.

To be frank, I would rather you notice how exceptionally cute I am compared to most cis men than have you meticulously detail every minuscule way in which I fail to live up to the idealized version of cis womanhood that only exists inside your head, to make a spectacle of my perceived inability to live up to misogynistic beauty standards (which trans women are always held to) by rendering every pore on my skin that you think a real woman wouldn't have. If you think drawing trans women without including every last feature associated with masculinity would be a lie by omission, then the way you perceive trans women simply disqualifies you from depicting them. Perhaps you need to look at some cis women, really look at them until you see the actual light hitting your eyes and the symbol disappears - and not just models and actresses and influencers, average people. Maybe then you'll notice that we're not as different as you would very clearly like to believe.

Do you actually care enough to do the work to first see us as we are, and then to notice the things about us that we like about ourselves, to occasionally dignify us with the visual language of cuteness and grace and softness and femininity and gentleness, instead of insisting on the caricatures of people trying but failing to look like women that your ideologically stained perception (or fetish) evidently tells you we are?

Rather than simply being an issue of intent vs. outcome, I believe it is also an issue of being able to execute on one's intent. Representation is an issue that requires delicacy, care, understanding, practice and actual skill. Intending to write a great symphony only results in a great symphony when the composer is able to realize that intention. We do not praise lazy, formulaic, stale or incompetent works simply because it was the intention of the artist to produce something worthwhile. Why then is this a standard we should apply to art which doesn't simply strive for artistic merit but attempts to comment on us, that through its misrecognition isn't simply unappealing but deeply hurtful/harmful? "Representation" is a difficult task that many people are unqualified for because they do not take seriously the work of developing it as a skill.

Image of the Ecce Homo fresco in the Santuario de Misericordia church in Spain (painted originally by Elías García Martínez ca. 1930), which was infamously ruined by the untrained amateur Cecilia Giménez attempting to restore it despite lacking the requisite skill to do so.

Not all artistic representation is better than no artistic representation. Don't expect gratitude in exchange for insults because you are incompetent. Slacker!

There's only so much you can justify by saying that "there's nothing wrong with looking a certain way". There's nothing wrong with having bright red skin, cloven hooves, a pointed tail and horns, but people might still come to the conclusion that this kind of depiction isn't a politically neutral choice. If there is no visual overlap between trans women and cis women in your art then perhaps you have some unacknowledged ideas about human sex characteristics as they relate to trans people. "We can always tell" does not become a progressive slogan if you add "and that's beautiful". Objecting to an offensive depiction does not mean accepting that having the features by which the group is being caricatured would actually make a person lesser or that it is impossible for someone to have these features. Trans women aren't being "the real transmisogynists" by objecting to being depicted with a focus on "masculine" features. They are seeing themselves through your eyes, filtered through your ideology, and recognize the distortions transmisogyny introduces.

To say that "it is transmisogynistic to depict trans women with features strongly associated with men" does not mean actually having these features would be indicative of genuine maleness, it means recognizing that they are being attributed to trans women as symbols of maleness.

I do not think "looking like a woman" is what makes me a woman, but I do think being depicted "not looking like a woman" and being depicted as "not being a woman" are exactly identical in a visual medium, because the semiotics of visual media are visual. Womanhood in a visual medium is conveyed through shared visual signifiers of womanhood. There is no private visual language, we have to rely on a shared visual vocabulary. It's not enough to smugly insist "I don't think my drawing looks like a man, maybe your idea of what men and women look like is regressive" because we are not using our personal views to interpret visual language. We use regressive ideas of "what men and women look like" to make sense of visual art because these ideas are part of our shared understanding of visual language. A word's meaning is its use, its shared use. That our shared visual language should be changed does not mean it already has been changed - and acting like it has will have you calling us "trannies" because you don't think it should be an insult. But it still is.

If you want to change the visual language of sex/gender then the point of attack you should choose is not people whose sex/gender is not seen as authentic to begin with, whose appearance is seen as having no bearing on "actual womanhood" or "actual manhood". There is no progressive value whatsoever to the assertion that trans women have the physical features of cis men, this is the most baseline reactionary view there is. It doesn't combat sex/gender stereotypes or roles, it isn't in any way subversive - it simply visually confirms what cisnormativity wants to be true: that trans women are fundamentally different from "authentic women" (cis women), that transfeminized people are fundamentally excluded from "authentic femininity" because of their "biological sex". It reproduces an ideology of immutable sexual difference, of people being safely confined to their assigned sex with no real way to ever transcend these categories. It does this using our shared visual language.

Relying on our shared visual vocabulary of transmisogyny to denote transfeminization is transmisogynistic, regardless of your intent. Your intent not being hostile doesn't make your art non-transmisogynistic, it makes it unintentionally transmiosgynistic. Being unable to parse our shared visual language to determine whether or not your art is transmisogynistic doesn't make you progressive, it makes you an incompetent artist with a concerning lack of awareness of transmisogyny.

MEANING IN A VISUAL MEDIUM IS CONVEYED VISUALLY THROUGH SHARED VISUAL LANGUAGE.

Spare us your lazy sophisms, your posturing about how progressive your own personal view of the semiotics of sex/gender is. When using a language, you have to take into account what its words mean to its other users. Individualist!

I might not have ever realized that I wanted to transition if it weren't for representation that looked like what I wanted to look like, that it was even worth attempting. Why align yourself with the reactionary forces that try to keep trans people from transitioning by implying transition is a futile effort, that we are forever doomed to look, above all, like our assigned sex?

Depicting trans people in a way that suggests an extreme sexual dimorphism based on assigned sex with no overlap doesn't bear out in reality and it's irresponsible, sexist, transphobic and (by my reckoning) intersexist. If you're not a trans woman yourself, you mustn't limit yourself to exclusively depicting visibly trans trans women. You do have some obligations towards people whose reason for transitioning is dysphoria. You can't allow yourself produce what will inadvertently function as anti-transition propaganda when judged by its effect on dysphoric people. You cannot let vulnerable girls think "this (and only this) is how people will see me" when that is the opposite of what they want - and then wash your hands of the result because you did it in the name of "representation".

I don't want you to feel like you have a moral right to completely unrestrained artistic freedom. Representation has to suit the represented, not just the artist - and not just those members of the population being represented that the artist hand-picked because they tell them what they're doing is perfectly fine. That kind of self-serving "listening to [x] voices" where you yourself make the choice which [x] to listen to is worth less than nothing, it's the definition of tokenism. What kind of representation goes out of its way to antagonize the people it claims to represent? I do want you to walk on eggshells. And I want you to do your part in increasing the number of cast off eggshells to walk on by very gently encouraging their occupants to hatch (by letting them know that there are people who will look at them with love in their eyes - love on their terms, love that they can recognize as love, love for what they love about themselves, love that isn't based on painful misrecognition).

When the forces of reaction proclaim "we can always tell", will you allow them to speak through your art? Traitor!

A final note about miscommunication. The later Ludwig Wittgenstein writes that language assumes different meanings depending on the contexts in which it is used. He characterizes these contexts as "language games". Different language games have different rules. In order for communication to be successful, the players have to be aware that they are playing the same game and they have to have a shared understanding of its rules. If one player thinks they are playing a different game, then they will understand the language being used to have a different meaning (because the rules that associate language with meaning change from game to game).

I am sure that a lot of artists have no intention to speak about trans women in general when they depict individual fictional trans women, but they completely fail to create a context that makes this plausible for the audience. For example, a mentally ill character in a work of fiction being a criminal assumes a different meaning when they are part of a large ensemble cast featuring many mentally ill people who aren't criminals than if they had been the only mentally ill character within a work that is otherwise populated by people who are neither mentally ill nor criminals. You, the artist, are not the sole authority over which "language game" you are playing. You have to make it clear to the other players which game you are playing, and you have to do it in a way that doesn't seem like a lie or an excuse. "All the trans women who aren't drawn with visual language that calls them men just happen to be off screen at all times". Be serious about it if you want us to play along.

Don't misunderstand me as saying that you should only draw trans people who perfectly resemble cis people of their own gender (though drawing those is required). That would be overcorrecting. "Clocky" trans people and gender-non-conforming trans people deserve respectful representation. That is a genuinely difficult task within a visual medium, where symbolic and representational aspects compete against each other (there is no benefit to pretending that this conflict doesn't exist). We should not abandon the field to the hostile caricatures that define the visual vocabulary of transmisogyny, but "good intentions" are not nearly enough to make a transmisogynistic caricature into anything else. There simply is no other way than learning to balance conflicting ideological demands against each other, which requires skill.

As an artist you are a propagandist, so learn to recognize how ideology shapes perception (including yours) and learn how to propagandize. Don't be a coward, don't be a slacker, don't be an individualist, don't be a traitor. Don't get defensive because you feel attacked, self reflect. You are being attacked because you make yourself into a nuisance by your careless actions, you can stop being a nuisance at any time by putting down your pen. If you cannot currently depict us respectfully, don't publish your depictions until you can. Not every stage of your artistic development needs to be subjected to public scrutiny.