You look so good in blue.

Jean-François Bouchard’s Transpose

“I didn’t want this to be sexual or shocking,“ he explained in a recent interivew with Canada’sNational Post. “I wanted this to be about the personal stories. I could have shot this in a far more shocking way — scars, things like that. But I didn’t want to take over the personal stories that are more important.”

Fittingly, the spare, deceptively powerful portraits are accompanied by personal statements from his subjects, a diverse group of young and middle-aged trans men with whom Bouchard, a cisgender (nontrans) man, worked after three years of research. A statement by subject Alex reads simply, ”[My] tattoo means strong because you have to be. Five and a half years of weekly injections, two surgeries, and I now finally feel comfortable in my body.“

[This picture composition is by Rae over at birlybir]

This morning, I woke up to social media telling me that today is Trans Day of Visibility. My first reaction was: “huh, what is this trans day of visibility that i never heard of? is that a new cool thing recently invented by white cis queers? is this also the day when we go around with our mason jars collecting allyship tokens?”… And then I stayed in bed and felt terrible for being so cynical. I also wondered what kind of trans person was I that I never even heard about a Trans Day Visibility?!

I got out of bed and went to work, but that sense of discomfort that had inhabited me since this morning refused to leave my body. Each time I logged on to social media platforms throughout the afternoon, I saw posts and posts about this trans day of visibility, mostly by cis folks, and a couple of heart-warming ones by trans folks and quite a lot of cynical ones by other (most racialized) trans folks. This wretched punch that had been beating in my guts did not stop as the evening rolled by…

“feelings,” I thought, listening to the signs in my body, “i have feelings.”

endless list of celebrity crushes  » laura jane grace

who don’t have short messy and brightly colored hair

who can’t afford a binder

whose parents won’t let them get a binder

who aren’t lean or “the perfect weight”

whose pronouns aren’t respected by anyone except people online

whose pronouns aren’t respected

who can’t take selfies and post them because people will assume pronouns

who are female/male passing and don’t want to be

shoutout to every single nb kid out there who struggles with self image