Preposterous Ideology

My series Preposterous Ideology explores the rising transphobia in the United States. The images intermix elements of the very laws that seek to take away my rights along with images of my own transitioning body using the language of glitch.

Work needs to be done to make the world a more accepting place for trans people. The falsely accepted norm of the gender binary needs to be dismantled, particularly in the face of growing anti-trans sentiment and legislature. It’s no longer ok for people to stand by as our safety and rights to live are stripped away. Through my work, I seek to educate about the tribulations of those who dare to live beyond the binary.

I show these struggles by utilizing the very texts of the laws that seek to take away my rights. Picking key lines that highlight the more heinous and often ridiculous aspects of transphobia. These snippets of laws are combined with photographic self-portraits of my own transitioning body with the databending process, defying the canon of what bodies should be shown. In databending the binary code of the files themselves is modified using non-traditional editing programs, this proverbial and literal breaking of the binary results in visual glitches.

The glitches that result from the forced modifications the file goes through when databending matches the struggles and scars left behind by those forced to go through the incorrect puberty. In a way, it leaves us glitched from the trauma we faced growing up in a body that felt unnatural to us. These glitches show the difficulties trans and non-binary people face as we are forced to navigate a society that not only expects but strictly enforces the gender binary. We must stretch, modify, and hide our true selves to avoid being erased and deleted from society, to avoid being “fixed” like the glitches we are seen as.