I no longer have any PhD funding. That means I’ve zero income from what is effectively my day job. A Pistachio Frappuccino® from Starbucks costs $7.35USD plus sales tax A subscription to my Substack costs $8USD. Because I’m a Canadian that’s $11CAD to me. If I got 200 paying subscribers, I could actually afford to like live comfortably for the first time half a decade (phd income levels are precarious at best)! Basically for the price of buying me a coffee a month you can be a shockingly large part of how I stop doing SW and get out of poverty. Please Consider subscribing!

Lionel LeMoine FitzGerald, Woman with Camera Outdoors, 1917

This essay was first published on Instagram December 2nd, 2021, and is being reprinted here as I am taking the week off because of a physical health emergency.

I'm a photographer. Currently primarily as a hobby but I've worked professionally before too. For a few years I was a minorly successful art photographer. After that I was an event photographer. And for a few years I was a photography journalist. It was always a side gig to my academic career.

I don't really shoot nudes. When I was living as a man it was because asking someone to pose for me felt predatory or aggressive. Now it's because internalized transmisogyny tells me the same thing. But I've always adored nudes, well a particular type of nude. I'm not really interested in that style that dehumanizes the person and turns their lines into a sort of geometry or landscape. I like ones with personality, where the person is present and there is an intimacy to them.

I've also deeply enjoy being the subject of photos, even if dysphoria gets in the way of me always appreciating them. And, because I have friends who are also to various degrees photographers, it has never been hard to have my photo taken. I'm a little too shy to request it. But people take them or ask to take them of me all the same.

But nudes are messier. I'm not sure how to react when someone asks to take a nude of me. And that's not because I don't want it to happen. I love the idea that someone might see artistic beauty in my body. It's because of what I've been taught about my genitals.

You see, of the admins of this account, I'm the only one who still as a penis, and I don't intend on that changing. I like it. But it deeply complicates the question of nudes of me for me. And it shouldn't. But it does. And it's not that I don't like the look of it, I think it's actually pretty cute. It's about the social messaging we get, even, perhaps especially, in leftist spaces about the showing of a penis.

While no one actually comes out and says it (okay that's a lie I'm sure it's been said somewhere on tumblr) a lot of the messages we get and spread about penises can be boiled down to the idea that a penis is violence. Not merely that it can be used for violence, but that the simple act of being made aware of it is a violence.

The idea of flashers, the rhetoric about unsolicited dick pics, kink/nudity at pride discourse, and a variety of other narratives promote this idea that to see a penis is to have been harmed by its owner. But on my photography Instagram account I see (increasingly censored due to insta) vaginas and breasts near constantly.

And I'm not mad about that. The increase in "vaginal art" that seeks to reclaim the beauty of the vagina or simply a cute snapshot of a girl dancing around, these things have value. And while I've personally been harmed by cis women, I will openly admit there is something different between seeing a vagina and a penis. Though personally neither bother me.

The problem that remains is personal, but a personal one shared by many trans women. For a cis girl, nudes pose a problem too of course. There is a patriarchy that will judge them, view them as immodest, sexualize them, etc. And I'm not here to diminish that. I'm here to tell you that there is a whole extra level of anxiety when you've been told your whole life that your genitalia represents violence.

I'm terrified of letting someone know that they can take nudes of me, because that might be a form of pressuring them too.

I'm terrified of them developing the film, because the person developing it might be hurt by seeing me naked. I'm terrified of them posting the nude publicly because not everyone who scrolls consented to seeing my penis, or it's blurred outline.

So right now my solution is Polaroids. When people ask I ask that it be taken on Polaroid (to spare the developer), and not posted (to spare potential viewers). But that isn't really fair to me is it, that I have to walk around feeling like to see me is an affront at best, violence at worst?

I beautiful in my trans body and my penis is no more capable of violence than a vagina. Certainly seeing it, soft and pink, is no more awful than seeing someone's grainy 35mm vagina. Isn't it unfair that I've been taught to be actively fearful that it's image might harm someone. Shouldn't I be allowed the same photographic freedom as my cisters?

Practically, I don't know what to do about this. I know theoretically I should say I'm trans and beautiful and anyone who thinks that merely seeing a trans woman naked is insurmountably more violent than a naked cis girl can fuck off. But I still feel it. I feel the weight of the takes, the text posts, the nightly news, and the comments sections. I adore and am forever grateful for the trans artists, models, and sex workers I follow who are helping fight these ideas. And I'm grateful for the smutty manga I occasionally consume that depicts trans women as just as vulnerable and just as non-violent naked as nude cis women. But I still struggle. I'm still afraid. I'm still horrified that someone will be injured by the sight of my body. And I will not forgive society for teaching me that at my most vulnerable I am somehow a weapon.

Anyways.

Ask trans girls out.

Offer to take nudes of them if you're a photographer who takes nudes of cis girls, especially if you are a cis girl. Comfort and reassure them that it's okay for them not to be tucking constantly, that they're allowed to wear that bathing suit, that it's okay for them to be naked in change rooms. Do this without them asking for it.

Help us learn that our bodies are not violence.

Get 10% off for 1 year

Acknowledgements:

The following people are “founding member” paid subscribers. That is, they are people who decided that my work was not only worth supporting, but that they could afford to pay more than the rate I was asking. On both a financial and emotional level these people mean an incredible amount to me. I screamed aloud the first time anyone ever became one. I cried when a second person did. The least I can do is thank each one individually. They give me hope. Thank you to:

X Valentine, T S, i.m., Hopestill, Jane Oxabel and Rachel K

You have filled me with joy, and helped make this writing possible.