Arien Reed

Throughout history and still largely today, people who are gender diverse are often deadnamed, misgendered, and portrayed in the media as villains, freaks, and jokes (sometimes all three, as in Ace Ventura: Pet Detective) or as pitiful corpses (ie, as hate crime murder victims on shows like CSI: Miami.) When featured on talk shows ostensibly to discuss their careers or talents, trans celebrities are instead interrogated about their past identities, current genitals, or medical history. The lack of diversity inclusive curriculum in the public education systems is compounded by these public portrayals of wildly inaccurate caricatures and ridiculous reactions by cisgender celebrities in a way that effectively trains our ignorant nation to treat trans people with disrespect, intrusive curiosity, fear, disgust, horror, sexual objectification, and sometimes even violence. Our true narratives have been discarded, our experiences rewritten or erased, our concerns ignored, and our rights to public restrooms, education, sports, employment, welfare, housing, and all other basic human needs randomly rewritten, replaced, or removed. Additionally, many transgender and gender-diverse folks are not only struggling to overcome transphobic discrimination and margnizalization, but also homophobia, biphobia, racism, sizeism, ageism, misogynism, trans-misogynism, ableism, slut-shaming, ugly-shaming, body hair shaming, and other forms of body-policing and identity-based oppression. Internally, many of us struggle to overcome our own body dysmorphia, or one or more mental illnesses or mental disabilities, on top of our gender dysphoria. For these reasons, my art is inclusive of all gender diverse bodies and the lived experiences of the human beings who happen to inhabit them. To incorporate anti-racism into my every brushstroke, my works also attempt to destigmatize darkness. In my art, "dark" is not synonymous with “depressing,” “disturbing,” or “evil" but is better interpreted as the strength and bravery it takes to be visibly trans in a heavily biased world.