During the summer lockdown I received a most welcome phone call inviting me to be part of Shout Festival this year which I am very thankful for. The plan was to create a zine which would be available at all the venues during the festival, however due to further restrictions the whole festival went online and called itself Shout: At Home and alongside the physical zine we made a digital sample version of it viewable here.
The project first came about from conversations with my friend Leo back in 2017 when they were playing with a new name and beginning their transition process – I’d worked with them on their show Bullish about trans-masc joy and peace, which sparked my interest and I was learning… so I spoke to other pals in the community and discovered a desire to talk about this stuff and make work and most importantly that I was trusted with this project.
I was also starting to really SEE other people who I knew from the community properly as they started to come out as gender non-conforming or trans and were literally bouncing about!
The zine contains texts and quotes from all 12 participants featured in this series adding further depth and complexity to the images, ensuring their voices are heard - the whole process is co-operative.
As well as making the zine I was invited to do a talk hosted by Meg Lightheart as part of the Trans Social event which was an absolute honour. I invited participants Sabah Choudrey and Lucy Hutson to join me - it’s essential that participants speak for themselves and that the whole process is collaborative. It was also wonderful to see other people from the project on the zoom and joining in with the chat!
Lucy ended up feeling very emotional on the day and was unable to speak due to overwhelming feelings re speaking publicly about their gender identity of which their issues have come to the forefront since becoming pregnant - their quote pictured here explains how they have been feeling - I think it’s important to acknowledge this and the hard stuff along with the celebratory and Lucy agreed to us sharing how they were feeling.
Before talking about the project, I gave a quick overview of my practice to put the project into context as many of the people involved appear in my archives and I’ve been working with some of them for years. I also wanted to acknowledge key artists who actually SAW me as an artist and my potential in the early days such as David Hoyle and Scottee.
Next are some highlights from the talk which I would like to share and archive.
Lucy has always insisted on keeping their wispy chin hairs which adds to their gender ambiguity.
Tink Flaherty, a pal and fellow non-binary parent stepped in for Lucy and read some extracts from their piece ‘How it is to be non-binary and pregnant’ which they recently published with Freedom News.
“It hadn’t fully occurred to me whilst I was trying to get pregnant how much I would miss my passing privileges. I am so lucky that I have a friend who can cut hair because I don’t want to go to the barbers now I’m showing.
I’m pretty sure my barbers aren’t that bothered by the gender of a person who wants a standard clipper cut.
That’s not my worry exactly.
What the barbers is to me is a place where I am accepted as male, we don’t talk much in there and I don’t tell anyone my name is Lucy. I don’t say anything that alludes to me not being a man and I wear a binder. I watch the men get wet shaves, and I revel in being accepted into a masculine environment.
Of course trans men can get pregnant, but that’s not a conversation I want to have in the barber shop. I just want a place I can go where I can indulge my masculinity, fit in and not rock the boat just for a short while every few weeks.
I don’t know exactly what the men in the barbers think of me. I don’t know if they assume I was assigned male at birth, but I know I get treated like a man when I’m there.
I sometimes wonder if my insistence on keeping my wispy chin hairs makes people think I’ve just started taking testosterone, but then I don’t know how much the bloke cutting my hair knows about hormone replacement therapy anyway.”
Sabah is a proud trans youth worker, psychotherapist in training, a writer, a public speaker and a cat person. They are also “South Asian, trans masculine and covered in hair”.
Sabah shared some insight into their relationship with their body hair. They spoke about how when they were younger - socialised as a girl - that being a South Asian hairy brown girl was not someone they wanted to be and there was a lot of shame around their hair.
One of their huge hesitations around taking testosterone was becoming so hairy, a friend even remarked “he’s going to be so hairy!” A few years on and still a big journey, it’s been hard to unlearn things like hair removal which they have lots of experience with - “…it’s awkward to suddenly just let it grow and embrace it”.
“Grooming becomes less about gender and more about myself and grooming – it’s not self indulgence it’s really personal and unique – my body hair doesn’t have to be gendered it can just be this routine, this ritual and this process and it’s actually quite enjoyable. How I feel about my body hair on my skin and how it looks is something else but taking care of it is kind of ok and being able to share this with Holly, and others and mostly even with myself has actually been pretty awesome!”
As well as talking about some of the themes we have covered such as the body and binding (see previous blogs for more on that), I also shared some new location portraits we’ve shot recently - revisiting current participants and introducing new ones. Sabah later spoke about it meaning a lot that I’ve come back and want to do more, the longevity of the project, working with them over time capturing both a relationship and their fluidity means they’re not stuck in this one box either.
Of course things do keep changing such as with Lucy’s pregnancy - they always spoke about having a strong desire to have a child - represented by the glitter ball once upon a time and now it’s real!
More from Lucy’s article - read by Tink:
“After the long process of trying to get pregnant had finally paid off, I had an overwhelming feeling of it all being very real. Lots of questions about the sort of parent I will be and how I would cope with different situations flowed through my mind and things I had previously been able to consider calmly rattled through my brain at a hurtling speed.
I started worrying about having to choose clothes for a little girl. It crossed my mind that I would get to watch Marvel films with them if they were a boy.
This didn’t reflect the way I think about gender generally. So when this short phase passed, and I started to enjoy imagining welcoming a baby into the world that could grow into any kind of human, I didn’t want to do anything to bring back those thoughts. At that point, I made a firm decision not to be told a sex for the baby at my five-month scan.
I think the reason I momentarily got caught up with the importance of the baby’s gender is because it’s so important to the prevailing status quo.
The disparity between people’s preoccupation and my indifference to the perceived sex of the unborn child is making me feel very different from the mainly cis gender world I inhabit.
I suppose I have always known that people like to know a sex of the foetuses. I think what I’m coming to realise is how little I want to know.
Its making me mull over the effect that being assigned female at birth has had on my life… “
Read the full piece here.
Here are some exerts from chatting with Sabah during the talk - besides feeling held and supported by Sabah throughout the event, they said so many affirming things that I’d not heard before so I feel a great need to archive some of what they said here. I didn’t know Sabah before the project which is rare for me as I usually work with friends or get to know people I’m interested in before shooting but as the project grows I am finding new ways to work and learning that I can still find intimacy and make connections with people I’m meeting through the project.
“Why the hell did I decide to do this project is what I’m asking myself tonight”. Sabah Choudrey
“I’m quite wary of working with people outside of my community - I was like who is this person, what do they want. what’s their angle, where are they coming from? We get fetishised - we get sensationalized – I needed to make sure it was more than that but after doing my research and knowing she’d worked with Travis Alabanza and Krishna Istha for example I decided I’d give Holly a shot!”
“Seeing the photos so far – especially Krishna’s glitter picture – seeing that photo – a brown masculine hairy body with scars and it looked beautiful and I was like I wanna look like that and I’m not usually a topless person but this made me feel like I want to do that and I can do that - that’s the way I want my body to be seen topless and it goes to show how much representation matters and that yay I could feel pretty.”
“This project wasn’t really about being trans – we must have talked about gender at some point but it didn’t feel like we were – none of the usual – tell me about your experience coming out etc and that was great because I’m tired of that and have talked about it for too long.”
“It was good to be in a place where I could just camp the F up and focus on my appearance and my aesthetic and just feel celebrated actually and be in that moment and especially from someone who is outside my communities – I feel like it was genuine interest – you were so affirming and complementing me during shoot and it was just so nice – so this is dope! I really enjoyed it!”
“I don’t think we as trans people particularly trans people of colour get spaces where we can just look good and it doesn’t have to go deeper than that. I’m happy if people just want to look at these photos and not read the captions because if you’re just looking at me that’s enough because we don’t get to see beautiful bodies like this and celebrated in this way and that’s where that Gender Euphoria comes in for me – its not talking about gender at all - its feeling happy and feeling good.”
This was a truly celebratory and enjoyable event.