There was a brief, extremely odd moment in the mid-late 2010s when it seemed like being a trans girl could also mean being an It Girl—for a split second in the violently transphobic history of the modern world, trans women were “in” (to a limited extent in specific social circles), and our faces could even enhance the market value of major brands.
In those years, I had several trans woman of colour friends get “influencer contract” offers—that is, sponsorship and modelling deals—with brands such as MAC Cosmetics, Dove, Hudson’s Bay and even Mastercard, all within a handful of years. I myself appeared in a Sephora makeup campaign and was offered another contract with a major fashion label (before you get excited, the money was not very good, though a giant video of my face did get projected onto the side of a building in downtown Toronto, so I suppose that’s something).
In that same handful of years, though, a disturbingly large number of my trans woman friends and acquaintances experienced homelessness, joblessness, street violence, intimate partner violence and severe mental illness caused by trauma.
All this is to say, it was a frankly bizarre moment to be alive, if slightly intoxicating. Even trans folks with a firm grounding in cynicism and anti-capitalism were being inundated with a steady stream of messaging about the value of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, and the Power of Representation™ to Change the World. Embarrassing though it may be to admit today, I suspect that a small part of my 20-something self really did believe that appearing in ads for expensive makeup was going to do something good for trans people—and of course, it was awfully nice that activism could be oh-so glamorous too.
Indeed, it did seem like something must be changing for the better. There were trans characters on television, many of them even portrayed by trans actors. There were more trans models walking runways and in print ads than you could shake a stick at. The Young Adult sections of local bookstores were filled with novels about the adolescent trials and triumphs of trans and non-binary kids, which would have been unimaginable in the publishing industry of a decade earlier. In a few short years, it had become de rigueur Human Resources practice in many white-collar workplaces to put your pronouns in your email signature. The Representation era of trans politics was in full swing, and the Influencer-Activist was ascendant.
“The politics of representation have not borne the fruits they once promised.”
Today in the mid-2020s, as anti-trans legislation sweeps across North America and the U.K., and as transphobic sentiment sweeps across much of the world, I think it’s fair to say that the politics of representation—that is, the notion that trans human rights and liberation can be achieved through increased visibility in the cultural sphere, and “inclusion” of trans people in a handful of high-status positions and professions—have not borne the fruits they once promised.
I am not certain exactly when trans women lost our oh-so-brief moment in the sun as trendy marketing assets, though the vicious and extreme public backlash to TikTok influencer Dylan Mulvaney’s ill-fated Bud Light endorsement deal seems to have signalled the end of the end—in Canada, trans advocate Fae Johnstone experienced similar backlash when she was featured on a Hershey’s Canada chocolate bar as part of an International Women’s Day campaign. Regardless, however, the stark truth is that even at its zenith, the politics of representation and the accompanying trendiness of “diversity” as a marketing strategy appear to have done little to improve the day-to-day lives of trans people as a vulnerable and exploited class, given even a basic review of existing statistics on violence and discrimination against trans people.
Furthermore, given today’s intense and widespread transphobic social panic, as well as the rapidly deteriorating state of trans people’s legal access to gender-affirming care and protection from discrimination, the situation is arguably even worse than before the last decade’s upswing in trans visibility took place.
This raises some uncomfortable, yet essential, questions for advocates, not only for queer and trans liberation, but for social justice in general: What—or who— is missing from a political strategy based on representation? How has the popularization of “representation” as a political strategy, as well as mainstream ideas about “diversity, equity and inclusion” been co-opted by the very systems they seek to overturn? And how can we adapt our strategy in the struggle for trans rights and human rights so that it is more effective as we move into a second Trump presidency and continue to grapple with ongoing global collapse?
For decades, there have been trans thinkers, writers and activists warning of the tendency to reduce trans liberation to matters of symbolic or aesthetic representation. They’ve pushed back against the idea that trans liberation is simply about the right to be “true to yourself” in the way that Disney films are about “being yourself.” This line of thinking turns the question of trans rights into primarily a psychological journey for the trans person who is learning to “accept themself” and for the people around them, who are learning to “accept people who are different.”
These critiques have been especially present in certain circles of trans women, transfeminine people and trans sex workers, who have insisted that trans lives and anti-trans prejudice cannot be separated from the day-to-day social and economic context that we live in.
In 1978, famed trans woman and street queen Sylvia Rivera declared in her iconic “Ya’ll Better Quiet Down” speech that “I have been thrown in jail. I have lost my job. I have lost my apartment for gay liberation and you all treat me this way?” Rivera was calling out the gay and lesbian movements of her time for abandoning the class-based struggles of poor, homeless, imprisoned and sex-work-reliant queer and trans people.
Unfortunately, as the movement toward trans rights and gender diversity expanded and grew out of queer activism in the following decades, the day-to-day struggles (sometimes called “material reality”) of many communities of poor, homeless, imprisoned and sex-worker trans people were continuously relegated to the background, where they largely remain today.
In 2000, trans scholar and activist Vivian Namaste wrote in her seminal work, Invisible Lives: The Erasure of Transsexual and Transgendered People, that queer cultural perspectives on trans issues tended to leave out “the quotidian living conditions of transgendered people” and that within queer theory, “transvestites and transsexuals function as rhetorical figures within cultural texts … the voices, struggles, and joys of real transgendered people in the everyday social world are noticeably absent.”
In other words, Namaste observed that trans people’s struggles were being co-opted by more powerful and privileged social groups, including some queer people who do not share the same struggles that many trans people—especially highly vulnerable groups such as trans women, trans sex workers and trans migrants—have in the real world. This includes trans people’s frequent struggle to access healthcare (both gender-affirming care and general care) and social services in a transphobic system, as well as the fact that many trans people experience severe housing and employment discrimination.
In a sentence that remains as hauntingly relevant today as it was nearly 25 years ago, Namaste observes that transgressing gender norms is often celebrated as liberation and revolutionary by people who “have nothing to say about the precarious position of the transsexual woman who is battered and who is unable to access a woman’s shelter.”
Namaste was talking about queer academics, but the same—or worse—could be said the fashion labels, consumer brands, corporate DEI campaigns and politicians that so eagerly plastered our faces and bodies on their advertising as inspirational content, but are currently nowhere to be found as gender-affirming medical care is being challenged or banned in several states. Capitalism, it seems, was all too happy to champion trans rights so long as corporations stood to make money and no substantive changes to social systems needed to be made.
“The representation-based approach to trans rights has long been concerningly divorced from the ordinary, material interests of trans lives.”
In retrospect, the representation-based approach to trans rights has long been concerningly divorced from the ordinary, material interests of trans lives. While it’s certainly edifying to see trans people on TV, I’d rather have universal access to gender-affirming care (and ideally, both!), and while it was nice to get a high-end modelling contract one time in my life, it would be much nicer to live in a world where trans people have protected workplace rights and equal access to employment.
Disturbingly, a superficial, symbolic approach to trans rights seems to have reduced our concerns to an “identity issue” within a broader Diversity, Equity and Inclusion framework—one that some people apparently think can be solved with a hyperfocus on trans celebrities, pronouns and sticking the Progress Pride flag onto storefront windows, to the exclusion of addressing the core needs of trans people, such as the right to transition and still participate fully in public life. “Awareness” campaigns such as Trans Day of Visibility ring hollow when held up against the reality that visibility itself has done very little to change trans lives for the better and that we have arguably been increasingly socially punished the more visible we’ve become.
Apparently frustrated with the “representation” paradigm, trans historian and writer Jules Gill-Peterson argued in a recent Substack newsletter that “the abstraction of transgender interests from transition into a fight for generic existence and rights also sustains frustratingly hollow claims to political action. It’s not surprising that representation in corporate entertainment, euphemistic appeals to poetry, art, or the aestheticization of everyday life as beautiful have become venerated refrains in recent years, as if they were genuine political defiance.”
What would genuine political defiance for trans liberation look like? The question is more urgent than ever. Though there are many potential answers, I believe that a focus on building power through grassroots trans community institutions, and on developing solidarity with other social struggles is key. Trans communities have survived throughout history by relying not on corporations or even the state, but on one another. Key areas of focus include strengthening our ability to provide one another with the supports and services that we need—taking inspiration from revolutionary groups such as the Black Panthers and the Zapatistas, as well as from the legacy of queer and trans resistance.
When it comes to healthcare, for example, expanding trans-led and trans-staffed community clinics could be a crucial intervention. So could supporting and participating in D.I.Y. and underground networks of hormone provision—such networks already exist, and are in many ways analogous to the ways that feminist networks have provided contraception and abortion care to cisgender women for years. Trans-led self-defence and community defence projects, as well as trans resource-sharing and peer counselling are also existing traditions that could be greatly expanded to positive effect.
Coalition-building and solidarity-building are also key areas of focus for us: trans healthcare has been framed in opposition to women’s healthcare by the anti-trans movement, but nothing could be further from the truth. Both are about the right to essential care and bodily autonomy, and there are important opportunities for trans advocacy to reclaim the narrative on this issue. Indeed, healthcare access in general is an explosive topic today, as the recent alleged killing of healthcare CEO Brian Thompson by Luigi Mangione demonstrates—what might be made possible by framing the fight for trans healthcare as a fight for everyone’s healthcare and vice versa? What could a trans rights movement that was also deeply connected to labour rights and housing rights movements accomplish?
I won’t pretend that I didn’t enjoy the brief moment that the Trans It Girl fantasy seemed to come to life for me—that the notion of being a fashion model who was also changing the world didn’t tug at some core wounds and longings deep in my soul. Yet the fantasy was always just that: a fantasy. That kind of representation was never going to change the world in ways we really need, no matter how many trans women of colour’s faces were used to sell products made by underpaid labourers in the Global South. Representation was never going to be our liberation, because it was about representation in a sick, corrupted system.
We don’t need to be a part of that system. We need to build a new one.
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