Jamie Diaz is an artist who just wants to be seen for her work. The 66-year-old Mexican-American trans woman has been drawing and painting since she was 15. She uses vivid colors, surrealism, and self-portraits to tell complex stories about queerness, love, and human suffering throughout her work. And much of that work has been created behind prison walls, with paint brushes constructed from donated human hair.

Diaz spent the last 29 years incarcerated in men’s prisons. In the new short film “Love, Jamie” from director Karla Murthy, we get to know Diaz, her artwork, and her story through letters and phone calls shared with Gabriel Joffe, a trans person on the outside who has become her closest companion over the past 10 years. Joffe first started corresponding with Diaz in 2013 when they received a letter from her while working with Black & Pink, the prison abolitionist organization dedicated to LGBTQ+ people and folks living with HIV/AIDS who are impacted by the prison industrial complex. Murthy’s poignant film — which is now streaming on PBS — traces Joffe and Diaz’s decade-plus friendship through letters and shared art, aiming to tell a story not about an incarcerated trans woman, but one about a trans artist.

“You know what I want people to feel when they see my art?” Diaz says over the phone to Joffe in the film. “I want them to know that we’re good people.” That “we” can be read as many things — trans people, incarcerated individuals, and especially trans women of color affected by the U.S. prison system.

TransLash caught up with Joffe and “Love, Jamie” producer and director of photography Andrew Fredericks over a Zoom call to talk about the new short documentary film. The two reflected on the significance of chosen family and trans elders, what they learned about the experiences of trans women impacted by the carceral system, and shared an update on Diaz, who is now finally free after being granted parole at the end of May. 

Note: This video is only available to view within the United States.

TransLash: So good to meet you both. I just watched the film this week and admittedly cried the whole way through. It was just so powerful and so meaningful. To me as a trans person, to watch this felt really, really amazing and important. So thank you both for your work.

Andrew Fredericks: Thank you.

TransLash: Andrew, I’d love to start with you and ask, as the producer and the DP, what was it really that drew you to telling this story?

Andrew Fredericks: Well, the first thing that drew me to it was when I saw Jamie’s art. Dan Cooney pulled out a drawer. I was at his gallery filming for a different project, and then I said, well, what shows do you have coming up? Because Dan always has great shows, people, unknown artists, but really great ones. And he opened up this drawer and started pulling out these paintings and drawings. And I was like, wow! And then he started telling me Jamie’s story, that she was incarcerated in Texas and what Jamie, what Dan knew about her. So that was initially what drew me.

I said, this is a great story. This really needs to be told. And at the time, I was very busy with a couple other projects and I thought, I don’t really have time, but I really want to get this story told. And that’s when I reached out to my longtime friend and colleague, Karla Murthy, who’s the director and editor of the film. So I kind of passed just the basics onto Karla. And then she started digging into it, and she was drawn to it too.

And if I can speak for her, because I heard her talk about this is, then what really cemented it, the story was good. Her art was good. It had an interesting angle of an incarcerated trans woman. But Dan Cooney shared a letter that Jamie wrote to him. And that letter was just so honest and so revealing and so full of compassion and love and understanding and honesty. And then that’s when Karla called me and she said, this, I know what to do now. And so then, then I said, well, I’m all in. If you’re all in, I’m all in. And then we contacted Gabriel and were properly vetted by Gabriel. And then with the blessing of Gabriel and Jamie talked about it, and I guess trusted us, Karla and I, enough to tell their story. And it really is to me, it’s not just the story of a trans woman incarcerated, an artist. It is about art. But to me what’s under it —it’s a story of love and friendship and what can happen if you just give yourself to someone else, wholly. So I would say that’s what drew me to do it.

TransLash: And that relationship Gabriel, I mean, to have a decade of sharing letters with someone is so profound. Can you tell me a bit about what that was like, especially for you as a trans person on the outside to be communicating with a trans person on the inside?

Gabriel Joffe: I think it was really a beautiful experience for me to just have an older trans person in my life. You know, it’s not every day you meet trans elders. It was nice to have someone who had such wisdom about life and lessons to impart on me. You know, she’s really serves as that figure in my life of a trans person [who] has gone before. And obviously our life experiences are so different, but just being able to talk about things and just hear her perspective. I think that’s something that is rare. Just even the larger LGBT community,  to have elders. 

And it’s kind of wild because until last week I just had all of Jamie’s letters, this 10 years of letters and correspondence. But she walked out of prison with all my letters, and we kind of, that first night, sat down and she showed me scrapbooks she had made with pictures I had sent her. And she had in the first page, the very first letter she had received from me. It was also this wild chronicle of like the past 10 years of my life. I have shoe boxes of her letters, she had these, and she wanted me to bring them back to Denver with me for safekeeping. So now I have kind of the second half of the collection. It’s wild to see 10 years of letters I wrote. So it just feels nice to kind of now be in like a new chapter of our relationship.

TransLash: That’s wonderful to have it so completed, your letters and her letters together.

Andrew Fredericks: You have to collatehem now, so it’s back and forth.

Gabriel Joffe: Oh my gosh. That’s a project for another day.

TransLash: Gabriel, you received so much art from her over the years. Were there any particular pieces of Jamie’s work that really stood out to you and spoke to you the most over that decade?

Gabriel Joffe: I mean, really immediately, I think of Worlds Within Worlds. That was the first large scale piece. You know, I had received the illustrated letters, but that was in 2013. And I have a picture of myself holding it up. And that was one that I don’t think I’ll ever part with. It was the first piece she sent me. And just the colors, that’s when I really realized how Jamie’s use of color and how incredible it is and depth.

And it is her more abstract piece. But I felt like there was so much captured. It’s one of the deepest pieces I feel, to me, of her work. And so, yeah, Worlds Within Worlds. I think I’ll always remember receiving that and just being blown away and I think fully understanding her capabilities as an artist.

TransLash: Andrew, I’m curious, as the DP and producer, it must have been an incredible challenge to make this film where you can’t access one of your leads, right? You can’t actually get footage of her. Can you talk a bit about what that process was like and how it challenged you visually? Was that a hindrance or did that sort of give you more artistic license to get creative?

Andrew Fredericks: Well, I think at first, because you think about the obvious ways to make something first and you think, well, we have to try and interview Jamie. And we started going down that road a little bit. We started making contact with TDCJ [Texas Department of Criminal Justice]. But then at a certain point — and we were working on that, we’re gonna do it — but Karla started editing some, and we really realized that the film wasn’t about incarceration. Jamie was an incarcerated person. But we didn’t want the film to be about incarceration. And if you saw Jamie incarcerated in prison, that would be the image one would have of Jamie. And we didn’t want that. Because that’s what Jamie wanted, to be seen for who she was, not where she lived. And that meant getting to know Jamie through her words and through her art.

So then we consciously decided we’re not going to try and show Jamie incarcerated. And that would’ve been the only way to show her, would [be]  to get an interview in some kind of visitation room or through the glass. So it was kind of fortuitous that it was a little bit of trouble because it made us realize too.

So as far as the challenges, we still needed visuals and Jamie’s art provided a lot of the storytelling. But there was also, we wanted to show the isolation of being incarcerated. So we needed some visuals. And luckily, I spent a year in Texas working on a film, another film at the same time. And I came across this abandoned Texas prison facility. And so I just started, whenever I had a chance, I would go down there and just make images. I imagined myself being inside of there and looking out at the world outside. So I tried to create imagery from that prison facility that showed what Jamie might see, you know, I could only imagine it. And sometimes there’s flowers just beyond the fence. So I tried to show something that’s right there, but just out of reach, just on the other side of the fence. 

And then Karla and I talked a lot about the visuals. There’s a section [of the film] where Jamie talks about being young and feeling almost trapped by her queerness and being afraid to come out at first. And so when we’re in Houston, we tried to shoot things from behind fences and behind, so it wasn’t direct. So there was this idea. And then once it got to New York and there was the gallery show, everything was out in the open. There was no more behind anything. There was a shot even of Gabriel talking about some of their early trouble and [I] shot from behind this fence where we saw Gabriel. So we tried to make the visuals kind of [gestures with hands pushing inwardly] and then open up at the end. And then with the birds in the sky at the very end [of the film] representing total freedom. What’s freer than a bird. So just to wrap back around, yes. Not showing Jamie, at first we thought it was gonna be a problem, but it ended up really being liberating.

TransLash: Yeah, that shot at the end of the birds flying is so beautiful. And for you both, I’m curious — I know Gabriel you worked with Black and Pink and probably had some sort of insight into what the experiences are like for incarcerated trans folks. But I’m curious if through making this film, and Gabriel through your communications and relationship with Jamie, were there things that you learned about the particular experiences of particularly trans women in men’s prisons that you hadn’t known? What did this experience open your eyes to that you didn’t know of before?

Gabriel Joffe: Yeah. As someone who has never been impacted by that system personally, I think my motivation to join as an organizer with Black and Pink back in 2012 was conversations I would be having with other queer activists or books. It was mostly through books I was reading, primarily “Queer (In)Justice [The Criminalization of LGBT People in the United States]” was a really important text for me. 

So it was books, but then what really I think the biggest learning was as I joined Black and Pink and volunteered during their weekly mail processing and read hundreds of letters from all sorts of LGBTQ folks that are incarcerated across the country — those individuals and their experiences, I just started to learn so much more. And then when I connected with Jamie — and I didn’t know it’d be a 10 plus year, I didn’t know what it’d become. Because I feel like you never know what a relationship will turn into. But through her specifically of just what she would share, from mundane things — like she would describe in extreme detail what her cell looked like, and she’d say, I have a toilet over here and then I have the floor here and I lay out my paintbrush. She would just in such detail, especially if she moved, got transferred, she would say exactly what her cell looked like, what she was eating to things like commissary. 

Even in staying in touch with her, that changed from letters to then the electronic messaging system and you have to kind of buy digital stamps. So I got to learn the kind of ins and outs of the apparatus surrounding the prison, different companies you have to interact with, whether you want to write or visit. And even now in the film you see just a decade of letters and, about six months before Jamie was released, Texas moved to a digital mail system.

So there’s no letters going in anymore. The technology has changed. So Jamie would no longer, if she was still inside and up until her release, she was no longer able to receive physical mail from me. So I learned a lot about that, just the whole apparatus as well as Jamie’s personal experiences.

TransLash: Andrew, how about you? Is there anything that opened your eyes that you hadn’t known before in the process of making this?

Andrew Fredericks: Oh, so much. I mean, I grew up around, I guess you could call it criminal justice. My mother used to run, when I was a kid, ran halfway houses for men at that time, only, getting out of prison and transitioning in. So I had a basis from my mom about the troubles of reentry and also about treating everyone, even if they’re incarcerated, they’re human beings and they have their own problems. So I had a little bit of background, but as far as, like Gabriel says, the actual apparatus of prison, of being incarcerated, is just byzantine. And then there’s people always, companies looking to profit off of it, whether they’re the people you have to buy the stamps from or if you want to make a phone call.

But through Jamie, because once we made Jamie’s acquaintance, I started exchanging mail also with Jamie and doing calls. And I just got an inside view of what it was like to be incarcerated. And it really opened my eyes to what that experience was like from someone who was telling me about it. And it made me appreciate, number one, my own privilege and my own freedom. And how much just the tiniest things one takes for granted if you’re not incarcerated.

I’ll never forget the day when — and this happened to both Karla and I, we had a similar experience. — I was on the phone with Jamie and I was on my front porch and I live in the country. And I was complaining about how much it was raining. “Oh, Jamie, it’s been raining.” But Jamie said, “when I get outta here, the first thing I want to do is go out and stand in the rain.” And it just made me realize just the simplest thing like that, that she couldn’t do. And so that, and as a filmmaker, I hope to always create empathy for other people. I’d rather create empathy, then knowledge. And so if that made me open my empathy up, I’m hoping that the film does the same for all incarcerated people. 

But then Jamie shared the added being trans, you know, and the troubles that that brought to her sometimes within the system. It’s a dehumanizing place and it’s a macho place. So Jamie had to overcome even that. And it also brought me into a world of people who I didn’t know, a world of trans people. And it’s such a beautiful community. It’s such a beautiful, welcoming community and it’s so under attack. And so that’s the other thing we wanted to do, is be an ally. You know, I’ll never fully understand the inner, what it means to be trans. But I understand human feelings, and so we hope that the film opens up people’s empathy for people who are incarcerated, but also Jamie’s hope, to understand “we’re good, loving people.” So that’s what I learned.

TransLash: Gabriel, what do you hope audiences take away from this  story and from your relationship with Jamie?

Gabriel Joffe: You know, I think that’s changed over the past year of the film being out. But I think presently just, first of all, the incredible art that Jamie creates. She’s an artist. She wants to be known for her art. So just more people seeing her art, and I think there’s so much creativity and talent of folks that are incarcerated that we just miss out on in society. And so I think Jamie’s art stands on its own. She’s an incredible artist. And I think there’s other people whose talent we’re not able to see. So I’m just glad that the film gives Jamie’s art a platform. I think also just especially, I hope this film is an uplifting to the queer community, that they see that there are elder trans folks in the community and there’s love and connection and that chosen family is beautiful.

TransLash: Mmm. Definitely. I think we have time for one more question. Gabriel, I know that you had met Jamie when she was released last week. I read about it in a story from them. Can you talk a bit about what that experience was like to be there to receive her?

Gabriel Joffe: You know, my dear friend Spinney was there, who’s been part of this

journey from the beginning, lived with me when I received those first letters from Jamie. And so it was great to have them there. Because we were there waiting for about an hour and a half and I was kind of going through many stages of emotion. You know, at one point I was trying not to cry. And then another point I was like, thinking of all the things I forgot to bring. And then was just kind of cycling through all the emotions. And it was down pouring, thunder. But I think even up until even we left the entire compound, the apparatus of the prison was very present. We had to stay in the parking lot. There was even at one point when I saw her, I just started walking forward and they yelled at me to step back. You know, the apparatus was very present. It was an incredible moment. And it was clear we needed to — we didn’t have time or space to kind of linger. It was kind of, first order business was just leaving the property.

But one of the first things — Jamie sat in the front seat and I was able to hand her the copy of her comic book that recently was published and she saw it for the first time and held it. And just seeing her flip through the pages and see her art in that form within the first hour of her, the first 20 minutes of her release. That was just super meaningful for me to witness her just hold her art and see it and see evidence that it’s out in the world.

TransLash: That’s so wonderful that she got to receive that from you. Thank you both so much. It was such a pleasure chatting with you.

Andrew Fredericks: I just wanna add that as part of my education and my understanding about trans issues and stories, early on somehow I came across TransLash and it’s been one of my regular reads now. I love when I get the newsletter. It’s really been something. I feel so glad that we’re gonna be a part of TransLash because it’s been like, my link besides, you know, Jamie and Gabriel to understanding the stories and of that community. So thank you.

TransLash: Oh, that’s so wonderful to hear. Thank you!

“Love, Jamie” is now streaming and available to watch on all PBS platforms including PBS.org, the PBS app, and the PBS American Masters YouTube.

To view Jamie Diaz’s published art and support her re-entry through her Solidarity Fund and through purchasing her artwork, check out her website JamieDiazArt.com.

Did you find this resource helpful? Consider supporting TransLash today with a tax-deductible donation. Did we miss anything? Let us know!

The post The Powerful Story of an Incarcerated Trans Artist: A Q&A With ‘Love, Jamie’ Film Star and Producer appeared first on TransLash Media.

Is Seeking Mavis Beacon part of queer and trans cinema? After thanking me for giving them the opportunity to answer this specific question, this was Jones’ response:

Q&A Transcript

Jazmin Renée Jones: As a Black, queer, non-binary filmmaker, there’s no question that this is a Black film. It’s just, it’s Black cinema. Me being Black, regardless of what the subject of my film is, it’s a Black film. And I think it’s really interesting that queer cinema, it’s a little trickier. And it’s like, I think this [their film] is queer cinema. Olivia and I are gay as hell, but but it’s like absent of a love plot. It’s like we don’t qualify. And I think queer cinema is also just like, hey we’re queers, we’re out here.

Olivia McKayla Ross (associate producer and protagonist): It’s like we’re queering cinema [audience laugher]. Like, well, there’s a divestment I think from like a normative way of understanding the traditional structures that are upholding how what we deem is like a regular way to behave. And we bring as like, investigators, a femme politik to even encounter people’s space. And sometimes even overdoing it with like apologizing a lot, knocking on doors in a kind of way where like, it’s very common with investigative documentaries, you just have someone like waving a camera in your face, and like being very, um, there’s like a sense of like “it is my right because I’m holding a camera” and there’s these like dude, dude bro, like true crime. Yeah.

So I think there’s a way in which, um, like the fact of our queerness embeds in everything that we’re doing. And also the lessons I think, like, that we learn from queer and trans people of history about representation and how it can be a trap [muffled]. Invisibility the entire, yeah having visibility and having a voice…

Jazmin Renée Jones: Another thing, I think, coming back to your question too, we had a really interesting experience, Olivia and I. We went to film at a certain queer archive and the question came up of like why would we let you film here, your movie isn’t queer. And then we were like but no, we are, and then they’re like but your subject isn’t queer, and we’re like you got us there, maybe, I don’t know. I haven’t talked to her about that yet. So I think in general, I just, I’m excited for this to be in conversation with other queer films.

Olivia acknowledged that we spent a lot of time studying the hero’s journey and then the heroin’s journey, which I really love, um, but I also found it to be incredibly clunky in its gendered language, and so, it’s like I had to like translate like the divine feminine. And like okay that means intuition.

And so if anybody here also would like to work on like a gender nonconforming Journey which is basically us figuring out the principles of that without all of this gendered language, I would love that um, so yeah thank you.

Guetty Felin (producer): You’ve done it with Seeking Mavis Beacon.

Jazmin Renée Jones: Thank you.

Family Dynamics In Seeking Mavis Beacon

Call it a “Sundance moment”: I serendipitously sat down with several of Jazmin’s family members at a cafe near the Seeking Mavis Beacon premiere on my way to the press line, before having any idea who they were. I had seen an open chair at a table and politely asked if I could use it, and was immediately invited to take a seat with the family. We easily fell into conversation, and upon learning what I was there for, Jazmin’s mother shared with a big smile that they (Jazmin’s parents, step-parents, and more) were there for the same film too.

As I looked around the table in awe, I told them what a beautiful gift it was for me to witness such a unified front for Jazmin. Even though I didn’t know her and hadn’t seen her film yet, it meant so much to see a fellow queer and non-binary person being supported in big ways by their blood and chosen family on their special day.

I didn’t have to tell them that I and other queer and trans people don’t always get this support. I could tell they already knew.

My brief time sharing space with Jazmin’s family was filled with their father and step-father trading anecdotes about her always having a camera in her hand, the warm tones of their voices full of pride and nostalgia. Jazmin’s mother’s phone then dinged with a notification, followed by her alerting the table that Jazmin had asked that they meet her at the press tent.

Since I knew where it was, I offered to guide them there. “You’re our angel,” Jasmin’s mother said as I led them out the door, and we made our way through the snow to the little white tent where Jazmin was waiting inside.

From a respectful distance, I watched as Jazmin’s family celebrated her getting her flowers, then joining her for photos on the red carpet. As Jazmin’s mother walked over to me, I thanked her again for the shared moment and congratulated the family before I stepped away to find the passholder line for the screening so I could get a good seat.

Queer Family Legacies

Once inside the theatre, I was immediately surprised and delighted to see up on the big screen several of those same family members I had sat with in the cafe. Between scenes of their investigative work, Jazmin wove in the ways that her family held space for them and offered advice along her years-long journey to find the elusive woman behind one of her favorite childhood computer games.

Jazmin also included scenes of herself with vibrant queer and trans chosen family; her own angels supporting her on her quest for truth and resolution. Queerness and transness is embedded so deeply in the film that it seems impossible that anyone could watch this movie and not call it queer cinema.

Seeking Mavis Beacon tenderly holds a story about a Black woman’s fight for control over her own likeness and right to privacy, while Jazmin and Olivia experiment with subverting technology to find her—and the truth about themselves.

While I thought I was going to watch a film about the intersection of race, gender, and technology, what I experienced was a fascinating and complex story about the ways we as queer and trans people—especially Black and brown LGBGTQ+ folks—find representation in media that wasn’t necessarily created for us, cultivating family online and offline in traditional and nontraditional ways.

If we choose it, we can use technologies as tools to help us unlock the truth about who we are, while fostering familial connections along our path to self-actualization and healing.

Will a future e-girl/e-person make a film about seeking Jazmin Renée Jones because they saw so much of themselves in Seeking Mavis Beacon? I’m betting on it happening sooner than you think.

Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing Is Complicated Black Representation In Tech

One of the most influential Black women in technology is a figment of our collective imagination. The co-founder of Myspace invented Mavis Beacon to sell the world’s most popular typing software, but the real woman she was modeled after disappeared in 1995.

Seeking Mavis Beacon poses critical questions regarding anthropomorphization and the consumption of marginalized bodies in the tech industry, while reimagining the legacy of a missing historical figure.

Launched in the late ’80s, educational software Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing taught millions globally, but the program’s Haitian-born cover model vanished decades ago. In Seeking Mavis Beacon, two DIY investigators search for the unsung cultural icon, while questioning notions of digital security, AI, and Black representation in the digital realm.

TransLash’s guide to the 40th annual Sundance Film Festival will be released during this year’s fest. Subscribe to our newsletter to access our guide: www.translash.org/connect

Did you find this resource helpful? Consider supporting TransLash today with a tax-deductible donation. Did we miss anything? Let us know and we’ll update the guide with your suggestion, crediting you as the contributor.

The post Seeking Mavis Beacon: a Black Queer and Trans Film about Healing Tech and Chosen Family appeared first on TransLash Media.

AI has been a leading buzzword since then. It’s been portrayed as everything from our new best friend to an existential threat to our livelihoods. It’s driven labor action and changed how academia approaches authorship. 

Ghosts in the Machine.

The apprehension isn’t misplaced as artists find their work devalued and we address the ethical questions of adding machine learning to our lives. To be clear there are many AI-related questions and shortcomings. 

For one, I don’t dare to call AI art generation very accessible yet. While mobile image morphing apps are widespread, a full AI art generator takes more computing heft. Midjourney’s cheapest unlimited plan is $30 per month and running Stable Diffusion at home still requires a beefy computer. It’s not accessible the way a pencil and paper are accessible—yet. 

There are also more complex reasons to be concerned about participating in AI art. For one, AI is trained on vast sums of online data, which creates issues of consent. Creators have lamented the ability of AI to use their work without permission to create new content. The risk to artists is palpably real. 

AI is also susceptible to bias. Although it cannot act with intentionality and personal agency, it can reflect the biases of its creators. This is often seen when flawed training data leads to biased creations. Shortcomings like these can complicate efforts to generate gender-affirming artwork from data that reflects cisnormative biases. Although frustrating, the user-driven and iterative learning sides of AI art makes it easier to rectify this imbalance over time.

While I was learning to use these programs, there were hundreds of duds, sure. It made dogs with too many eyes or eyes in worrisome places. Trees blended into mountains in beautiful but unsettling ways. Don’t get me started on what it did to human fingers. Despite these errors, there was magic in participating in artistic creation. I felt unburdened by scrutiny and failure when asking the AI box for pictures. 

However, one branch of AI artistry remains relatively unexplored: the potential for queer-affirming portraiture and visual art. 

What is AI Visual Art and How Does it Work?

AI visual art is the output of machine learning designed to produce imagery. These systems are trained on massive databases of images, text, and human feedback, all while being adjusted by developers. For AI users, art generation happens through ‘prompting’. The user describes what they want to see and the machine produces it. The resulting image may be refined by increasing its detail, changing objects, or generating alternatives based on the prompt. With time and practice, users can develop their prompting skills to generate relevant and accurate imagery. Imaginary landscapes and startlingly authentic human faces can be created in mere minutes. 

AI art represents the conjoining of the intense capabilities and shortcomings of computing. It can process, store, and produce far more information than any human can. However, it lacks the intuition of context clues that we have.

AI and Self-Discovery

In mid-2022, I was breaking under the stress of grad school and started taking antidepressants for the first time. During the months I got used to the medication, I realized my gender dysphoria ambushed me under the cover of depression. 

This was also the time when people couldn’t stop talking about Midjourney. I wasn’t doing much beyond staring glumly at screens, anyway. I figured it couldn’t hurt to try. I coaxed the AI program into conjuring up images of the freedom my heart desired. I prodded it for pictures of dogs in space. I requested art on the theme of ‘Pride, but ominous’. 

I fed it my own photos to generate portraits of trans women who look like me, and I saw myself in a completely new way. Usually, Asian trans women are depicted as raging stereotypes or the subject of pornography. But with AI, I created a fantastical version of myself rendered in lively color that brought me joy. 

Creating Possibilities for Queer and Trans Futures.

AI was once a tool that worked behind the scenes for giants like Google and Duolingo. This is changing. We now use AI, rather than just being served AI-managed content by advertisers and content algorithms. 

It has strengths and shortcomings, but it’s definitely here to stay. So why shouldn’t we explore it in an ethical and considerate manner? 

AI has been used to create gender-affirming visions of ourselves via image-morphing apps like FaceApp. Sliders can add makeup, change facial hair, or tilt our gender presentation into entirely new directions. 

AI-generated art based on personal photos can also transport us beyond binary ways of seeing ourselves, to faraway lands, or into contexts where we don’t see ourselves represented. 

And those are just the tools that use existing images. Full AI art generation like that of Midjourney and DALL-E can create new people and locations to inspire our art and showcase queer diversity. It can expand our imaginations beyond the confines of a cisheteronormative landscape.

What I learned from my brush with AI art is that there’s room for queer and trans users to carve out space for themselves alongside computers. We don’t have to suffer with depictions of ourselves that misrepresent us through someone else’s eyes. AI tools can bring a sense of agency and confidence to those of us who fight against the limits of social constructs.  

Summer (she/her) is a transgender writer from South Africa. After finishing a Master’s in Psychology, she took up writing to bring her knowledge of healthcare, LGBTQ+ issues, and mental well-being to a wider audience. When she’s not figuring out her next sentence, she’s probably playing a game or building a scale model.

The post The Untapped Potential of AI for Gender-Affirming Art appeared first on TransLash Media.

Stereotypes about Appalachia run rampant, and one of the most pervasive is that the region is uninhabitable for LGBTQ+ people. There’s a push from some rural queer folks for queer people to form communes unto themselves apart from the “backward” people in Appalachia, or escape to a big city—preferably one near the coast. But talk to Stacy Jane Grover (she/her) for five minutes, author of the newly released memoir-in-essays Tar Hollow Trans, and she’ll show you why that’s a reductive and often incorrect way to view the region. 

The Appalachian region itself is as contested as what goes on inside of it. A brief history: The federal government declared a war on poverty in 1965 and formed the Appalachian Regional Commission, an economic development entity that identified 423 counties spanning from southern New York state to northern Alabama and Mississippi as being impoverished and in need of special attention in order to more fully participate in capitalism. 

However, as we know from Indigenous activists, borders are often arbitrary, so cultures, communities, and family connections don’t stop at county lines. In the most technical sense, the rural southeastern Ohio county Grover grew up isn’t in Appalachia according to the federal government, but it’s surrounded by ARC-designated counties on three sides and many of the cultural traditions carry over. 

“I reference the historian Emily Skidmore who wrote True Sex: The Lives of Trans Men at the Turn of the Twentieth Century. These trans men specifically moved away from the city to live in rural areas to live out lives,” Grover said. “Skidmore also talked about just how easy it is to find trans people in small-town newspapers where the newspapers are using correct pronouns.”

Finding True Sex while in grad school for her master’s in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies was validating for Grover. “It was something I always felt growing up, and that book showed me it was real, not just vibes,” she said. 

In Grover’s lived experiences growing up in Carroll, a village in Fairfield County, Ohio––which just hit a population of 500 in the 2020 Census––it’s not being queer or trans that Appalachian people take issue with, it’s disrupting the rural way of life. 

“It’s not being gay or trans that was disruptive. It was like, ‘Don’t bring that city slicker shit out to my neck of the woods,’” Grover said. “People know my family as farmers and people who worked in the paper mill and the glass factory. People know that you show up to help in a barn fire. People know if you come to church. If someone is about to lose their kids, people know how to step up to help with food. We have all these mutual aid networks in rural places, so you have to show up.” 

Showing up and being present in the lives of others is the basis of any community, and it’s no different in Appalachia. Grover writes beautifully in her memoir about the rural goth scene she was a part of, which included a number of queer people who showed up for each other constantly. Whether poverty or loneliness, addiction or mental health, they helped one another navigate uncertain futures and achieve what sometimes felt like unattainable dreams, like going to college or finding a trade that would allow for some semblance of upward mobility. 

It’s in these passages that she addresses yet another stereotype about Appalachia: that if you are out in the region, there’s one queer community and it’s a monolith, so there’s only one “acceptable” way to be LGBTQ+. That, too, couldn’t be further from the truth. Not every queer person gravitated toward the goth scene Grover was a part of simply because they knew they’d be accepted there. There were other queer spaces to join, so there was no need to shoehorn yourself into a scene that you didn’t actually identify with. 

If Appalachia is not as inhospitable to trans and nonbinary people as the dominant societal narrative would have us believe, a world of possibility opens up for LGBTQ+ people who may feel pushed by queer culture to flee rural areas for the city, even though they find themselves more at home in more sparsely populated areas away from the coasts. Yet this pressure to flee reveals even more stereotypes about Appalachia that don’t hold up –– namely that the entirety of Appalachia is rural, so one must leave the region to live in a city. 

“Cornell University in New York is in an Appalachian county, but that’s not what you think of when you think of Appalachia,” Grover pointed out. “Look at West Virginia. The whole state is in Appalachia and parts are an hour or half hour from D.C. It happens everywhere.” 

And as Grover discovered when she moved to Columbus, Ohio –– the notoriously gay-friendly 14th largest city in the country just a half hour from Grover’s hometown –– the promises of a queer haven and community in the city don’t always happen as hoped for. 

“What makes you belong is different in the city. What gives you your card to the club of certain scenes is, do you know and cite certain histories? Do you know and like certain pop culture? Like how every queer person seems to know astrology,” Grover said. “I don’t remember at the time ever feeling like I needed to get out of my hometown and I don’t know that I ever wanted to. It just kind of happened…I had such a rich understanding of being gay and the lived experience of being trans in my home area with my chosen kin and my friends, then I got to the city and it was like everything I was doing was a cheap white trash knockoff of what the city had to offer.”

It’s not that Grover is discounting trans and nonbinary people’s very real concerns over safety and belonging, but rather that through Tar Hollow Trans, she’s casting light on experiences like hers, which don’t get talked about nearly enough.  

“A lot of people’s life stories are: I was closeted, I couldn’t come out in my hometown, so I went to the city and found community. Even though we know that’s not the case in all rural places and it’s not everyone’s rural experience, that’s the forgotten part of all this,” Grover said. “When you’re a country person, a rural person, and you’re Appalachian, you move to the city and you want to do that same kind of connecting but you don’t want to assimilate. A lot of times you’re locked out of the promise of community.” 

As Tar Hollow Trans shows, if we open our minds, trans and nonbinary community isn’t as difficult to find in rural places as city slickers might believe.

 Mandy Shunnarah (they/them) is an Alabama-born, Palestinian-American writer who now calls Columbus, Ohio, home. Their essays, poetry, and short stories have been published in The New York Times, Electric Literature, The Rumpus, Entropy Magazine, The Normal School, Heavy Feather Review, and others. Their first book, Midwest Shreds: Skating Through America’s Heartland is forthcoming from Belt Publishing. Read more at mandyshunnarah.com.

The post In Community and at Home as a Trans Person in Rural Appalachia appeared first on TransLash Media.

“Wow,” she says, gesturing to the flatness of my torso with a smile. Then she looks down at her own body and points at her full breasts, freshly shaved and smooth. “Wow.” She looks at me again. I smile back. We don’t need any other words to say what we feel. So I simply go back to kissing her.

If you are a member of the transgender, non-binary, and gender non-conforming community, you are likely no stranger to the fact that being in relationships while also being trans can be … complicated. Our physical forms are often works in progress, and our existence is far too often the target of hate speech and ignorant headlines. Even with our supportive cisgender partners, we can find ourselves guiding them through uncharted waters when it comes to body parts, labels, or something akin to a gender language barrier.

However, not all of us have cisgender partners; many TGNC folks fall in love with one or more kindred transgender spirits, forming what is commonly known in our community as a “T4T” (i.e. “trans for trans”) relationship. From two binary trans people with a heterosexual dynamic, to a polycule of nonbinary and genderfluid humans, these partnerships are as wonderfully varied as queer people themselves. 

Take my current relationship, for instance. I met my partner, a panromantic asexual transgender woman, shortly after I had ended a four-year relationship with a bisexual cisgender man. She was the recording engineer and technical director for a project I was tracking vocals on, and when she mentioned that she’d be taking time off for her breast augmentation surgery the next month, I asked her if she had anyone coming to take care of her during her recovery. She shyly admitted she wasn’t very good at asking for help, and I said, “Cool, I’m coming Tuesday.” I showed up as promised, thinking it would be a one-time favor for a new friend, but something about her just kept me coming back. And hey, the rest is history.

As a *demi-panromantic, asexual, and agender/gender non-conforming person, when someone experiences attraction to me, it often raises questions about who they see me as and what they’re really attracted to. Part of what brought the two of us together was the conversations we had about asexuality and queer platonic relationships (aka QPRs)—we actually began our relationship as platonic partners and later realized that it had blossomed into something more. In both the platonic and the romantic chapters of our story, the emphasis has been on providing support in the ways our previous relationships had lacked. And after just eight months of knowing each other, I have noticed with gratitude the difference in how my girlfriend affirms and cares for gender, sexuality, and even consent.

A lot of it is the little things. She calls me her “dragon” (an enchanted non-gendered term of endearment that I love) and creates spaces where I can feel like the strong one. I seek out feminine language to include in my conversations with her, like “enchantress,” “goddess,” and “hey, girly.” She made a point of shifting her language around body parts when I explained what words felt icky or not right for me. I make spaces for her to be soft and delicate, something that felt forbidden before she transitioned and was being perceived as male. Before my top surgery, she would check in with me about my chest binding to make sure I was being safe and taking breaks. At every opportunity, I make sure to compliment her on her hair, dresses, and make-up—anything that I know will make her feel girly and beautiful. We’re both always on the lookout for affirming gifts to give each other, and we casually exchange pre-transition clothes and belongings without a second thought. And the list goes on; a myriad of threads that form a tapestry of love and support.

It’s also in the unspoken things. Even though our trans experiences are not identical by any means, so much of our emotional connection starts with understanding one another on a deeper level. We never have to explain why something feels affirming, or why at times we need certain things to relieve dysphoria. We don’t have to explain what dysphoria is or feels like. We don’t need to worry about our partner’s chosen family and social circle being safe and accepting. We are also conscious of how anxiety-inducing it can be to enter new spaces, and we always attend to each other’s sense of safety. Our relationship has more room to breathe and grow because the focus isn’t on being trans, but on being ourselves together.

To be intimate with someone who has no preconceived expectations for how parts are “supposed” to operate is liberating. To be supported in your transition by someone who understands it and holds actual joy for you is exhilarating. The conversations we have, the inside jokes, the shared desire to see more queerness in media; we experience life differently from our cisgender peers, and the way our histories contain little echos of each other is just one facet of our secret language. Take it from a dragon and a vampire princess—being in love with another trans person is magical.

Definitions

Demisexual/Demiromantic: Demisexuality and demiromanticism are subsets of asexuality and aromanticism, respectively, as are the rest of the identities on this list. Demi is French for “half,” and was first coined to describe a person who does not experience attraction to an individual until a significant emotional bond has formed. This works off of the idea of primary attraction and secondary attraction. Primary attraction is attraction to people based on first impressions, such as appearance or how they smell. Secondary attraction is attraction to people that develops over time, and forms out of the relationship one has with a person, and their emotional connection. This can be applied to both romantic attraction and sexual attraction. Demisexuals or demiromantics do not experience primary attraction, but do experience secondary attraction.

Pansexual: Used to describe a person who has the capacity to form enduring physical, romantic, and/ or emotional attractions to any person, regardless of gender identity. This is one of several terms under the bi+ umbrella.

Asexual: Asexuality is probably the most well-known of the a-spec identities. Many people who identify with one of the subcategories of asexuality will use asexual when talking about their identity in public because it’s the easiest to explain. A simple definition that I use is: Someone who does not experience sexual attraction towards anyone. It’s important to remember, however, that attraction and action are not always the same: some asexuals may be repulsed by the idea of sexual contact and won’t engage in it, but others may be sex-neutral or sex-positive and will have sex. Some asexuals have a libido or will masturbate but won’t be open to sex with someone else, while others may not have a libido but will have sex with a partner because of the sense of connection that comes from it. Everyone experiences their asexuality differently, so it’s important not to make assumptions about an asexual person or their experiences.

Agender: As first reported by them., “agender” refers to people who don’t identify themselves with any particular gender. This can mean being genderless, lacking gender, or having a null gender. However, people also use “agender” to mean identifying as gender-neutral or having an undefinable gender.

Featured image courtesy of Broadly’s Gender Spectrum Collection.

Socks Whitmore (they/them/theirs) is a writer, stage and voice actor, and lyricist-composer rooted in voice and text. A graduate of CalArts, the range of their writing spans from musical theater to narrative design for games to poetry, short fiction, and op-eds. They have been produced by New Musicals Inc. and Overtone Industries and published by American Composers Forum, the Sappho Small Talk blog, and Queer Quarterly magazine, among others. Learn more about Socks here.

The post T4T Magic appeared first on TransLash Media.

As an Afro-Latinx musician, I spend a lot of my time jamming out to an array of sounds that cross generations, cultures, and genres. My headphones are always on, and the music is always up. It’s been one of the biggest ways I’ve been able to come closer to my identity when the world makes it seem out of reach or like a bad idea to do so. Building this relationship with artists, especially Black artists, has given me so much life, and now I get to help keep their legacies alive by passing on the music to you. In honor of Black History Month, here are five musicians that remind me of my power, and some of the songs that propel me forward. 

All The Time Always 

Made up of Makel Clemons and Alex Restivo, All The Time Always captivates your attention with sung and spoken performance over ever-evolving production soundscapes. I was briefly roommates with Makel while at Berklee College of Music, and in that time, was able to see and hear the music before it came to life. I’d often come home to fully finished, recorded, and produced songs after just having been gone for a work shift – it was incredible. As someone who’s seen a life before All The Time Always and a life present with them, I say with full confidence that it’s better to know them. You also never have to worry about carving an hour out of your day to listen to a whole project because their four song EP Feel is only four minutes long! For a taste of what you’re getting into, watch the music video for REPETITION above. It speaks for itself. 

Duke Ellington 

Duke Ellington may very well be the reason I didn’t realize synesthesia, specifically chromesthesia – the ability to see colors for sound – wasn’t something everyone experienced. I remember reading about him as a child and he’d talk about how notes sounded like different colors when played by different people and thinking to myself “He gets it, no wonder the music is incredible, he’s painting jazz symphonies!” I’m never going to hear it in the same colors he wrote it in, but I like imagining what the palettes he heard were. As a recommendation, here’s a deep-cut from the 1963 album Afro-Bossa, a favorite of mine, called Pyramid. Close your eyes when you listen, imagine what it must’ve been like to write it, the colors you hear…it’s a very eye-opening experience. 

Eryn Allen Kane

When releasing her debut two-part EP series Aviary in 2015, against all suggestions from industry representatives, Eryn decided on Have Mercy, an a Capella song, as the single. Defying the odds, that move was what propelled her forward, becoming a collaborator of Chance The Rapper, Thirdstory, Noname and more. It’s never just about the music for her, she has to shake the room and make you feel something. Her voice got her into the room and her spirit is what keeps her in it. It’s no wonder to me that Prince happily mentored this legend in the making. Her more recently released album a tree planted by water, is dedicated to and made for Black women, saying to Teen Vogue, “I wanted [this project] for the world, but I always gotta talk to my sisters.”

Florence Price

As a religiously raised Arkansan, Florence had an admiration for the music she heard in church. She also was heavily interested in European Romantic composers. The combination of gospel and Tchaikovsky became known as her compositional repertoire, and led her to being the first African-American woman to be recognised as a symphonic composer and the first African-American woman to have her works performed by a renowned, major symphony orchestra in 1933. To put it simply, Florence changed the rules within and built a bigger picture. And succeeded. By herself. What more could you need out of a favorite musician? For a taste of the magic take a listen to Dances in the Canebrakes: I. Nimble Feet, one of the last compositions Florence wrote before passing, meant to be a reflection of past tradition, played by the legendary African-American Pianist Althea Waites.

Jimmy Cliff

And to close us off, The incredible Jimmy Cliff. There was no doubt in my mind that good ol’ Jimmy was showing up on this list. A multi-instrumentalist master of reggae, soul, ska, and rocksteady – a genre invented in Jamaica around 1966. Jimmy does it all and brings every ounce of energy to each performance – not just live, but also in the booth. Listening to the ‘Music Magician’ (a name I made for him years ago) taught me how to leave it all out there when I sing and play. He holds the Order of Merit, the highest honor granted by the Jamaican government for achievements in the arts and sciences, rightfully so. He also holds the key to my heart, but the order is more impressive. The 1970 album Wonderful World, Beautiful People is the record most scratched of his in my collection, the second song, Many Rivers To Cross being the most tattered up. If you need to be uplifted during a good cry, this might be a good song for you.

I hope that somewhere in here you find sounds worth listening to, stories worth learning, and ambition worth chasing. Happy Black History Month from my favorites, and from me.

Yannick Eike Mirko (he/they) is an actor, musician, editor, and writer. Yannick supports production of TransLash Podcast with Imara Jones.

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The post 5 Black Musicians That Remind Me Of My Power appeared first on TransLash Media.