Five years ago, the average person would not have understood the meaning of the word “trans”.
But since the “trans tipping point” in 2014, the gender spectrum has entered mainstream culture more than ever before. Plays with trans characters such as the Olivier-nominated Rotterdam have taken the West End by storm, while films including The Danish Girl, TV shows such as BBC’s Boy Meets Girl and 21st-century trans icons Laverne Cox and Caitlyn Jenner have dominated screen time.
Yet the public rarely see beyond the celebrity media circus or portrayals of trans people in entertainment. Until now.
The Museum of Transology exhibition at London Fashion Space Gallery in Marylebone is presenting genuine stories of trans people. It is the largest collection of trans artefacts and photographic portraiture ever to be displayed, with more than 120 items.
Curator E-J Scott tells me about his motivation behind the museum. “I think that there’s been a wider recognition of people who are trans or non-binary, but this has been mainstream trans ideas of who we are, not real-life ideas, such as your Caitlyn Jenners who have this ‘before and after’ experience, which most of us don’t have. It’s been read as an expression of alternate sexualities, for example. Because of this transcestry (evidence of trans lives lived before us) has been overlooked in museums.”
He notes a resulting worrying trend of trans people feeling excluded from working in the heritage sector. “If you don’t see yourself in a museum, why would you think you’d be welcome to work there? This is why lots of our transcestry has been lost, because you need trans eyes to locate trans identities.”
Mr Scott fears that, despite the apparent gender revolution, not enough is being done to correct this. “This collection is a challenge to museums to not miss this increase in awareness, because they aren’t responding fast enough and we’re in danger of overlooking this moment in time as well.”
He is adamant, however, that the change in society and the reason his project was possible was not down to representations of trans people in the cis media (dominated by cisgendered people whose gender corresponds with their biological sex), but rather due to an increase in confidence and vibrancy in the trans community.
“I don’t think this has been made possible just because cisgendered people know what trans is. Trans communities in the UK are coming out and being confident enough to say ‘this is my gender identity’,” he says. “That means that more trans people are finding each other, online and at Pride festivals for instance, so when I had this idea word got out very quickly, and people started donating things.
“The whole thing has been a community project. The exhibition itself was crowdsourced, and the community made the set. It was about taking art and craft out into our communities and providing a space where we could heal, and create something beautiful to show to the public.”
At the exhibition, I saw members of a university LGBTQ+ society inadvertently bump into each other. One congratulated another, happily shocked about the progress of their transition: “Your face is changing, your voice is deeper!”, and others discussed society events. That one room instantly became a place for community and support, a “safe space” in itself, just as train tickets to Pride events and their merch are a common feature of the display.
Richard Sandell, Professor of Museum Studies at the University of Leicester, agrees that the Museum of Transology is breaking new ground. “In 2005, when I first began to look for narratives related to gender diversity in museums, examples were extremely scarce.
“My interviews with curators and activists alike suggest these substantive and exciting portrayals of transgender lives would not have been possible ten or even five years ago. However, attitudes are slowly changing and curators are acknowledging the potential for more inclusive narratives.”
But why are museums so crucial in rights struggles?
“Museums don’t operate in a vacuum,” says Professor Sandell. “They not only reflect social norms but actively shape the conversations that society has about difference and prompt new ideas. They inform the climate within which groups engaged in equality struggles can claim and exercise their rights.”
He adds that the potential for museums to impact visitors emotionally needs to be harnessed effectively for this to be the case, as this can move people to protest and enforce wider social change.
And this change is drastically needed. The exhibition demonstrates that UK society is not adapting quickly enough. Trans hate crimes in England and Wales have nearly doubled in the last five years. Almost one in three have been attacked or threatened more than three times in the past year. One in three trans people have experienced homelessness. Three trans women have died after being held in male prisons in the last two years.
Mr Scott suggests that by excluding a group of people from museum representation, you are hindering their chance to make sense of their place in a world that may not always be welcoming. His exhibition seeks to offer them roots.
“Museums should help you look to the past to locate where you are now and understand why you are in the world in the way that you are, so you can look forward and build a responsible future,” he tells me.
He adds that challenging the binary archival system is the key to improving trans inclusion. “We need new ways of archiving that don’t posit that there’s only a male and female experience.
“How do you archive someone who might identify as being assigned female at birth but is actually male? When they were made to go to school as a girl and wear a girl’s uniform, are you going to say that those photos from 20 years ago are actually of a girl?”
Professor Sandell talks of the importance of public portrayals of trans lives that are created by trans people themselves. “These hold the potential to counter negative and stereotypical accounts of trans identities,” he explains.
It is putting control in the hands of trans people which makes the Museum of Transology collection profoundly emotive.
“I made the decision to have handwritten tags attached to the objects, so that the person who donated the object would be in control of their own narrative. It’s not the cis media, the cis gaze, explaining what trans identities are – these are real people’s stories,” says Mr Scott.
This personal touch, complete with somewhat endearing spelling and grammar mistakes, creates the sense that the donors are speaking to you directly, in their own voice. The objects are not behind glass, so there’s no barrier to your connection – a powerful way to present stories that many may not have engaged with before.
And it’s clear that the public agree. The exhibition has been overwhelmingly popular. “It’s the busiest exhibition that we’ve had at the London College of Fashion,” says Mr Scott.
One visitor I spoke to, Esmee Joseph, said: “The exhibition was enlightening and helped me empathise with the LGBTQ+ community. It made me aware of the challenges they face to just be themselves. I have a strong sense of respect for their bravery in sharing such personal parts of their transitions.”
The project is celebrated in the trans community too. “I’ve been inundated with requests from around the world to donate more objects,” says Mr Scott.
“There’s been a great deal of interest in having the museum go on tour. But I want to find a permanent home so that the collection is preserved correctly. It’s a complicated collection to save.”
The complexity doesn’t stop there. It is a challenging topic to get right, perhaps going some way to explaining why so few museums have explored it. Just last year the Science Museum in South Kensington was forced to rethink its Who Am I? exhibition when it caused controversy by asking visitors to test whether they have a “pink” or “blue” brain, implying a stereotypical gender binary.
“Museums are often nervous about adopting a position on specific human rights issues, and some curators have been anxious about engaging in topics around which there is a lack of public consensus,” says Professor Sandell.
Some of the items in the Museum of Transology are quite visceral – you can easily see how it might offend a more… delicate viewer’s sensibilities. Yet it is unabashed. Its brochure’s cover features a breast preserved in a jar following a mastectomy, loudly proclaiming the truth of trans life from the off.
“The exhibition is unapologetically great,” says Mr Scott. “It is a bold display of the realities of the variations in trans people’s lives. I was clear there was going to be no editorial process, so whatever anyone wanted to donate, they were allowed to donate.
“This is why we see such a diversity of objects, from everyday objects to objects that are very challenging. It’s taking away from this idea that trans people are supermodels – there’s no one thing that means trans. At the same time, we have common experiences, from success stories and achievement through to violence and rejection.”
Intersectionality was also an important part of this diversity. “There are people who aren’t just trans, they’re trans and they’re black and they’re Muslim and they’re differently abled, and this complicates life,” Mr Scott explains. “We tried to represent that this is not a white, middle-class experience, this cuts across all sections of society.”
The set includes wardrobes of underwear and clothes, and bathroom cabinets filled with make-up and toiletries – an everyday process of getting ready that everyone can relate to – and the “lounge room” of hobbies filled with ballet shoes and swimming goggles, for instance. But it also proudly displays the plaster casts for gender confirmation surgery such as phalloplasty, medical cabinets full of hormones, and surgical items from Mr Scott’s own chest surgery: syringes, the surgery gown and a bloody binder, and what he calls “the bits that caused my lactose intolerance” – the preserved breast tissue.
This humour echoes throughout the exhibition – something I was not expecting. A small “pack and pee” prosthetic (allowing people to stand to urinate) had a tag that read: “I became more ambitious with age!” One card on display mentioned works from a university comedic film group that included A Cismas Carol and “a re-imagining of the nativity story (featuring a pregnant Marcus and his wife Josephine)”. The writer mentions that trans characters are often used as “cheap punchlines” – once again, this collection gives the opportunity for humour to trans people themselves.
There are heartwarming stories, such as one man’s experience on hormones: “Sustanon 250 is the best thing that has happened to me apart from my wife and son! It’s made me the husband and father I always wanted to be.”
But the Museum of Transology ultimately offers a heartbreaking insight into the struggles many trans people face on a daily basis, such as being misgendered – there is a complaint letter from when this happened on a flight – and the expensive and long process of transitioning. The struggle to get the correct medical care is evident in the tags attached to hormone packets, often leading to potentially dangerous self-medicating.
The brown travel tags in the exhibition are a metaphor for this very gender journey. Yet cis people go on a journey too.
Mr Scott says: “I wanted to end with the hat stand where people could write their own tag, so people understood that gender on a spectrum is not just about trans people, it’s about how we are still struggling, despite three waves of feminism, to disassociate gender from gender roles.
“This is where the trans experience and feminism are actually aligned, despite the backlash from TERFs [Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists]. The trans fight is a feminist fight about making sure that there is gender equality for everyone.”
This idea has never been more prevalent. Women’s Hour presenter Jenni Murray recently came under fire for saying trans women are not “real women”, just as outspoken feminist Germaine Greer did in 2015, and there has been a turn against the so-called “transgender lobby”.
But that “lobby” is clearly ready to fight back. Mr Scott’s passion for making museums more inclusive spaces, influenced by his own experiences, has made him a firebrand. He just might make theirstory.
The Museum of Transology is now on in Brighton
Originally published: PA Diploma News
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