This is gonna sound weird but I wish we were depicted with features that make us clockable like a brow ridge or shoulders or a blocky silhouette in art defending us.
Like I’ve been looking through comics and almost every depiction of a trans woman looks identical to a cis woman… which like, I get why a trans person would be uncomfortable with drawing dysphoric features, but I feel like it dulls the point of the political art.
Defending trans people who pass is easy, like even transphobes can do that, but defending trans people who aren’t conventionally attractive and don’t pass is much harder. Those are the people who get into confrontations in public bathrooms, and who experience the most hatred and constant micro-aggressions from almost everyone. The stage where you “don’t look good” is when you’re most vulnerable and is an almost universal experience for all trans women that tends to last much longer if you’re underprivileged.
I would just like seeing more stuff that affirms non-passing trans women are still women and that, in general, women don’t need to be pretty to deserve respect and basic decency from other people.
I see trans women depicted like this all the time. In fact, it’s extremely rare to see trans women actually depicted as passing women. The norm in Hollywood is to cast a cisgender male to play a trans woman. And tumblr artists constantly draw trans women as men in dresses.
Sure, it’s fine to occasionally draw trans people like this. But it’s the NORM to draw trans people like this, not a rare exception. Those artists will always justify it by saying, “well SOME trans women have feature X, Y, and Z,” but then those artists ALWAYS draw trans women as these extremely manly caricatures that don’t even bother shaving. Often the “some trans women have…” is just used as an excuse to draw art that is indistinguishable from bigoted caricatures of trans women.