228. TDoV 2017
Trans Day of Visibility was yesterday, and I have very mixed feelings about it.
Part of it is, people seeing us is the first step on the road to people giving us rights and seeing us as equals and so on – but it means that there’s an intervening period of time in which we are marginalised and hypervisible. The people who are able and willing to be visible on TDoV might not even know how powerful their acts are for the rest of us.
This comic is about my annoyance with TDoV. Specifically that I feel like cis people should see us and accept us on that day, but I only ever see trans folks talking about it. It feels like we’re an echo chamber, and maybe cis people just have to work a little harder than usual to pretend we aren’t human, don’t exist, etc. And while this comic was forming in a conversation with Andréa, this smol child walked in right at the end and well, they had to stay in the comic. If we’re hypervisible to each other, maybe that’s not so bad?
As always, my Patreon supporters (including Lyrania, Alex, Lorelei, and many others) make it happen. (Well, like, except for the drawing obviously, I did that. And if you support me on Patreon you can see secret drawing too, etc etc.) Thank you, everyone!
Thank you for articulating my thoughts about (the positive side of) TDOV <3
You’re most welcome! <3
Oh, my lord, that is so incredibly cute & honestly made me tear up a little. I work with a QSA & dedicated so much time to furthering LGBTQ+ (I mostly work with trans & nonbinary rights), it’s so easy to get caught up in the people who ignore or fight against you that it’s easy to forget the real reason I’m there. Yeah, it’d be cool to make jerks understand us, but I care more about the kids who do and shouldn’t have to, grow up thinking they’re alone, weird or broken.
Awww, thank you for saying so, and that is really beautifully put. I’m glad to have been able to move you a little bit. 🙂