'The Transgender Soul' (Completed Art Project)

It's finished! Wow, amazing what you can accomplish when you're given so many free hours in a row. I also credit the incredible resilience and quick-fixing abilities of latex and hot glue. HURRAH!


Title: The Transgender Soul
Gender is both a cage and a map. It can guide us, tell us where we are and where we going, but it also confines us, tells us where we cannot go, where we are forbidden.
The Transgender Soul transcends this blurred divide. By shattering the walls around, the Transgender Soul lets in the light which reveals the true fragility of our constructions, even as it celebrates our incredible creativity. The Transgender Soul represents the limitlessness of human identity.
But without boundaries, we are fearful. And so we have done all we can to keep our gendered boundaries, to fortify them. We have attached Gender to Sex, our greatest vulnerability, and heaped all manner of evil upon the Other. We have chained ourselves to the cold sterile ground through unequal access to employment, to health care, to civil rights, and we have held ourselves in the shadows of violence and confusion because they are somehow familiar.
Men and Womyn have been at war so long we can't even remember what are differences and similarities really are. The Transgender Soul will free us, if we let it.




A description, in case it's not clear. What you have here is a papier mache egg (constructed strictly from the pages of The Dallas Voice I might add) which represents gender - gender which is something that both protects and confines. The egg is colored with the "traditional" or typical colors that denote the gender of a newborn baby, but blurred slightly where they meet. The gendered shell is chained down by various elements (you could interpret the three chains as Ignorance, Fear, and Hate, or some other relevant triad). The inside of the egg is painted dark, to show how even though we are all inside this shell, we are barely aware of it. The Transgender Symbol is stainless steel (this was made by someone else) and is bursting through the shell, representing how only when a soul which stands outside of the normal shape we've come to expect of gender comes along, can we see, and be free, of the bondage of gender. The chains are unbroken however, we've only just begun to see our way out, it will take a long time before we are free. The shards which lie in front of the shell are painted gold - this could be because they are so highly prized, but also because they are very, very costly. Some of the shards are labeled, representing some of the greatest barriers the Trans community (and consequently, ALL people) face - from the simplest things like 'personal safety' and accurate 'documents of identity' to the challenges of economic equality, family and marriage equality, and equal access to decent complete health care!