ok so this is a conversation i've been trying to have with everyone around me for the past year or so.
i'm TIRED of art that portrays trans people as completely indistinguishable from cis people. if the only way i can tell your characters are trans is bc you put a little trans pin on them or bc you clarified it through text later, then that leaves a bad taste in my mouth. thats not what so many of us look like. the fact that people act like there isnt a space between “transphobic caricature” and “100% stealth” is tiring.
there are so many of us, no matter how early we transition or how much money we have, who will never look cis. there will always be bits and pieces of us that are “clockable,” and even still, for many of us who are at peace with gender nonconformity, they aren't aspects of ourselves we want to get rid of. it is so harmful to act like this isn't true and that it isn't a natural part of humanity to be celebrated!
artists are so afraid of portraying people who are visibly trans… and i truly feel like it goes far beyond a fear of coming off as fetishizing. it is a fear of questioning their own standards of beauty, a fear of looking their own internalized prejudice in the face.
so much of this stems from the fact that people refuse to draw anyone with humanity. nobody wants to draw “imperfections…” if you've never drawn a cis woman with stubble on her chin or hair on her breasts, then obviously when you draw a trans woman like that it becomes a transmisogynistic caricature because it's evident you see these qualities as masculine, as ugly, as flaws…
but the solution to this isn't “never draw trans women with facial hair.” it's to know that all women, whether they are cis or trans, can have facial hair and to portray them as such. to draw women with a sense of realism and humanity in the first place!