Escaping the Point: On Trans Visibility and the Art of Edie Fake

Since TIME magazine's declaration of the “transgender tipping point” in 2014, images of transgender identities in US film and television have more than quadrupled. And yet these efforts to make transgender bodies “visible” within popular media often reproduce a tacit cissexist optics that remains intact. Trans activists, creators, and scholars have pointed out that this increased representation offers transgender people a paradox: what seems like a “door” into recognition and acceptance also enacts a “trap of the visual” by which trans bodies are simultaneously objectified both against and under an implicitly cissexist gaze. In this article, I draw on trans artist Edie Fake's work to explore how trans aesthetics might resist this trap by escaping the point of tipping-point optics. By “point” I mean the interpellative pointing of media at the transgender body as well as the assumption that the “point” of transgender visibility (both its purpose and direction) is to improve transgender lives. I offer Fake's work here as a transfixing response to the paradoxes of tipping point optics—one that cuts through our assumptions about the value of representation, demonstrating why and how we should resist the current fixation on transgender visibility.