Hari Nef Shows That Trans Women Are Worthy Of Affection
It was the 1990’s. I was a kid living in Kalamazoo, Michigan. It was summertime. Summers were filled with the sounds of clicking sprinklers in the back yard, cascading cool water down on my friends and I who were jumping through its wet blades. My dad’s eclectic music pouring out from an open back door.
It seemed like he listened to “Who Wants An Ugly Girl” by the Tom Tom Club on loop. In the song, Tina Weymouth daydreams about finding a man who would want to love her despite her being self described as an ‘ugly girl’. It’s one of those songs that manages to squirrel its way into your memory, grabs onto your self-image and won’t let go.
I have tons of these memories, many of them having been repressed and re-discovered over the course of the last year. Moments purposefully forgotten only to force their way back to my present tense to remind me of a past iteration of myself which I had long shed like a layer of snake skin.
“Who wants an ugly girl?” The mirror had settled that question for me. I didn’t look like a girl was supposed to look, so that was that. Even if I could magically become a girl, there’s no way this body would ever permit me to find love. I would undoubtedly be consigned to ‘ugly girl’ status, rendering my unlovable and unworthy of the trappings of romance.
I put carefully stowed my feelings of dissonance hoping that one day they would either die a quiet death, or that I would be better equipped to figure out just who and what the hell I was.
Fast forward to 2017.
The world has come to better understand trans identities to the point that for the first time ever, a transgender woman is featured in a makeup ad for the company L’Oreal. Her name is Hari Nef.
Her ads are a desperately needed milestone for the normalization of trans people when already this year, we have as many murders of trans women in just these first two weeks. It’s just one of the painful reminders of how far trasgender people have to go to reach a basic level of decent treatment and respect in American society.
Hari Nef has already made a name for herself in the fashion world, and her work is in high demand as acceptance begins to grow. Her portfolio is as brilliant as her attractiveness and poise, but when I think of myself and my relationship to my own femininity, sometimes I’m not as confident as she seems to be.
“Who wants an ugly girl?”
That fucking song has become a painful reminder of a time not so long ago where I questioned how deserving I am of love. It’s a trope that persists even despite the fact that many of us are in reality, sexy, desirable women. It’s a trope that begs to be killed, and Hari Nef has chosen to make herself the executioner.
In Nef’s recent photo shoot, she captures a series of images that to many of us, seem like they come straight out of the fantasies of our dreams.
The magic of these photos is how mundane they are. They could be the photos in any full page Calvin Klein ad. Just a girl and a boy together, being affectionate toward one another. It could have been any model in his arms, but it’s not just any model. It’s Hari Nef; A proud trans woman.
Trans women are thought by many in the public to exist in one of two extremes — those who pass and those who don’t. Similarly, many of our identities have been reduced to fetishistic desires, fodder for the arousal of a specific niche of men who “are into that sort of thing”. Trans women internalize these ideals to the point where we sometimes mistake ourselves as being perversely beholden to that system of sexual objectification.
The reaction of so many in the trans community who saw the photos has been overwhelming.
When we see these photos, we are reminded that beneath the faces we show the world, we’re still human. We only want what everyone else wants; to love and be loved for who we are.
What Nef’s images offer is a look into another possibility — the possibility that we as women are worthy and deserving of the affections of whoever loves us. The possibility that we too can be the girl, being held by the boy. Nothing more, and nothing less.
EmilyMaxima is a freelance essayist with published works in TheEstablishment.co, The Huffington Post & Btchflicks.com. Follow her on twitter: @emilymaxima
