Hi Jennifer, I wanted to thank you for writing this incredibly personal piece and letting cis outsiders such as myself read your story. But as I read your section on the rise of misandrist humor in feminist circles, I was struck by your inclusion of the uncredited, screenprinted piece reading “I’D RATHER BE BEAUTIFUL THAN MALE”. Whether or not you personally know about the identity of the artist, her lack of credit and inclusion troubled me, and I wanted to supply some information for you and your readers: this screenprint was created by artist Mark Aguhar sometime in 2011, and is called “Making Looks.”

Mark described her work in this way: “My work is about visibility. My work is about the fact that I’m a genderqueer person of color fat femme fag feminist and I don’t really know what to do with that identity in this world.” She used she pronouns and called herself “someone who is struggling with my trans*identity (whether or not I ID as trans* or to what degree I ID as trans*”) to the world at large, until her death in 2012 by her own hand. She spoke out frequently about how the images she created, like “Making Looks” and performance and photography pieces using her own image, were “consumed” by the larger artworld and white, mainstream gay/queer community in ways that stripped her work of its context and meaning.

That is exactly why it is so disturbing and tragic to me to see this piece of hers used as a demonstration of transmisogynist ‘misandry,’ and why I wanted to bring her name back to her work. “Making Looks” is, like all of her art, a complex and personal statement loaded with pain and resistance against the systems that oppressed her, and an assertion despite everyone telling her otherwise that she was beautiful in the body she was in. I understand why you’d use that piece for that section of your essay, and I don’t mean to challenge your story in any way, but I’d respectfully urge you to add her name and the title of the piece to the image, and for anyone reading this to look into her work. Thank you to anyone reading for taking the time to listen, and you can find much of Mark’s work here: http://markaguhar.tumblr.com/