Posting this one more as a controversy. Both sides may have some valid points. Be aware the link does bring you to Playboy. Transexuals are, perhaps, one of the last sexual variations who are mercilessly mocked, rejected, but what is legitimate expression, what is, essentially, usury? What becomes us just responding to Hollywood and beauty industry manipulation and dangerous image making that may even kill those who can’t, or won’t, conform? -OEN
When Laverne Cox decided to pose nude for Allure, she knew she was taking a risk. “Black women are not often told that we’re beautiful unless we align with certain standards,” Cox told Allure. “Trans women certainly are not told we’re beautiful.”
More than that, trans women and black women, too, are often told that they’re not real women.
“When the image of the perfect woman is coded from childhood as Snow White, the fairest and most sunburned in all the land, the idea becomes that all the rest of us are just donning costumes to imitate true beauty,” says black trans women writer Shaadi Devereaux. Cox, in taking off her clothes and costumes and posing au naturale, as herself, dares the viewer to see her as not just beautiful but natural.
She also, as I’m sure she knows, invites a backlash from those who see black trans women’s bodies as innately false. The backlash was not slow in coming.
Feminist Meghan Murphy reacted to the photo just as Cox suggests that people often react to black and trans women — with disgust, prejudice and horror. In a short but impressively cruel post, Murphy sneers at Cox for attempting to achieve a “‘perfect’ body as defined by a patriarchal/porn culture, through plastic surgery, and then presenting it as a sexualized object for public consumption.”
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