A photo series about safe spaces. Photographer Jip: ‘To transgender people, the outside world can feel like a jungle full of uncertainties. Sometimes I experience this strongly. As if I don’t really belong. Fortunately, I know where I can find security and be myself.’
‘My mother has to be the person who most intensely experienced my transition. She also gained her own personal growth through my transition. …Right mum?’
At age eightteen Louis Alves got the “go ahead” to start taking feminising hormones. However, after spending a period in New York, Louis decided not to transition.
The concept of gender dysphoria influences the image of trans persons. The opposite of dysphoria is euphoria. This concept remains marginalised in public debate about trans people. It’s not even in the Dutch Van Dale dictionary.
At age 22 Brasilian Aleisha started transitioning. A year later she was working in prostitution in Rio de Janeiro, not able to find another job. When she left Brasil to start a new life in Europe, sexwork again seemed the only option.
At the mention of ‘pregnant trans men’ many people over thirty will think of Thomas Beatie, the American who obtained publicity in 2007 […]
The Netherlands’ pioneer status, which it attained by opening the first transgender clinic in the world in 1975, is now in decline. However, our country is still considered to be trans friendly. In other parts of Europe, transgender people are subjected to restrictions that are inhumane and encourage transphobia.
The older generation grew up at a time when little or nothing was known about the subject of ‘being transgender’, so you couldn’t talk about it. Author Eveline van de Putte wrote down the stories of many of them in the book Nieuwe Namen.
As a trans person in Latin America, your average lifespan is thirty-five years. If I hadn’t fled my country three years ago, I probably would have been part of the statistics.
I feel more and more at home in my changing body, but still fall over a number of social stumbling blocks, such as going out. ‘Will I pass as a man?’, ‘Am I flat enough in this binder?’ and ‘What if I meet people from my previous life?’.
