‘(Un)heard’ examines transgender experiences

Some of the photographs seem to be of ordinary young men. Vann, 38, from Baltimore could be your smiling neighbor, sitting on the freshly painted red steps of a house.

Others are a little more provocative. Koomah, 25, from Houston, stands near a wall built of white teacups wearing hot pink lipstick and eyeshadow, his black T-shirt emblazoned with “DRESS ME UP” in the same stark color.

These are two of the eight installations in the “(Un)heard: Transmasculine People of Color Speak!” exhibit of first person accounts in the Carl A. Fields Center’s Multipurpose Room, which runs from Nov. 7 to 22.

The first mixed media project to focus on these experiences and identities in Americans, (Un)heard addresses that despite the rise in discourse regarding trans people in the last 20 years, transmasculine people of color are often “misunderstood, ignored, unaddressed and unheard,” artists Asher Kolieboi of Saint Louis and B Mann of Ohio wrote on their official website.

Some of the photographs are accompanied by interviews accessible through a free phone call. Vann, who is African American and has a wife of seven years and children, was born Vanessa.

Remembering his youth, he spoke of social isolation and feeling like he did not “belong,” as he said that he felt and thought like a boy.

“I remember playing outside in the courtyard ... I remember wanting to drive the race car,” he said of his childhood. “I always wanted to run with the boys.”

“I remember having to graduate [from high school] and having to wear a dress,” he said. “I don’t remember being too comfortable with it.”

Vann said that he had only recently come to understand what being transgender meant and now identifies as a straight male. He is in the process of changing his birth name.

Koomah, who was born in Japan to a “very abusive and neglectful situation” and lived there until his “early childhood,” said that he did not initially have an understanding of what gender meant.

“My goal was to survive,” he said. “I did not have a gender. I did not have a name.”

He was then adopted by a conservative Caucasian-American family, and said that his parents were Pentecostal and Baptist respectively.

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“All of a sudden, I’m gendered. I’m female, and I’m supposed to act a certain way and look a certain way,” he said, recalling the suddenness of his introduction to gender in American culture.

“You are this. And your name is now this,” he said, and called the situation “interesting” because he had “never really identified as such.”

In the process of trying to find out who he was, he tried to be “bisexual,” “a butch lesbian” and a “straight man” until he realized that he was a trans person and became comfortable with this identity.

“I don’t fit in this binary [of male and female],” he said. “I am a transgendered person who also happens to have an intersexed body.”

The display at the University is the first for Kolieboi and B Mann, who hope to add interviews and photographs as they travel with the exhibit. In January 2012, they plan to begin a tour of the Southeastern states.

The University exhibit is sponsored by the Fields Center, LGBT Center and Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies.