Trans visibility

The invisibilization applied to any social group is very dangerous, as well as homophobia and other risk factors that can compromise the health or life of people.

The discriminatory treatment of minorities or majorities due to power, symbolic violence, and the perceptual strategy of stereotyping applied to the LGTB community, leads those who experience it to suffer social stigma, one of the most terrible problems related to gender issues. Faced with this reality, Cesar Rojas decided to photograph moments during a trans women’s beauty pageant to tell us brief stories through his series Transformacion, 2007. The work suggests the importance of creating safe spaces and places for trans women who face unequal challenges such as feeling foreign in their own bodies and ignored by the lack of support programs to address the range of gender identities and diversity in gender expression.

With this powerful approach, the artist understands that by using his practice to seek to engage with a diverse collective composed of different communities, it is possible to raise awareness of LGBT issues by revisiting through photography the social roles, physical appearance, and normal behaviors of people struggling for recognition.

In this sense, Rojas’ images reveal the lack of the threshold of diversity, apathy towards social inclusion, and at the same time evoke feelings, illusions and dreams of trans adults who have been violated by experiencing rejection or exclusion from medical care, being denied jobs, being opposed to gay marriage, being denied training opportunities and other restrictions because they have been biologically and socially assigned a gender they are not assuming and are not obliged to assume.