For the first time, I was grateful not to be a supermodel; the whole process sounded gruelling. But to come out as bisexual or a lesbian – when there were a number of women like Cara Delevingne, Heather Kemesky and Freja Beha Erichsen already out, as such – or as trans, when models like Andreja Pejić, Hari Nef and Lea T had done so, was one thing; Cindi told me she had also helped Hanne Gaby Odiele come out as intersex, a first in the world of high-profile models.
Hanne Gaby has been on the cover of Vogue and has modelled in campaigns for Balenciaga, Mulberry and DKNY Jeans. She’s from Belgium originally, and is instantly recognizable to anyone who’s ever opened a fashion magazine: platinum blonde; a naturally stern brow; a pretty, petite, bird-like face. Although there are many ways to be intersex, it basically means that you’re born with variations on what people think of as male or female physical characteristics, so variations in your genitals, chromosomes or internal organs. Hanne was born intersex due to a condition called androgen insensitivity syndrome, which, simply put (and it’s not very simple, medically), means that you have the genetic make-up of a male but are resistant to male hormones, so you have some or all of the physical traits that are considered typically female. The condition can also affect the genitals, so those born with it are often given involuntary ‘corrective’ surgeries as children that can be psychologically harmful. This was what had happened to Hanne. She also had to endure the stigma that comes with being born intersex, which still exists despite the fact that approximately 1.5 per cent of the global population are intersex. That’s roughly the same percentage as people who have ginger hair.
Hanne’s modelling agency, Women Management, approached CreagerCole in June 2016. Her agent had already spoken to several publicists and he wasn’t getting a good feeling about how they would handle Hanne’s story, Cindi explained to me. Then someone at the group InterACT, which advocates for intersex youth, suggested Cindi, so they set up a meeting. ‘He didn’t even tell us her name at first, they just came to our office and we had a very informal meeting. Hanne said she felt instantly comfortable with us and that was it: once they felt comfortable and wanted to hire us, we’d soon guide her to becoming the most high-profile intersex person in the world.’
‘What did you do first?’ I asked.
‘We said: let’s break down what your story is. It’s one thing to be a model but to be able to talk about your own personal story, to talk about intersex issues in a way that you can be that advocate . . . We really started working very, very intensely at the end of October 2016, through November, December. Certainly what Hanne went through as a child was very traumatic, so we needed to work hard to make her feel strong to talk about these things, and unapologetic about being intersex. You’re taught to live in shame all these years and all of a sudden you’re talking about it and it takes time to practise it, to be able to mitigate emotional triggers that come up for you.’
CreagerCole broke Hanne’s story on USA Today. It went out, purposefully, at the start of New York fashion week, three days after Trump was sworn in. ‘There was all this Trump news that morning,’ remembered Cindi, ‘and then all of a sudden this gleaming light of Hanne in all the top news stories. After it broke it was like wildfire – we were inundated with media requests, to speak on panels, to do press, to talk about the issue. We had many, many lists of journalists wanting to interview Hanne. She could pick and choose; book deals, documentary deals, offers to maybe be in movies.’
The coming out process was similar for Teddy, who had the same media training and made her announcement around New York fashion week in the autumn. After hours and hours of practising her story in CreagerCole’s meeting room, she was ready. CNN Style broke the story, but Teddy also posted a series of videos to her Instagram about the decision. Like Tom Daley, she wanted to take control of her own narrative. ‘I remember living my whole life as male, but feeling like I was playing a part. I always knew I was female, just in my soul, in my heart, in my brain,’ she told her fans in the video. ‘I kind of knew I had to pretend to be male to appease everybody else. At one point I just stopped giving a fuck.’ After Teddy came out, Marc Jacobs and Andreja Pejić immediately and publicly expressed their support. She, too, was inundated with interview requests, said Cindi. From her Instagram account, it seemed so effortless, but now I knew how much work had gone into the decision and process of telling the world.
‘Why do you think Teddy decided to come out?’ I asked Cindi.
‘She was living as cisgender, and tired of seeing so many things happening to trans people in the world: murders, attacks, and this administration’s attacks on trans people through policy. Teddy said: “I really need to use my voice. I’m a successful model and I need people to know I’m a trans woman also. It’s just one aspect of who I am but I wanna fight for what’s right, stand out.” Plus now she gets to go up the runways at Paris and Milan fashion weeks and know she’s doing it as her authentic self.’
‘What about Hanne?’
‘Hanne was told when she was young by doctors: “You’re the only one like this, don’t tell anybody, don’t talk about it.” She wanted to represent the community positively, being new to speaking about it, and she wanted to shed light on the human rights abuses inflicted against intersex children, abuses that she herself experienced.’
‘So they’ve basically done it for the greater good?’
‘They’re both changing the world just by being out and visible,’ said Cindi. ‘I know just from the messages of support that Hanne and Teddy have got on their Instagrams, people writing to them – families out there that thought they were alone, particularly on intersex issues, people who have said they don’t feel that they’re alone any more. I just know that it’s given a lot of courage to families to share their voice.’ I knew it was Cindi’s job to say all of this, but I could also tell that she believed it and that she cared.
‘I think they’ll both help with policy changes too,’ she added before we hung up the call. ‘Hanne is sitting on a lot of panels: with InterACT, with people from the UN, working with Human Rights Watch occasionally.’ She was out there, lobbying for policy change.
‘So it really can make a difference?’
‘In the end, you hope that leads to something.’
The lift floated up to the twenty-sixth floor of One World Trade Center. On the site of Ground Zero, this building was a kind of replacement for the twin towers that were destroyed on 9/11. In the late November sun its glass exterior reflected the cloudless blue sky. When I asked the doorman how high it was, he told me it was the tallest building in the Western hemisphere.
I reached the floor I was looking for, the Vogue floor, and was told the person I was after was elsewhere. I glimpsed the view across the office, filled with partition desks just like any other, and headed all the way back down.
I still hadn’t found any trans models, but I did have a meeting with Meredith Talusan, the first transgender executive editor at Condé Nast. As well as being a trans woman of colour in a rare position of power at a huge media company, Meredith was in charge of the brand’s latest digital title, the first to launch in a decade: them., a website aimed at young LGBTQ+ and non-binary people, which used pretty much exclusively LGBTQ+ and non-binary models. With a sleek design and intersectional ethos, them. was like a newer, shinier and queerer version of Teen Vogue, not just for teens but for millennials too. Articles included: ‘This Makeup Transformation Is WILD – But Don’t You Dare Call It “Drag”’, a diary of top surgery, a regular column ‘about the people, places, and events that have shaped our queer lives’ called ‘them.story’, and listicles like ‘Trans Jokes by Trans People’. (‘Q: How many trans people does it take to change a lightbulb? A: One to change it, literally everyone else to tell them to wait and slow down first.’)
A few nights before my meeting with Meredith, Helene and I had been having dinner and talking about trans models.
‘Did you see what Rihanna said?’ she asked.
&
nbsp; ‘No.’ I never knew what Rihanna had been saying.
‘Yeah, someone asked her why she didn’t use a trans model in her Fenty campaign and she was like, “cause I don’t wanna tokenize”. You should google it.’
I googled it. At the dinner table. (We had been together for more than twenty-four hours and all common courtesy had gone out of the window.) A fan had indeed DM’ed Rihanna asking her why she had not used a trans model in the campaign for her make-up brand.
‘I’ve had the pleasure of working with many gifted trans women throughout the years, but I don’t go around doing trans castings!’ Rihanna wrote in her response, which the fan later posted on Twitter. ‘Just like I don’t do straight non-trans women castings! I respect all women, and whether they’re trans or not is none of my business! I don’t think it’s fair that a trans woman, or man, be used as a convenient marketing tool! Too often do I see companies doing this to trans and black women alike! There’s always just that one spot in the campaign for the token “we look mad diverse” girl/guy! It’s sad!’
Apparently the fan then apologized for any offence that might have been caused, to which Rihanna replied again: ‘You absolutely didn’t babe! Just didn’t want you to think I intentionally leave anyone out!’
I agreed with what Rihanna was suggesting, in that sometimes inclusivity benefits the brand more than the model, but I also felt that making the most invisible people in society visible could only ever be a positive thing. And yet: was it anyone else’s business who was and wasn’t trans?
Her attitude to casting trans models was a lot like the rapper Angel Haze’s reaction to me asking her about her pansexuality – that’s attraction to people no matter their gender – in an interview: ‘If we were in a sexual situation you would know exactly who I am sexually,’ she told me over the phone in 2014 (quite flirtily, I liked to think). ‘But if we’re just having a conversation, you don’t need to know what I do in private. Sexuality is not the most interesting detail about a person. It’s like me saying my favourite colour is red all the time. After a while you’d kindly tell me to shut the fuck up about it.’
To her, being pansexual was a private matter, and to make a fuss out of it would be at best intrusive and at worst fetishistic. It was her business and her choice, sure, but if no one talked about their sexuality or gender identity in public then who would kids look up to? We’d be back at square one in terms of having no visible role models. I agreed that trans women should not be included in campaigns or videos only for the sake of their being trans. But equally, the result of Rihanna’s approach was that zero trans women were included.
‘Don’t you think we just need to be deliberately inclusive until the world naturally gets a little more inclusive?’ I said to Helene.
‘Sometimes I get asked to do stuff just cause I’m mixed race,’ she shrugged. ‘In fashion, diversity basically just is tokenism.’
We were silent for a moment, mulling over her words. Then I broke the silence: ‘Imagine if Rihanna DM’ed you,’ I said.
‘I know, mate. Twice.’
After my failed visit to the Vogue office, I found Meredith across town at The Wing, a bougie New York members’ club for working women that was decorated like the inside of a bag of pick’n’mix, all pink and white stripes. I was half an hour late, thanks to my detour, and we headed straight up to The Wing’s rooftop, with views of the Empire State Building, where the sun was setting. Meredith started telling me about herself, and when she said she was forty-two years old my jaw dropped because she didn’t look a day over twenty-five.
‘Have you seen the TV show Younger?’ she laughed, when I expressed my surprise. ‘It’s about a forty-year-old woman who pretends to be in her mid-twenties to land a job at a millennial publishing firm. There are days when I feel like my life is that.’
Meredith was – in her own words – a queer, disabled, trans, albino first-generation immigrant and person of colour. I knew that, because of this, she would have been on the end of a few token gestures, but also, as an editor at a big media company, that she might be in a position to tokenize other people. When I put this to her, she immediately acknowledged it; ‘Absolutely,’ she said. ‘I’m a product of early nineties elite college diversity initiatives, which weren’t perfect, but if you were a poor immigrant kid and happened to be nerdy and do well in school, it meant it was possible for you to enter the halls of privilege.’
Meredith grew up in the Philippines until she was fifteen. Her parents were divorced when they emigrated to the States. Her mum moved to LA, her dad to New York. She lived with her mum until college, when she went to Harvard as an undergrad, at which point her base shifted to New York. She made her career as a journalist, writing breakout pieces for The Nation and American Prospect, calling bullshit on transphobia in LGBTQ+ movements or organizations that were failing to support the ‘T’. But she wasn’t interested in only writing for LGBTQ+ publications – because wouldn’t that be preaching to the converted? – so she wrote for the broadest audience possible. This won her the attention of a lot of editors on Twitter, as well as a lot of anonymous Twitter trolls.
It was in 2015 that she got a staff job as a writer at BuzzFeed, where she says she was the only trans person in editorial. This meant that, if anything remotely problematic was published about trans people, she would hear about it, or even be held culpable. She was a token by default. ‘At a 4,000 to 4,500-person company that’s difficult,’ she sighed. ‘I felt pressure to get involved with anything to do with trans culture.’
Teen Vogue wunderkind Phillip Picardi, the man behind the idea for them., called Meredith up to sound her out about the job of senior editor in 2017. He knew her work at BuzzFeed and her vocal Twitter presence. They also had a mutual friend in Janet Mock. Meredith wasn’t really interested in a full-time editorial position but, a few months later, Phillip contacted her again to ask if she could suggest someone for the role, preferably a trans woman of colour. This was annoying, she said, because apart from Mock, she couldn’t think of anyone. How few trans editors there were in East Coast America only highlighted further that she ought to go up for the job. In fact, Meredith had just written an article about how there needed to be more trans voices in editorial positions, so it was time to put her money where her mouth was.
‘Did you have any reservations about taking it?’ I asked her. ‘Were you worried about working on something queer created by a big company? Were you sceptical about their reasons for doing it?’
‘Basically all of that, all of that,’ she said, almost laughing. Meredith was very agreeable. She was also not a Condé Nast PR mouthpiece.
‘I think, for me, I’m deeply aware that we live in a late capitalist society,’ she continued calmly. ‘If I was an ideological purist I wouldn’t be a journalist working in mainstream media; I would be living on a communist, separatist queer island. Like, if I’m going to play the game of being a journalist in this particular environment I’m going to have to make strategic decisions about how I’m going to negotiate it and how my politics play into that. Even if Condé Nast doesn’t play into my own personal values, if I engage with my job with integrity and am constantly looking for ways for the result to be a net gain for marginalized queer people, well then I feel OK with that.’
I asked for an example and Meredith told me about a time when them. was casting for a video and one of the people they were thinking of casting had a disability. ‘Someone else on staff said it would be inconvenient to cast this person in the video because they were disabled in a particular way. I said, “As a disabled person, I think we could see this as an opportunity to have the able-bodied people adjust for the disabled person, not the other way around.”’
She then explained that this was one of both the positives and the negatives of what we might call tokenization: that once in a position of relative power, a marginalized person might be able to use their position to help others; that she could ‘leverage’ her privilege against her marginalized i
dentity. But, she said, it was worth remembering that this wasn’t always the case for trans people or people of colour.
‘I think tokenism has a couple of different meanings,’ she said, explaining that traditionally it used to be about ‘a person only existing in the room in order to excuse the fact that the entire system is unjust’, whereas more recently, she’d been thinking about a different, perhaps subtler kind of tokenism, whereby you were a minority hired on merit but you still had to be an exceptional outlier to even get in the door and once you were through it, you still had to fit the standards of the majority. Part of the reason she was able to have a job like hers was the amazing work done by people advocating to see more trans people represented, but it was also because – and she was very aware of this, she said – she was a child prodigy who scored insanely well on standardized tests and went to Harvard. Her success didn’t necessarily mean the system was skewed any better towards trans people; she wasn’t the rule, but the exception. And until that changed, the system wasn’t really improving. The same went for trans models and actors, too – most of the time, Meredith explained, they had to fit a mould of cis beauty to be successful. ‘I’ll see models who fit into particular tropes of femme, white, waif, female blondeness, who are using their modelling visibility to continue to advocate for social and political change, and that’s been really important. But it’s also a paradoxical position, simultaneously saying, “I’m here because of these outlying conditions that make me atypical as a trans person, but it’s important for trans people who are not like me to also be in more privileged positions too.”’
For Meredith, putting queer and trans people in positions where they have the agency to steer representation was a good thing, and an imperative for companies who wanted to do better. ‘It’s hard to objectify people who are like yourself. So as sensitive as one can be about these issues, having the people you want to represent on staff is the only genuine way to diversify,’ she shrugged.
Queer Intentions Page 17
