‘Is that the start of what “real diversity” looks like?’
She thought for a second. ‘I don’t necessarily believe in the binary poles’ – she said this in such a way as to imply sarcasm at her choice of term – ‘of what we might call “tokenism” and “real diversity”.’ Not only because they were on a spectrum, but because whatever ‘real diversity’ was, it was difficult to achieve. ‘The media doesn’t just shape society, it reflects back the way society looks, and besides, you can never really represent everyone. Them. tries to counter the forces of tokenism in society – at the same time we’re really aware that we exist within a market and there’s never going to be any piece of representation that is going to be fully diverse.’
‘The photo frame isn’t big enough for a photo of literally everyone.’
‘Right,’ she said.
On that note, I asked her what she thought about Rihanna’s quote.
‘It’s a tough quote because, on the one hand, I agree that the ideal situation is for trans people to be able to operate in the world in ways that are equal to cis people, but at the same time, that’s not the world we live in. It’s simultaneously good that trans people aren’t being used as a pawn in some kind of diversity game; at the same time it’s important to acknowledge that a trans person working with Rihanna would be a good thing. So I guess I’m at odds with that quote.’
‘Yeah,’ I sighed. ‘Me too.’
After a few more stressful days in New York, one of the trans models I’d contacted finally got in touch with me. Her name was Peche Di, and she was the founder of Trans Models, an agency exclusively for trans and non-binary people. I asked Peche if I could come to the Trans Models office, and she told me that actually, she ran it from home, so the evening before Thanksgiving, I found myself walking to Peche’s house. She lived in Greenpoint, one of Brooklyn’s most gentrified neighbourhoods, its tree-lined streets peppered with vintage warehouses and boutique coffee shops. I walked there down Bedford Avenue, past the Apple store and busy bars, which I stared into from the freezing cold outside, like a jilted lover from a Richard Curtis film. I went into a chocolate shop, the only store that was open, and panic-bought Peche some macaroons. Then I walked across McCarren Park, which was floodlit and eerily empty.
When I found Peche’s house, she let me in and I followed her upstairs. I noticed how bouncy she was, full of energy. Her home was a spacious one-bed apartment with a long corridor that stretched from the entrance hall through a kitchen, a living room and into a bedroom. Peche joked that it was perfect for practising her runway walk, and showed me just to demonstrate that this was possible. I followed suit, doing my best Linda Evangelista. We sat on her bed, which gave me the feeling of being a kid again, at a sleepover. It was also quite camp getting straight into bed with someone you’d never met before, like a Nineties breakfast TV show or In Bed with Madonna. This was not Peche’s intention; she had recently moved in, and the other rooms were cluttered with boxes. She pointed to an Apple Mac on a desk in the corner of her bedroom. She told me this was where she ran Trans Models from.
I asked Peche where the idea for Trans Models originated and she told me that the story really started when she was eight or nine. This was when she first understood what it meant to be transgender, she said, because her mum showed her a picture of a cousin who had moved to Germany and transitioned. ‘I never met her but I saw her photo and was like, “Wow, she used to be a man? She looks good!”’ said Peche, laughing.
Back then, her dream wasn’t to become a model, but to become a beauty queen; a dream that was thwarted by the other kids at school, who would kick her in the crotch, call her names like ‘sissy’ and tell her she’d never be a girl. Undeterred, Peche stuck to a strict beauty regimen. She would read about how to make her skin softer, make her own coffee scrubs for her face and put coconut oil in her hair. I made a note to ask her more about this later.
When Peche was a teenager, she met another role model, this time in the flesh. ‘One day a girl who had graduated from my school and had transitioned came back to visit the teachers. She had long hair, a gorgeous face. I asked her how I start and she said, “Go to buy hormones right now.” So that day, after I finished class, I went to the pharmacy to get hormones. I took three because I’m impatient, and then I vomited it all up. So then I was like, “OK, let’s take one from now on,” and I kept taking it every single day.’
‘Did you tell your parents?’ I asked.
At this Peche let out her infectious, high-pitched giggle again. ‘No, but my mum caught me because I left the hormones in the pocket of my student jacket. She thought I had a girlfriend and it was for preventing pregnancy.’
‘Wait, so it’s the same hormones?’ I said incredulously.
‘Yes.’ Peche seemed a bit impatient with me at this point, so I explained that I hadn’t taken the contraceptive pill in eight years. This once again resulted in the ‘What! You’re gay?’ conversation.
‘Did you have anyone else to look up to, any trans celebrities?’
‘Yeah, there was a trans celebrity. She used to be a trans model walking with big Thai fashion designers, and after she turned to be a commentator on television, on Thailand’s Got Talent. Her name is Ornapa. She was very well respected, everybody knew her and people are accepting of her. She didn’t really start out as a model – she was a make-up artist before and then one day a model got sick and the designer was like, “Can you wear my clothes and walk for us?”’
I gasped at how Devil Wears Prada the story was.
‘Yes! And she slayed!’ Peche exclaimed, nattering on. ‘I read her book in Thai. I always carried it with me. That was the book that inspired me to be a model. But first, I had to join beauty pageants, and I was very shy because I’d been attacked at school and I never felt comfortable with my body or with my look, so learning how to dance, be on stage at beauty pageants for a few years, helped me be comfortable, to go from a very shy person to a more outgoing person.’
‘Did you see the Vogue cover, with Valentina Sampaio?’ I asked.
She told me she had, and that she had read Vogue religiously ever since she was a kid in Thailand. If she had seen a trans woman like Sampaio on the cover back then, she said, she could have shown it to her family, and they would have thought that being trans was acceptable, desirable even. Role models weren’t just for us to see, they were for the people around us to see too.
‘What do you think of the headline?’ I asked.
‘I think labelling is important for young people. When they have that term “trans” they know they have found their representation. Some people think we shouldn’t label but if we don’t, what about the younger generation who have no idea who is and isn’t trans? It’s important for young people to see the label.’
It was this belief that you had to see it to be it that carried Peche to America in 2010, when she was twenty, where she would try to become not just a model but a role model for others. By this time she was twenty she had transitioned and had been working as a model back home, including national campaigns and walking in shows during Bangkok fashion week. But she hadn’t been able to find an agency that wanted to sign her. Transphobia was rife, she said, so some girls would use a fake ID to join the big Asian agencies. ‘In Thailand we don’t have any law or regulation to change your gender marker,’ Peche explained. One of her friends was even arrested for changing her documents illegally to model. America seemed a more promising landscape in which to pursue her dreams. She had seen that the models Isis King and Yasmine Petty were featured in different magazines and working with top people in New York, so she decided to follow suit, believing that America might also allow her to change her legal gender, that she might find a partner and build a life with someone. (Incidentally, two days before we met, Peche had just had her new passport come through, identifying her as legally female for the first time.)
Peche worked in a Thai restaurant for cash, took English lessons to improve her pronun
ciation, and pursued styling and modelling on the side. Around this time, she met a friend who became a mentor and would take her portfolio to different agencies, but she would hear nothing back. She felt she was being discriminated against, so she tried to hide that she was trans. She scored her first job, but then her campaign was dropped when she had to show her passport to be paid and the agent realized she was lying about the gender she was assigned at birth. Eventually, it seemed best to be transparent about being trans. The emergence of trans models like Lea T, who modelled for Givenchy, was a comfort.
‘It was much better to be honest . . . I felt like I didn’t have to lie to people.’
‘So did you start getting jobs?’ I asked.
‘No!’ That giggle again. ‘People didn’t want to take my photo because I’m trans. Except for a lingerie brand for trans women.’
In 2014, Peche landed her first big US campaign, for Barneys New York, called ‘Brothers, Sisters, Sons & Daughters’, in which they cast all trans models, seventeen in fact. It was shot by Bruce Weber. Vanity Fair described it as groundbreaking. But it didn’t change much for Peche; she still couldn’t get an agency. This was when she had the idea to start an agency for trans models herself, given that there seemed to be a market.
‘I made a list of names. My friend said, “You shouldn’t put ‘trans’, people are still negative towards that word. It’s not a good idea to expose yourself.” I said, “I know that there’s negativity towards it, that’s why I want to use the name.” I wanted to purify the word, add positivity to it. When you google about trans on the Internet, porn shows up. I want to add something that’s not just porn when I google the word “trans”. When people say, “Don’t use that word!” it makes me want to use it more.’ And so, in March 2015, Trans Models was born.
Peche started casting models through friends of friends. Her roommate was also trans, so they called on people they knew. They aimed to include not just people who passed for cisgender but people who did not pass, or were androgynous, or who identified as non-binary. ‘I wanted to represent the actual person . . . you don’t need to pass. And I don’t like the idea of passing and passable, it’s like white privilege . . . passing is a privilege for a trans person. I didn’t want to represent that as what’s considered beautiful: that you have to pass. It’s not fair.’
They set up their first photo shoot with nineteen models at a friend’s loft, and Peche gave an interview published in The Atlantic. The story travelled fast and the first jobs started coming in: i-D magazine, Time Out, Teen Vogue – later some brand work with Puma, W Hotels, Kenneth Cole. Then a big job for National Geographic’s special ‘Gender Revolution’ issue, which featured several of Peche’s models.
‘Money-wise, it was not that great. I’m not good with numbers, I’m more a creative visual person, and some work with brands paid but only like once a month. We got a lot of exposure, but we were struggling.’
‘What happened next then?’
‘Nineteen models was a lot. I thought I needed a lot of models to make a lot of money but after I met with my friend – I represent her, Yasmine Petty; she’s my role model and my mentor – I realized you don’t need a lot of models to create a successful agency. I felt like I couldn’t handle it, it was too stressful. She said, if you can represent just one person, like Laverne Cox, that’s all you need. After she said that I decided to release everybody. Now we have four models.’
‘Do you still represent yourself?’
‘Yes!’ Peche started giggling, the most she had giggled yet.
‘What’s so funny?’ I asked.
‘That I’m still looking for someone to represent me,’ she laughed.
I wondered whether Peche wasn’t having much luck with getting signed or getting many gigs for the same reason a lot of talented drag queens weren’t – because their industries were getting crowded, and there was only one proverbial golden ticket in a world increasingly rife with tokenism. Trans men, who had always been less visible than trans women, were even starting to become more visible in the world of modelling: Casil McArthur walked for Marc Jacobs at New York fashion week, and underwear model Laith Ashley, who’d been represented by Peche, had 200,000 Instagram followers and had been featured in Vogue. Trans Models wasn’t the only trans model agency any more; the LA-based agency Slay Models had even been followed by a TV show.
When Peche and I talked about this, she told me she didn’t see more trans models as a threat, but rather as a good thing – both for business and for politics. The problem was the type of model who would get exposure.
‘For me personally, when trans people get to be on covers, it’s still mostly Caucasian models who look cisgender. The beauty contracts trans people get signed to are all Caucasian trans women: Andreja Pejić, Caitlyn Jenner. I want to see the change include trans people of colour, and gender-non-conforming trans people.’
This applied to Teddy and Hanne, I supposed. Without diminishing their incredible activist work, they were shaking up the world in many of the right ways: they were thin. They were white. They passed. And they were already famous when they came out.
‘Fashion is still lacking portrayal [of the] beauty of Asian trans women and African American trans women,’ said Peche, sitting up. ‘I’m shocked when I hear brands call darker skin tones a minority, because Asian people are a majority of the population, and African people are a majority. I get frustrated and pissed by that term, “minority”. I wish magazines would be more inclusive – we are women and women need to be represented in different shapes, sizes and forms. Isn’t that better for the magazine in the long term?’
‘So all these trans models . . . is it just a moment or is it actual progress?’ I asked, processing what Peche had said about the tyranny of passing privilege and Eurocentric beauty standards – the supremacy of white, Western ideals that are upheld by magazines and the media. How there still seemed to be a particular ‘type’ of LGBTQ+ person we were happy to see in a magazine, or on TV.
‘Thankfully progress is happening. I think it will happen more . . . I’m not saying this against the fashion industry – I’m in the fashion industry and I love this industry – I just want to work towards something that’s more inclusive. It’s trans women of colour that get attacked and killed,’ said Peche, ‘so I want to see the change include those people.’
chapter six
NOW YOU DON’T
At some point during my conversation with Meredith, I had ‘circled back’, as the Americans say, and asked her why them. needed to exist to begin with. I told her about my own experience, working for magazines like VICE and i-D and Dazed and Refinery29. They weren’t LGBTQ+ titles, I said, but they widely covered LGBTQ+ issues as well as ‘straight’ issues, long before and after I was there encouraging them to do so. So why did Condé Nast need a separate LGBTQ+ publication?
She told me that she perceived culture to be changing; that, for people who were millennials or younger – younger than thirty-five, really – queer culture was just culture. ‘Surveys show that Generation Z – after millennials – more than 50 per cent of them consider themselves not straight or cisgender.’
I didn’t know, off the top of my head, whether these stats were correct. (When I looked them up later, they were backed by trend-forecasting agency J. Walter Thompson Innovation Group, which found that only 48 per cent of American Gen Zs identified as exclusively heterosexual in 2016.) However, I knew the stats in the UK said roughly the same thing: more people than ever before placed themselves somewhere on the scale that said they weren’t entirely straight. A UK survey from 2016, for instance, found that half of young people in Britain aged eighteen to twenty-four identified as something other than heterosexual.
Meredith carried on: ‘So, to me, them. feels like a queer publication in name, but I feel like as audiences get younger and younger, the idea that only a small percentage would be reading a publication like them. disintegrates.’
I wasn’t sure I was follow
ing. Wasn’t that the point I had made? If queer culture was culture, why would you need to distinguish it?
Meredith smiled. To her, being separate didn’t mean being ghettoized, it meant creating a dedicated space where LGBTQ+ voices were the dominant voices; to her, them. being its own entity was just ‘putting queer culture in its rightful place’. In a perfect world, she said, them. wouldn’t cease to exist because LGBTQ+ people would find it unnecessary to read a separate LGBTQ+ magazine. It would be read by everyone, and be just as big as the New Yorker, or Vanity Fair. This, she said, was her goal.
‘That’s an interesting outlook,’ I said, a little embarrassed that I hadn’t seen things this way myself.
Then she said something that struck a chord with me, something I was still thinking about a week later, after Helene had left, as I was riding the subway to Queens to stay with my gay friend Patrick.
‘People forget that before Madonna’s “Vogue” there was an entire history of queer trans people of colour,’ she said, ‘or that, for every make-up look you have for a pretty cisgender model, it’s extremely likely that a queer person was a part of creating that look. So many cultural products we perceive to be innovative or mainstream were created by queer and trans people.’
Keeping queer culture separate was a way of staking a claim to that, she concluded, rather than once again letting queer culture be subsumed by the mainstream.
If I had gone into my conversation with Meredith feeling dubious about Condé Nast’s decision to market itself to an LGBTQ+ audience and sell ads off the back of it, Meredith’s politics left me feeling optimistic. Condé Nast had put its money where its mouth was, by hiring a trans woman of colour in a position of power, and the result felt truly inclusive, unapologetic, beneficial to actual queer people.
But what Meredith had said about queer people having their culture co-opted stayed with me because it was still happening everywhere, all the time. While the media had diversified to include the representation of queer people in recent years, genuine or otherwise, so had brands, and as with some of those brands who sponsored Pride events, this often felt distinctly disingenuous. Every time I passed a billboard of two men kissing for an advert for a bank, I wondered how that bank supported its LGBTQ+ staff. Every time I saw an advert for a vodka brand featuring trans women or drag queens, I thought, What does this have to do with marketing vodka to the masses? And every time I saw a luxury fashion brand or a make-up brand adorning queer bodies of colour for an advert, I wondered, Why didn’t you do this before it was fashionable?
Queer Intentions Page 18
