This Is What Transgender Looks Like

There have been a couple of moments when we’ve been teased with glimpses of mainstream media diversity. A transgender person might appear on a runway, a magazine cover or as the lead image of a story. But those moments have been fleeting and while the responsibility to better reflect transgender communities is shared widely across an industry that’s notoriously bad at representation, something as simple as having positive, true to life, stock imagery that accurately visualises the trans community (rather than reinforcing stereotypes), is a big deal that still needs addressing.

'I guess there’s quite a lot of movement in fashion with gender', 25-year-old photographer Bex Day tells *The Debrief. *She has just released a set of images in partnership with Adobe Stock to celebrate the relatively undocumented transgender communities in the UK. 'There's been Vanity Fair and Time covers and there is a lot of writing about it, but there’s equally the problem of glamorisation, and I don’t know, for me fashion magazines and covers are quite unrelatable'.

The issue of relatability extends from the front of magazines right down to the bank of images that publications and agency call upon to illustrate what transgender looks like, which is why Bex and Adobe worked together to try and make the pool of photographs more inclusive. Bex, who cast the trans models herself, said: 'As the world is evolving at a rapid rate, it's important that Stock contributors continue to document current affairs, especially those that make a difference.'

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Bex explained that she'd gotten fed up with society's black and white way of thinking. 'People always try to put people in boxes, so with my work I wanted to create something that takes us away from this thinking. With Adobe, it fit. I'd already started a project on the older transgender community and with the stock photos I'd researched I found that they were highly unrepresentative and a bit dated.'

'I just wasn't happy with how the trans community was being shown in the media', Bex added. 'So, I wanted to create work that was more compassionate, that actually had feeling and was relatable.'

The result was a collection of beautiful portraits that are now available to use. Bex's style of photography, which she aptly describes as having a 'rawness' about it, brings a broad and refreshingly diverse range of members of the trans community that she sourced through friends of friends and on social media, into a space that feels current, authentic and legitimately relatable. It's a body of strikingly straightforward imagery that has definitely been long overdue. Have a look through Bex's collection below.

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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.