The New Yorker:

Politics and aesthetics have an uneasy alliance. Too often, trans expression is on the losing end.

By Grace Byron

In July, the artist Amy Sherald pulled out of a large-scale show at the Smithsonian after learning that she might not be able to include a portrait of Lady Liberty as a Black trans woman. The Trump Administration heralded the “removal” of the exhibit as “a principled and necessary step.” Sherald quickly decried it as censorship. Though the Administration likely had numerous gripes about Sherald’s reimagining of what is maybe the most recognizable American symbol, the controversy demonstrates the shaky future of trans art. Imagine how much uproar there would have been had the work in question not only depicted a trans woman but been created by one.

The Trump Administration has launched a full-fledged assault on trans people and trans rights, prohibiting trans people from serving in the military, sending trans women to men’s prisons—a move tantamount to a death sentence—restricting trans passports, and making it harder for trans individuals to receive gender-affirming care, or any health care at all, just to name a handful of policies. But one of the less publicized effects of Donald Trump’s anti-trans executive orders has been a crackdown on trans culture. Government websites are stripping away references to trans people, history, and art. Book bans are targeting trans authors in conservative states, eradicating their work from curricula and library circulation. Earlier this year, in compliance with Trump’s executive orders, the National Endowment for the Arts began requiring that grant applicants agree not to promote “gender ideology,” which, according to the White House, “includes the idea that there is a vast spectrum of genders that are disconnected from one’s sex.” Wesleigh Gates, a transfeminine scholar and performer, who planned to travel to Colombia on a Fulbright fellowship to study a trans-women-led activist collective, told me that her trip was cancelled after she received a letter that “made it quite clear” that she was being targeted for “promoting gender ideology.” The trans novelist Torrey Peters told Interview magazine that her “name was on a list” created by a Republican congressman urging the government to discontinue funds to the Edinburgh International Book Festival. “The United States had given money to Edinburgh to bring over ‘transatlantic writers,’ ” Peters said. “Because they brought me and I, ostensibly, promote what they are calling gender ideology—which I think just means being trans or writing about trans people—they cut the funding to Edinburgh.” (Peters still spoke at the festival earlier this year.)

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