My first association with the before/after diptych is the TV infomercial: take this pill for hair growth, buy that workout equipment for weight loss, invest in this complicated food processor for a purée the likes of which you never thought possible. On the left, the grainy, poorly lit, unflattering before hovers like a Dickensian spirit; on the right, a sexy, glossy, hyper-saturated invocation of potential, the after, supplants its sinister sister.
These days, we have before/afters for trans people. They’re not new, of course—I suspect that not even Christine Jorgensen’s infamous 1952 cover story, “Ex-GI Becomes Blonde Beauty,” could be said to be the first to make the papers—but they’ve certainly become far more popular, particularly on social media. Many of us, maybe most of us, have created some variation on it, if only for ourselves in the private light of our photo app.
But popularity eats itself. Before/afters are highly clickable, especially for cis people. They’re titillated, appalled, and frightened by our transformation, which they scour for clues they can then use to transvestigate (transvestigation being another neo-genre of relationality and time-marking that eats itself). As a result, many of us trans people distrust the before/after, finding it to be problematic, cisnormative, and cringe. Everything has to be a freak show for cis people, doesn’t it? Binary-addicted, porn-brained, tin foil-hatted circle-jerkers turning a normal human experience into, at the very best, hollow, shallow, fallow aspirational content.
What I resent about the before/after, as a narrative, is that it’s not optional. Any two images of me must necessarily become a before/after, provided the latter was taken within the last five years or so. I understand why we get irritated when other trans people intentionally position themselves in this way, but the fact of the matter is that it’s unavoidable, and for this reason I can’t get all worked up about it. We’re all defined by this fetishization of change: first by the pursuit of it, and then by the process of it, and finally by the persisting notion that a sex change is somehow distinct from any other kind of aging, biologically speaking, anyway.
I thought about sharing my own before/after here in this post. I’m proud of how I’ve changed, and I suppose I could pretend to illustrate my point while actually capitalizing on the reality that images of myself make this newsletter pay out more. Not that there would be anything wrong with that. And maybe I’ll do it, sometime.
But what I like about my own before/after is how little I’ve changed, physically speaking. Most of it happened inside me, before the physical part even began, when I made the conscious decision to change. There’s no quantifying, not in pounds or hair follicles, the difference between my before and after. Like a religious relic, perhaps, the diptych tells you more with form than with content.
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