WHO’S AFRAID OF A NAKED TRANS WOMAN?

AS A 30-YEAR-OLD WOMAN, I CAN DO A LOT OF THINGS. I can vote. I can drink. I can drop hundreds of dollars on therapy to help me work through my deeply self-destructive attachment style and still let men treat me like shit. But there’s one thing I recently learned that I can’t do—put a naked woman on the internet.

Let me rewind a bit.

It was the last week of April, and I was prepping a print article, “Caught in Their Gaze,” for publication on our site. It was a profile of Río Sofia, a trans woman whose multidisciplinary nude self-portraiture explores the coercive side of gender. Far from the empowerment narratives we’re used to seeing in this post-“Transgender Tipping Point” age of visibility, the figures in her photographs—all played by Sofia herself—are at odds with one another, mixing pleasure with despair across a number of bondage scenarios.

I found the images from Sofia’s series, named after the forced-fem erotica magazine refreshing as well as challenging. I see my body every day—when I look in the mirror, when I catch my reflection in a parked car’s tinted window, when I go to take a photo of a stupid subway ad and my front-facing camera catches me by surprise—but I don’t often see bodies like mine, especially ones that haven’t been filtered through the gaze of whichever cisgender editor, photographer, director, or producer has decided to bring an image of that body to life. Entertainment media and commercial