How A Photo Of A Nine-Year-Old Sparked The Gender Revolution

On March 23rd, 2016, North Carolina’s legislature approved a bill written and signed into law by Governor Pat McCrory. This bill overturned a policy enacted by the city of Charlotte preventing businesses from regulating use of public restrooms based on sex and was the first exposure many Americans had to the existence of transgender people in modern society. Unfortunately, much of the discourse around this decision focused on unfounded claims of sexual perversion and paranoia of grown men entering women’s bathrooms for nefarious purposes. Ten months later, the media was once again filled with discussion of transgender rights, but from a completely different angle. National Geographic published their January 2017 issue with a photo of a nine-year-old transgender girl named Avery Jackson on the cover. Almost overnight, this photo inspired a national discussion on transgender issues, exposed the reality of transgender youth to the middle class, and signaled an era of gender deconstruction in America. The simple photo of a nine-year-old girl reclining on a chair arm in her living room wholly recontextualized the rhetoric on transgender people in America.

Understandably, most people would be uninterested in discussing the right of an adult man to use the women’s restroom on a whim; however, seeing a photo of a child that could belong in any family helped people to understand that this is what a transgender person is. It not only forced many to reconsider how they view the issue, but also made parents question how they might react to their child telling them they are a gender other than their assigned sex. It was not an accident that this photo humanized Avery and affirmed her identity. In an article published by The Spinoff, a New-Zealand based culture review and criticism platform, Robin Hammond, the man who captured the photo, speaks to his experiences as a young man with homophobia, and how he relates that to his thoughts on Avery and the photo.

I look at my own family, the attitudes of my parents have shifted massively. I think what that is about, whether it be through photography or film or what they read or even personal interactions, is just being exposed to narratives, other than the homophobic narrative they carried in their head that they were taught when they were kids. To Hammond, it is important to broadcast these experiences and portrayals so that parents and children can look at the issue through a positive, human light. That positive representation is only possible because now, more than ever before in American history, transgender people are fighting for their human rights. Unfortunately, middle class America has missed this reality, sheltered from the experiences of those who have felt adversity over their gender expression. National Geographic represents something significant to the cultural zeitgeist of the 20th century. The magazine has been seen as a reliable and informative description of what is “real” in world events and science, a window out to the world across geographic and class borders.

Representation of a social issue on the cover of National Geographic doesn’t just introduce previously unaware readers to the subject; it works to canonize a subject into the field of acceptable experiences and discussion. Avery herself has this to say about being seen by the public and having her story told: “It’s showing we exist. Transgender people do exist. And they’re there, and you can’t ignore them, because they’re there”. This is now reality for the average American. National Geographic saw this shift in cultural awareness already in progress, and they titled this issue “Gender Revolution. ” This is an excellent choice of words to describe what’s happening in the minds of young people in America today. Many are finding themselves questioning gender identity, whether through the roles society has assigned to gender or if your sex determines one’s gender at all. This is not limited simply to male-to-female transgender children. Rather, the increased sense of openness in an increasingly tolerant society has allowed so many to start questioning what it means to be a particular gender and whether one should be able to express outside their sex.

To describe Avery’s photo on their cover as “brave” might not be the correct way to view National Geographic’s choice. Rather, it is a sign of what is to come. The scope of this progress is revealed through a look back ten months prior to “Gender Revolution, ” when the state of North Carolina was in the news. Public opinion of transgender rights improved radically as 2016 ended. National Geographic may not be the main cause of the significantly advanced discussion, awareness, and changes in attitude on gender in general, but it is still hard to overstate the power that a photo of a girl being herself in front of the world has had in all of those areas.