This #TransDayOfVisibility, we want to share some of the incredible art produced by trans and non-binary artists and showcase their creativity. We hope you'll discover some new artists as well as well as some favourites, and you're inspired to learn more...
Claude Cahun (1894-1954) was a non-binary surrealist photographer, sculptor and writer whose work frequently took on personas and transgressed gender binaries.
Claude Cahun, c1927, Courtesy of Jersey Heritage Collections
Wu Tsang (born 1982) is a filmmaker, artist and performer based in the USA. Her work often focuses on hidden histories and marginalised stories. This still is from her 2016 film Duilian, looking at the queer inner life of revolutionary Qiu Jin.
Zackary Drucker (born 1983) is an artist, activist, actor and producer. Much of her work explores gender, sexuality and ways of seeing. She has won an Emmy Award for her series "This Is Me".
"Don't Look At Me Like That" by Zackary Drucker and Manuel Vason, 2010.
Greer Lankton (1958-1996) was a New York East Village artist best known for creating lifelike sewn dolls of celebrities and people she knew. This 1996 installation, "It’s all about ME, Not You" was the last she created.
Courtesy of Mattress Factory
Amos Mac (b1981) is a writer, photographer and publisher from Georgia. He founded magazine "Original Plumbing" in 2009. His photos have appeared in numerous publications and digital. This 2017 portrait of Schuyler Bailar was commissioned by Instagram for Trans Day of Visibility.
Cassils (born 1975) is a Canadian performance artist and body builder. Their work explores struggle, survival, violence and representation. This photo is from their performance "Becoming An Image" where they attack a 900kg clay block in darkness, lit only by the flash of a camera
Vaginal Davis (date of birth private) is a USA-born performing artist, painter, curator and filmmaker. She is genderqueer and intersex and considered the progenitor of "terrorist drag". This painting comes from her 2012 exhibition Various Hags.
Sisters Lana (born 1965) and Lilly Wachowski (born 1967) have collaborated on 10 movies and a TV series. This still is from their 1999 film The Matrix, which Lilly has confirmed was a trans allegory.
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
We've been receiving a lot of requests for us to answer this crucial question, and we are delighted to attempt to provide you with the information you need as to whether you can read braille with your clit.
First of all, it is important to establish parameters on the scope of this question. It is in fact two questions: can you read braille with your clitoris, and does this impact reading speed?
For the purpose of answering this question, we will assume that the OP means the clitoral glans. The glans is the only part of the clitoris which sticks out. The rest of it is beneath the skin of the vulva. Here's what the whole organ looks like; the glans is at the top.
Being a Vagina Museum, we run up against a lot of myths about the world's most misunderstood body parts. Heck, we even dedicated an entire exhibition to the topic.
One myth we encounter fairly frequently is that dogs have periods. Today, we're going to address that...
Having a menstrual cycle is very rare in nature. A period is a phase in the ovarian cycle where the endometrium - the lining of the uterus - is shed. It will then regenerate each cycle, because for whatever reason, embryos only implant in fresh endometrium.
Only a handful of animals shed the endometrium and have a menstrual cycle. For all other mammals, they get rid of old endometrium in a different way: they reabsorb it if they don't get pregnant.
Rana temporaria is the taxonomic name of the common frog. They're very, very common in Europe and parts of Asia. Except they have a way of determining sex which is (so far) very, very uncommon...
Some animals determine sex based on genes - there's multiple approaches to this, including the XY system (most common in mammals); the XO system (many invertebrates) the ZW system (most common in birds); and the XYXYXYXYXY system (pretty much just platypuses and echidnas).
Under these systems, if an embryo has one type of chromosome set, it will develop as female; the other and it will develop as male (most of the time).
Ever wondered what a menstrual cup is doing in there during use? Thanks to science, we now know where it sits: pretty close to the cervix, turns out. In this MRI scan, the cup is coloured in green, blue shows the vagina, the cervix is outlined in yellow and the uterus in orange.
The reason this research was done is rather interesting. Maria Friburg and colleagues (2023) needed to know exactly where a menstrual cup sits in the body to answer a related question: can bacteria that causes Toxic Shock Syndrome grow on a menstrual cup?
To answer this question, the researchers needed to know, first of all, whether the test environment for growing bacteria was aerobic (containing oxygen) or anaerobic. If the cup was lower, it would hold the vagina open, letting air in.
Museum collaborations are a great opportunity for exchanging knowledge and best practice. We would like to share some of our learning from our residency at the Crab Museum. So who wants to hear about the mind control barnacle that feminises and impregnates its victims?
Sacculina carcini, also known as the crab hacker barnacle, is a parasitic barnacle which infects crabs - usually the green crab (although sometimes others).
The female barnacle larva finds a crab, and enters through the bristles on its legs. It's not fussy about the sex of the crab, it can infect either males or females.
It's been a while since we've shown you a weird fad in medieval Christian art, so here's one you might enjoy - Lactatio Bernardi: The Lactation of St Bernard.
Now it's important to note that St Bernard of Clairvaux isn't the one doing the lactating. He's the kneeling guy. That's the Virgin Mary right there doing the lactating, with baby Jesus on her lap.
Bernard of Clairvaux was a 12th century abbot and one of the founders of the Knights Templar. Here's a couple of depictions of him outside of the milky miracle.