The Gender Visibility Project is a photo voice project that invited queer Asian folks and women to share their narratives, lives, and experiences. The photos were showcased in January 2020. The project was led by Gender Justice Organizer Janet Nguyen.
Meredith Song (she/her/hers)
I like girlhood. I’ve been reflecting on my upbringing and my experiences in elementary and middle school as just like a young Asian American girl. I think girlhood is so powerful and important, but at the same time, so taboo in our society. Like, we don’t let young girls be who they want to be like, we don’t let young girls break gender roles, and especially young girls of color or young Asian girls. I think there are so many expectations that I grew up with that I’m still working on like trying to unlearn and realizing that it’s not wrong, you know to not be the girl that my parents wanted me to be.
Being really docile and being really quiet are some things that I internalized so much that I retreated into myself at school, like never speaking in class. Like I would get my report cards back and it’d show good grades, and then the only comment would be like, Meredith doesn’t speak in class. It was weird because I thought that I was doing everything right. But then to get that comment, I was so afraid to then speak up.
I think girlhood, especially in Asian cultures, is associated with being docile and being quiet and like serving others and putting others before yourself and being like, young and pure and innocent for as long as you can. And I think sexuality and being queer and talking about that and being out is a violation of this innocence and purity that you’re supposed to maintain. But I also think girlhood is so important, like such an important stage in life. I think about being someone that young girl me would look up to, and I think that has been really like empowering and I think investing in young girls and investing in youth can be so powerful and making sure we’re not enforcing these strict rules about gender identity and gender roles and sexuality so early on.
Katherine Nguyen (she/her/hers)
Growing up mixed Vietnamese and Cambodian was definitely hard because we grew up using only English. And so as I made more friends who were Vietnamese or Cambodian, I couldn’t really connect with them through language or even some cultural aspects. I kind of felt a sense of loss, where it was like, I’m not really Vietnamese. I’m not really Cambodian. So even though I claim to be both, how do I show it? So when I got to college, I wanted to join the Vietnamese and Cambodian Student Associations to have that sense of belonging to each community. And it was nice having those spaces, but even within those spaces I still felt out of place because I didn’t know the languages. I struggled a lot with being scared to speak and practice Khmer and Viet because I’m very self conscious about my accent. I don’t want to be wrong or sound dumb. I don’t want to embarrass myself, and that fear itself makes it difficult for me to even try.
Pashie Vang (she/her/hers)
You will not believe it, but I felt like I went through a second puberty. I was so self conscious because there was this very masculine side of me. I think it was my sophomore year in high school where my voice started to change. It got a lot lower and I didn’t even want to talk to people because of it. I went through a lot regarding how I felt. Now, I’m okay with it. I love how I sound and I see how unique it is and I started to really embody it. My mom gave me encouragement and she said something like, how I sound is fine and if someone comments on my voice, that I should tell them that I’m special and unique. I took it to heart and I told myself that when people tell me I sound like a boy or if I sound masculine.
Isabela Alesna (she/her/hers)
As an organizer, your job is to be able to tell your story and then have it be part of what motivates people, but I’ve also felt, I don’t know like, I don’t think insecurities’ the word but I don’t feel that my story is that inspiring. Not trying to downplay myself, but I think having grown up in a place of privilege and like, you know, having struggled with my identity, but honestly not to the extent that I’ve seen a lot of my peers and people that I love struggle, I’m like, well, I have these identities but I haven’t struggled. So am I really? Am I really these things? Which is fucked up! You know, because it’s like, is being this identity… does that just mean struggling, you know?
I remember at Macalester, they had these things called identity collectives. There’s like, the queer people of color collective and then there’s the queer women’s collective and Asian men collective. And there’s also the Asian women of the diaspora which interestingly, I never went to even though I knew it existed. I only went to queer women’s collective and a couple times I went to the QIPOC collective. I remember one day in college, I wondered if I was really a person of color. I feel like I haven’t struggled systemically to like, I don’t know, own that identity. But then my partner who is white was like, “Listen to what you’re saying, dude. Like, does that mean being a person of color is just about struggling, being oppressed?” There’s so much more richness to it and to reduce our identities to just struggles that’s just another function of white supremacy.
Skye Reddy (they/them/theirs)
I’m a dancer, and I’ve been taking ballet lessons since I was a kid. And that’s really where a lot my experiences with societal beauty standards came from. Because dance schools are disproportionately white. And they have a very specific idea of what the female form is supposed to look like. And I was struggling with that on a double level because I was like, not something I identify with, as well as my body not fitting the standards of what a dancer should look like. And my family was kind of like, you should just drop that because you’re not going to ever look like that. And at the same time, they did a lot of body shaming where they would tell me that I’m eating the wrong things, or I’m eating too much. Or if you just worked out more, you’d look more the way a dancer is supposed to look. And my dance school was also kind of like, you’re never going to make it as a dancer because you just don’t have the right body. And I was also struggling with all that, because I did not personally want to look the way people thought women were supposed to look. I didn’t even identify as a woman. And that was difficult. And, I mean, I feel like that whole thought process just never really left me. I still judge myself by the standards that other people have laid down and not even because I want to anymore, it’s just so internalized at this point. But yeah, I just see myself now through the lens of ‘this is the way you’re supposed to work if you’re considered nice looking’. And I don’t like mirrors because every time I stand in front of one I see all the things wrong with the way I look.
For self preservation, I feel like the first thing was getting rid of mirrors. So dance studios, I’ve got four walls lined with mirrors and you can’t stop seeing yourself. The more classical dance forms like ballet, you’re literally you’re obsessed with how the line of the body looks, so you’re just staring at yourself in the mirror and just finding all the faults all the time. And I feel like outside of the studio, the house I live in currently has one mirror in the bathroom and that’s it. And that’s been good for me because I don’t want to keep checking reflection. I don’t want to accidentally walk by a mirror and then feel bad for the next half an hour because it didn’t like what I saw. And I started doing a lot more hip hop and that kind of stuff. Where you don’t have to wear the clothing that is very form fitting and look at your physical shape. You can wear shorts and a T-shirt and you can go to dance class, and it’s literally whatever you’re comfortable in.
Jinath Tasnim (she/her/hers)
I really love women-centric spaces and queer-centric spaces, which that has taken me a while actually, to find that. And I think it took into my adulthood. Definitely in high school, I had a lot of internalized shit. But even college, I think it wasn’t until after I graduated college that I really got involved in very specific, like women oriented spaces. Because I think I was really biased against that before, you know, which I think a lot of people do in our fight for equality, we want to be the same and we don’t always want to highlight our marginalized identities and we’re looking for that equalizer instead. I’ve come to learn that women/trans/femme spaces are very sacred.
leyen trang (they/she)
I’m definitely not straight. I think gender identity is a little bit harder for me to pinpoint because sometimes, I don’t quite feel like womanhood resonates with me. I don’t know if I’m ready to take on another gender identity though, you know?
Sometimes I wonder if questions around gender identity stems from my frustrations with gender expectations and gender roles and that in turn makes me not want to align with womanhood.
I think I only talked to one person about like — how they came out as nonbinary, and they recently said that they were also figuring out some things about gender identity. I felt like I didn’t have the answers then. More recently, I talked to another friend and they reminded me that these labels are fluid and that it’s okay to continue to allow these labels to grow with us. I don’t have the answers now but I think I’m a little more comfortable with it.
Annemarie Eayrs (she/her/hers)
I went to a predominately white college and so it was a lot of white queer people which is absolutely fine. So that was my experience with the queer community generally and then with the Asian American community why want to join the AAOP board was because I’m Chinese and adopted. And so even within Asian American spaces — there was this Chinese student org on campus, and they would meet and often talk about, you know, like generational stuff like their parents and like that kind of thing and like cultural clash stuff. And so even there, I felt just like one step removed because my experience of immigration and being Asian in this country, has been different. I was raised in a white family and in a generally white community and so even in those spaces, there was one step removed. And so stepping into those spaces that were theoretically for me, but felt like I was on the periphery.
I think there’s a lot of pressure on us to be number one, grateful we were saved. And number two, to be very good children because you want to prove that this was a good decision and I was worth being adopted. It’s wild, but it’s there. And so for me being both Asian and queer… those are both things that not only set me apart from my peers where in middle school all you want to do is be invisible and fit in, so those who are things that made that impossible for me and also made me less of a good daughter. My mom was very Catholic. She’s a single mom and it’s always been just the two of us. And so we were very close. And those two things also just ruptured that closeness in a way because being Asian was something she could never understand fully and being queer was also something that she couldn’t understand and also did not accept for the first few years. There was a lot of sliding Catholic pamphlets under my bedroom door and me like marking them up with sassy comments and sliding them back.
Amanda Vegara (they/them/theirs)
A lot of people think that non binary people just don’t exist or like, or like refusing to see them or use their pronouns and I’m not sure how my family would react, and I think it was really disheartening to see the Catholic Church the verse in the Bible being like God created like man and woman or whatnot and meaning that trans people are not listening to like how God wants them to be or something and it was like, so unnecessary that you had to do this during Pride Month too.
Chann Kong (she/her/hers)
I was eight when I lost my dad and wasn’t able to have a relationship with him. My mom was always working and she never really showed us what it is to be a Cambodian woman. I always had to just figure it out myself. That’s why when I was younger, I was never interested in Cambodian culture. I didn’t have any Cambodian friends growing up. And there was this void.
I saw an older Khmer lady who was speaking poems about the war and I was so enamored and it brought me back to literacy and how it’s hard for me to speak to elders because I didn’t get the chance to learn how to have a normal conversation. Like, yeah, I speak Khmer, but they don’t want to get you or understand you because they see you as an American.
Dexieng Yang (she/her/hers)
I’ve known I’ve liked girls like that, since I was like five. But growing up, especially in the Hmong community, you only see the princess with the prince, Mom and Dad, and no one ever talks about that. Being gay is weird in the community, and I just really wanted to be on a platform where I could say that because I’m not loud with me being queer, but that doesn’t mean I don’t care about the issues going on here, or that I don’t see it happening, especially in the Hmong community. Especially in the Hmong community.
Merle Geode (they/them/theirs)
It’s important to reflect on a wide spectrum of experiences and identities under the umbrella of “Asian-ness.” As a queer, genderfluid, mixed-race (Korean/white) person, I hold certain privileges and I am also a part of marginalized communities. These are intersections that I wanted to bring to this storytelling project through my lived experience. I believe we can all benefit, as a community, from telling stories that show that “Asian-ness” is not monolithic. I personally have a very moving and shifting relationship with this term. For example, I am legally unable to receive citizenship in Korea under the current law because my mother, not my father, is Korean; there are ways in which being mixed race is very complicated depending on where I am.
It is also true that queerness is complicated in the sense that there are culturally some pretty big gaps to fill between my lived experience as a queer person in the U.S. and, say, my mom’s worldview as a person who was born right after the Korean War and immigrated to the U.S. shortly before my own lifetime. I am using my relationship with my mom as an example because she is my most foundational link to Asian-ness and also a certain separateness in terms of my gender and sexuality. I feel most comfortable with the definition of Asian-ness as a political one; even to say that my tie to Asian-ness is through Korean-ness has its own set of gradations of experience that are unique to the colonized history of Korea, the ancestral trauma, and how that carries forward. Speaking of which, in terms of spirituality, it wasn’t a choice per se, but it just sort of happened that I have been pulled back to my roots and continue to explore how to connect to indigenous Korean spiritual traditions. My grandparents on my mom’s side were Buddhist; the last time I went to Korea in November, I was able to visit the temple where my grandmother used to go and that was a very significant event for me. To learn how my ancestors prayed.
In my mom’s generation, she and her siblings converted to Christianity and Catholicism (and to this day, S. Korea has a lot of megachurches; so much of this shift has to do with the fact that the U.S. military is still essentially colonizing the country and missionaries were also a part of the changing landscape after the Korean War.) So. My return to what was there first, in the ways that I can (and believe me, there are a lot of barriers) is a sort of recovery process. Here in the U.S., something I am interested in exploring (and have already made some connections) is how these indigenous Korean spiritual practices are continuing on—and possibly changing—in the diaspora. I think there are questions that yet have to be answered, such as what happens when multiracial Koreans encounter 신병? This is a relatively unprecedented question, generationally, because Korea has historically been one of the most mono-ethnic countries in the world, though that has changed in the decades following the Korean War.
I don’t have all the answers yet, and some are buried in language lost due to assimilation but these are some of the things I think about often. And, given that Korea is a very patrilineal and patriarchal society, historically but still ongoing, even my access to certain types of information is limited by the fact that I am not a man…but I am not a woman either…so that complicates that journey as well. Anyhow, I think this project is a great way to show many different facets of experience related to how people process who they are in light of the prompt of Asian-ness and I am glad to be a part of it and to also learn from the stories of others, and perhaps this also enables new connections to happen, communally, in the future.
Kia Lee (she/her/hers)
There are gender roles that my parents, relatives, and the broader Hmong culture expects me to live by, such as the expectation to get married and bear children. These are two things in my life that I’ve always been very iffy about due to family trauma that I witnessed growing up. I have three aunts who’ve “ran away” from their home and marital relationship to live under my parents’ household for a period of time. These moments occurred at separate times while I was still in middle school.
These memories, even though I don’t remember them very clearly I feel like in a way, seeing my aunts go through that struggle and seeing my mom and my grandma try to be there for them was really hard for me to watch as a little girl. Seeing other women in my life be in really toxic relationships where their husbands and community weren’t there for them really hurt me. My mom and grandma are also very bitter people. They have a lot of love but it’s tough love. They’ve always told me and my sisters things like, “men ain’t shit, men suck, once you get married men will lie to you”. Their words must come from somewhere, so I often wonder what are the stories and pain that they carry but do not speak of? At the same time, they’ve reinforced ideas about my worth and limits as a future married Hmong woman.
So that’s why there are a lot of things that I’m scared of, such as commitment, marriage, bearing children. Once I finally dug deep enough to understand why I’m the way I am though, I’ve been doing the work to heal and define what it means to be a Hmong woman on my own terms even if I do get married and want to start a family in the future.
Tri M. Vo (S-he/they)
I’ve been treated as a cisgendered Asian man for so long, I feel this need to to stay in this body to continue to record the memory of how people treat me. I don’t want to forget that throughout my life in the U.S., having moved here with my mom at the age of 4 to join my dad in Minnesota, there have been elusive forces at play guiding me into life paths that checked the boxes of what a person like me was meant to step into. Stepping into self-advocacy of the story shaped by such forces needs the storyteller to embody the story. To have a direct, feet-in-fire, material stake in an identity subjected to the quietly genocidal agenda of the ruling, conqueror class. I feel if I were to transition out of, and claim an identity with newborn material consequences, at least compared to the longer lifetime of the (gender) identity I transition out from, I feel as though like my authority on my lived experience of up until now would be diluted, not as authentic — untrustworthy.
I feel a strong need to speak to my treatment as a cis-Asian man because very few people have the language to do it. Maybe it’s my fear that not enough cis-Asian men study post-colonial humanities or to learn how to talk about this sort of thing.
And so for me, I’m not necessarily saying, “I am a cis-Asian man, and this is my cis-Asian story.”
I’m saying I have been treated, and socialized, and invested in the systemic disentangling of how cis-Asian men have been Othered for so long, that it would be a loss to have one less key to the story. One less person with heart-and-flesh level access to an identity that we need to unravel the vicious, humanity-warping machines keeping us from really knowing each other today.
Vang Xor Xiong (he/him/his)
Navigating masculinity as a bisexual Asian male in today’s society is hard. I don’t often think about if I’m too masculine or if I’m too feminine when I’m with my partner. However that’s a different story when it comes to society and the dating scene in general. I feel like different people react different to how my masculinity and femininity manifest. For example, straight women are often feel off by my queerness and gay men sometime fetishized my body.
Elly (she/they)
I’m like 5’1”. I feel like if I were to cut my hair and dress more masculinely, people would think I was a 13 year old boy. I already struggle with people taking me seriously and with taking myself seriously. While it’d be nice to get kid’s movie tickets, in the professional world and everything, I feel a lot of fear around being seen as a child.
Also Asiann-ness, gender identity in the US, and white supremacy is complicated—Asian masculinity is contentious and fraught terrain. With the hyper-feminization of Asian women and feminization of Asian men, it feels like my body, regardless of how I dress or what I do, will be read as feminine.
So when I think about exploring masculinity as an East Asian, AFAB person, I come up against a lot of internalized barriers. I especially get stuck feeling like, if I want to get any validation from other people, for people to find me attractive, I should be more femme.
I know in my mind that is wrong, that that is racist, and that I need to live and make decisions for myself. In my heart, I feel afraid of rejection. Moving into queer and trans Asian community has been powerful. I am fed by meeting people who remind me that I have value and exist. I don’t need to bother myself with how white people see me. My fellow QT Asians have been helping me grow into myself as I find congruence.
Chue Lor (he/they)
Homelessness is a such a big problem for queer youths. I think the stats are like 40% of homeless youth are queer. There are a lot of resources and cool conversations around this. However, I wish there were more conversations about homelessness within the Asian community, especially for queer Asian youths. The only things that I read about queer Asians is that they are afraid to come to their parents because they fear losing face. But it is not just that! Who cares about losing face when you could lose stability, family, home? I think we also need to reconsider what homelessness means? For example, a lot of Hmong families, like my family, live together. It is three families living together in one family unit; every single space is utilized. I slept on my mother’s concrete dank ass basement floor without any mattress for years while my siblings slept on the couches. Like what kind of home is that? In a similar note, if a Hmong family loses their home, they could live with their cousins, despite that they could have tensions living together. And they will suffer and bear their pain just so they can have a roof over their heads. And is that not considered homelessness? We should also talk about homelessness as a state of mind. Yes, I can have a roof over my head, but every single day, I feel like shit living under my mom’s house, taking verbal and physical abuse. Is that not homelessness?
L Elizabeth Meeks (all pronouns)
I have a bunch of tattoos and piercings, which I don’t know… I think enhance how I look because I just felt so shitty as a kid. My dad would also tell me that I’m not Chinese, I’m American. So it was this weird identity crisis I was raised in. For when I was a kid, it’s like check your race, and if you could only do one, I would check white. But when I got older, I would check Asian, or two races or more. But how do I categorize myself? Because I don’t feel Chinese, but am half Chinese. How do you deal with that?
Sunny Thao (she/her/hers)
After I shaved my head I was getting a lot of feedback from my family, which wasn’t necessarily helpful or positive for me at the time. So then I was really conflicted on what it means to be a good daughter? And what does it mean to be a good woman? I think the one thing that I kept thinking about- I still think about too, is that like, my parents, especially my mom. She kept saying, what you’re doing is not a bad thing. But it’s not what we should do, you know, and I just kept thinking about that. And I was like, What do you mean, we should do, you know, and she was saying, like, you know, this isn’t what Hmong girls are supposed to look like, what we’re supposed to do.
Toni Geurts (she/her/hers)
I really have wrestled with my biracial identity. I know it’s a really common experience for a lot of biracial people to be assimilated into the dominant culture. So for myself, I’m really just starting to do a lot of identity work around who I really am and who I want to be and who I want to show up as in the world. And I didn’t necessarily have the opportunity to go to college at a younger age. I feel like that’s where a lot of people start to unpack their identities, where they start to find their circles and their peers. And for myself, I was just so removed from that. Like, I grew up in Big Lake, Minnesota, which is about 50 miles north of the Twin Cities. And so we moved there in ’96. So I guess maybe I should start maybe even a little earlier than that. My parents met in Japan. My mom’s originally from the Philippines. She was working in Japan at the time. My dad was military. He’s a white American. And so my parents met there. And my dad’s originally from Minnesota. He’s from a small town, so my dad was used to this rural Minnesota lifestyle, and that’s ultimately where we ended up. But for myself, my brother, my mom, it was a really weird experience. And I remember having these experiences, just constantly knowing that I wasn’t like everyone else, you know, like, just kind of constantly having this experience of being othered. While at the same time, also, not being able to fully embrace my culture on the other side as well.
WaMee Vang (she/her/hers)
Because my parents are traditional, I’m expected to clean the house and take care of my family. Is this equality or equity? Also, I’m going to college and I just got my Associates from St. Paul College and graduated this spring and wanted to continue to get my BA, but I won’t be going back until next fall. I feel like as a woman, it’s hard to get back into school because of familial obligations. You’re supposed to be shy and quiet. That’s how I grew up.
Haley (she/her/hers)
Like I’m a third grader and I don’t want to sit in a salon chair for three hours. And having these chemicals burn my hair, burn my head and I’m like, I don’t get what’s happening. My mom’s just like, “You’ll be beautiful. Don’t worry about it.” I’m just like, I don’t understand what’s happening. And then this continued — I would get it every other year until like, ninth grade. And I think it was because of going to a more open minded high school, there was a moment I was just like, I need to say stop. I was just like, no, I like my hair. Leave my hair alone. Currently, I’m still going through where sometimes I look in the mirror and I want my hair to be straighter, but then it’s also like, I like my hair way more now than when it was flat and straight and that’s not me. That’s just not who I am.
Leah Wallgren (she/her/hers)
I don’t know what my identity is and how I should identify. I am the child of transracial adoption. I am mixed race. I can easily blend in with white crowds and Latinx crowds based on my skin and hair. In actuality I am Hawaiian, Irish, and a mish-mash or other European ethnicities. I often feel as if I do not quite fit in with my Asian peers because I am not Asian enough. I also feel as if I am betraying my heritage if I ignore it. Participating in this project is out of my comfort zone, however I am determined to find more people like me: divorced from my heritage, yet wanting to learn.
Kenny Ngo (he/they)
I believe that visibility across the spectrum is so important when it comes to LGBTQIA voice.