Should We Alter Old Photos to Erase Dysphoria?
By: Arabelle J.
Tags: Self, LGBTQ, Art, Transgender, Photography

Should We Alter Old Photos to Erase Dysphoria?

Regendering photos to create a past that didn’t exist

Photo by Caleb Woods on Unsplash

When a transgender or nonbinary person embraces a new identity, what happens to our past? Beyond putting deadnames to rest and changing gender markers, how do transgender and nonbinary people share our past with people we meet after we transition? For some, our post-transition identities are evolutions of our prior selves. For others, new starts. Every transition is different. Or, as the saying goes, “if you’ve seen one transition, you’ve seen one transition.”

When we transition, we shouldn’t be forced to divorce our past in order to live into our future.

For many, though, pre-transition photographs stir up dysphoria, feelings of loss, or worse. Technology now offers us a fix — the regendering of photographs. When you regender a photograph, you are changing the gender of the person in the photograph so that their outer presentation more closely matches how they identify inside.

When you regender a photograph, you are changing the gender of the person in the photograph so that their outer presentation more closely matches how they identify inside.

With so many photo apps, make-up apps, and photo-editing software solutions out there, we can now transform our memories into what could have been. Rendering is the automatic process of generating a photorealistic or non-photorealistic image from a 2D or 3D model by means of a computer program. By ‘regendering’ our pre-transition photos, we can capture who we saw ourselves as by altering how others remember us. By altering photographs to change our gender, a transgender person can appear to have transitioned much earlier, even to the point of appearing to have lived a nearly cisgender life.

But, is it ethical to create a past that never was? How will others close to us feel when we transform how they saw us into how we saw ourselves?

Maybe that’s what art is

Like all art forms, photography creates for others what the artist sees. It’s a form of communication. Photography helps us communicate what lives in our minds. It’s sharing ourselves with others.

What if the regendering of photographs from our earlier years captures the self of our imaginations? What if we can now show to others that part of us that persevered through and conquered dysphoria? That inner self is the one who saved us as the world pressed in. Before we were sure we were going to make it. When one more day seemed like too much. When our future getting better was anything but certain.

Imagination has the power to save us from a future that seems overwhelming, like an approaching wave stretching skyward and closing in as we stand on a shore littered with the broken driftwood of busted expectations and dashed hopes. Imagination just might be the only thing that saves us long enough to find our way.

Imagination believes us before we believe ourselves.

What if regendering photographs doesn’t distort the past, but captures the past we actually had, the one we want to remember? What if regendering captures a past otherwise lost, known only to us because it was only visible to us? Until now.

How does anyone know how we see ourselves without art — the art of words, or the art of drawings and photographs?

Lost years

For most of us, years — even decades — pass between when we first feel ‘different’ and when we transition, if we ever do. According to the 2015 USTS, the largest percentage of transgender and nonbinary people — forty-three percent — transition between the ages of 18 and 24. And this holds true for both nonbinary individuals and transmen too. Transwomen transition even later in life, however. They transition in their greatest numbers after age 35.

While the largest percentages of transgender and nonbinary people transition after reaching adulthood, we report feeling “different” much earlier. According to the 2015 USTS, sixty percent of more than 27,000 respondents stated that they felt “different” before age 10.

That is at least a decade, maybe more, of time when we don’t feel quite right in our bodies and with how others see us. That’s a lot of lost time. And perhaps a lot of time spent living in the safety of our imaginations.

Regendering photos

With all the apps and more extensive photo-editing software available these days, photo regendering has developed into something of a niche industry. Jeffrey Tambor drama aside, “Transparent” introduced the idea of regendering childhood photographs to the masses in 2015.

With free mobile phone apps, just about anyone can take a photograph from years ago, scan it, and begin to change facial structures and features, apply or remove makeup, and lengthen or cut off hair. With more extensive photo-editing software, you can begin to change backgrounds, add or remove people, and even swap out clothing.

By regendering photographs, many transgender and nonbinary people can confront bittersweet memories from our earlier years. Transitioning no longer has to create such a sharp break with our past. Looking at photos of our earlier selves no longer has to mean recalling the dysphoria and other intense emotions we’ve since conquered. We can now capture and show to the world that person who lived inside us, invisible to the world for so long.

The value in revising the past to show the truth

Art captures who we are and how we feel. Photo regendering allows us to show to others what we see and feel within ourselves. It’s primal in a sense, but it’s also a reflection of what many trans and nonbinary people feel — that our outer selves did not match our inner selves. It also allows us to reconcile one of the great sorrows faced by many transgender and nonbinary people: that we regret not coming out, or transitioning, earlier if we had the chance.

Photo regendering is not only right, but it’s also ethical. It’s portraying the past more accurately and authentically, as we lived it in our heads and imaginations when we were being most authentic with ourselves. Photo regendering is art too. Because that’s what art is — creating for others what we envision and live in our minds.

So, if altering old photographs helps erase dysphoria, then, yes, we should regender them. In the end, regendering photographs is not so much creating a past that never was, it’s about capturing a past that we could not show until now.