This Trans Artist Is Figuring It All Out

The inspiration for Leon Mostovoy’s exhibit Transfigure, opening February 26 at the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art, was traditional children’s flipbooks. But instead of quirky illustrations of dinosaurs like those in the flipbooks Mostovoy enjoyed as a gender non-conforming child, Transfigure portrays 50 nude, trans-identified figures trisected at the head, torso, and lower body. The seemingly endless combinations—say, a woman’s head over a post-op torso over a penis—playfully shatter any notions of a gender binary.

“It’s like this big ‘fuck you,’” says the trans artist. “Like, try to put my body together. Even if you tried you wouldn’t be able to.”

Taken from Mostovoy’s hardbound book of the same name, the exhibit of life-size prints portrays a range of body types—overweight and skinny, white and brown, pre-op and post-op—that he solicited during open studio sessions in various cities. It took him a year to find 10 trans people in Los Angeles willing to be photographed; in San Francisco strangers stripped naked in the middle of Dolores Park. Mostovoy will also shoot portraits at the gallery for later iterations of the project.

Fellow trans activists have criticized the Transfigure book for focusing on trans genitalia, but for Mostovoy the physical is political. “As much as we want to be elevated and say, ‘It’s not about the body,’ it absolutely is,” he says. “Otherwise people wouldn’t go to such extremes to feel comfortable. ‘Why did you get top surgery? Why is it so important to pass?’”

The project has been a catalyst for Mostovoy’s own self-acceptance as someone who began transitioning later in life. “After I transitioned I started to feel like I was missing a penis, and that’s something I hadn’t felt as a butch dyke,” he says. “Now, after three years of doing this project, I very much want to keep my genitals as they are. I am queer-identified, and it’s important to me to stay close to my tribe.”

Looking back on his childhood, Mostovoy wishes he had something like Transfigure to make sense of his body at the time. “If you’re a cool mom and you have a gender-variant kid, show them the book and tell them, ‘Honey, it’s OK to put your own body together.”

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