It Never Gets Easier

I chose to do my contemporary piece on gender roles and transgender issues. Gender roles are harmful to everyone, men, women, especially at a young age, because they try to tell children who the should be and what they should grow up doing. Little boys are expected to enjoy getting dirty and sports and other things considered 'masculine', and girls are expected to like Barbies and make up and baby dolls, and I feel like this is incredibly toxic. Toys and games should not be gendered, and children should be allowed to express themselves however they wish, or else they may grow up with a toxic view of who they should be. And this is even more difficult for members of the trans community, with all of these gender roles trying to tell them what box they should fit into, it can be very difficult when that doesn't feel right. The gender spectrum is expansive and can't be put into small boxes labeled 'male' and female'

For this piece itself, I did the whole thing in Photoshop 7, using the shape tools and a silhouette of a male and female crouching looking distressed, I filled in these with the words, and then deleted the silhouette layer to create the image out of just text! The smaller little 'male' and 'female' shapes within the larger ones were simply recolored using the select tool and locking the text layer. The background was also made with the shape tool. Overall I love the effect this ended up with, and I think it worked out pretty well. I hope it was alright that I used a digital medium for this!