WEST HOLLYWOOD, California — It’s an extremely precarious time to be a trans person in the United States. Already tenuous civil rights for the trans community have been further restricted by the current, far-right administration. In less than 100 days in office, Trump has already enacted a slew of anti-trans legislation, including an executive order that forbids minors from receiving gender affirming care, and the Republican-controlled house passed its own bill that denies its first trans member, Delaware’s Sarah Elizabeth McBride, from using the restroom that matches her gender identity. As the next four years progress, trans people anxiously wait to see how their civil liberties will be whittled down even further by the far right’s attacks.
These threats, however, have incited productive rage and ramped up activism in queer and trans communities. For curators Steve Galindo and Jamison Edgar, Queering Digital: Artists in Response to Anti Trans Legislation at the Pacific Design Center is a response to this wave of anti-trans litigation. The exhibition, which features 13 transgender, nonbinary, and genderqueer individuals, is a refusal to be silent or retreat from the government’s tyranny.
The artworks, which include custom-built software, paintings, photography, sculpture, multimedia installations, and a video game, demonstrate how trans narratives are proliferated and distorted through social media and technology. Many of the works nod toward pop culture — for instance, Thanos Valentine’s dual installations “Where’s Everybody Going? Bingo?” and “Bedrotting” (both 2024) combine to create a teenage bedroom: An old, boxy television displays the start screen for the video game Resident Evil, while a plush blanket printed with Powerpuff Girls imagery lies beneath bedazzled prescription bottles. Both of these franchises feature prominent genderqueer characters — Morpheus in Resident Evil, HIM in the Powerpuff Girls — signaling that trans voices have long been in the public eye.
Other artists seem to want to push their conservative and religious adversaries’ buttons via installations and compositions that some viewers may read as sexually explicit or sacrilegious. Amina Cruz’s “SPIT” (2024), a narrow enclave bathed in red light, has the ambiance of an illicit backroom in an old-school video store. Porn plays on a screen warped by moiré lines, and a stool conveniently offers up latex gloves and lubricant. A roll of paper towels, screen printed with Cruz’s howling face, could be interpreted equally as an orgasm or a cry of despair, the latter an appropriate reaction to the current political climate. Next to Cruz’s installation are a cluster of paintings and drawings by Ruby Zarsky that portray anime characters with enormous penises. “Madonna” (2024) depicts the Virgin Mary with an erect cock and semen dripping off her shoulders. It may be Zarsky’s means of retaliation against the religious zealots stripping away her rights, or perhaps it expresses the fluidity of embodied gender.
Though the artists’ anger can be felt in the exhibition, there are moments of tenderness. Marsian De Lellis scattered live ladybugs around their sculpture “(In)/Animate Objects [Burial + Rebirth]” (2025), which embeds handmade dolls into a bed of soil, plants, and mushrooms. The dolls will erode and be taken over by fauna, a hopeful reminder that this period of adversity could lead to stronger, healthier possibilities.
The artists in Queering Digital embrace their divergence from cishet norms. They pointedly eschew comfort and assert themselves, and the more their livelihood is threatened, the more visible they become.
Queering Digital: Artists in Response to Anti Trans Legislation continues at the Pacific Design Center (8687 Melrose Avenue, West Hollywood, California) through March 30. The exhibition was curated by Steve Galindo and Jamison Edgar.
