A woman sitting on a toilet in a wedding gown next to a litter box. A woman, naked, lying on a settee. A pregnant woman dressed in a bathing suit. A woman pumping breast milk. A woman lying next to a small child and a cut-out skeleton. And 61 more photographs featuring the same woman in a range of states of undress, most featuring the subject’s face either cut from the frame or obscured.

This is what makes up Michael E. Northrup’s Dream Away, published last month to acclaim from the New Yorker and the Guardian, among others. The experience of looking at the work is a little unnerving: Vogue Italia acknowledged the discomfiting nature of the images, saying “you’re not sure you’re allowed to but nonetheless you can’t look away.” That seems to be the point.

The woman in Dream Away is Northrup’s ex-wife, and the pictures were taken over the course of their relationship — they met in 1976, married in 1978, and divorced by 1988. The domestic intimacy of the images is all part of the 1960s snapshot aesthetic that Northrup himself has expressed affinity for. A commercial artist as well as art photographer, much of his work over the past decades has played with this style of image-making, while also experimenting with light and flash. He’s certainly quite successful at making the viewer feel like they are getting a long glimpse at private moments.

But it is nearly impossible to look at the works that make up Dream Away and not think about the relationship between the photographer and the photographed. Looking at the photos allows the viewer into an intimate relationship, a marriage that is now over.

Thing is, in the discussion of these “arrestingly intimate” images, there appears a comment from the artist that might give one pause. “She hasn’t seen it yet,” he says in an interview with Sleek, “if she likes it that would make me immensely happy, and if she doesn’t, that’s her problem.”

Looking at the photos allows the viewer into an intimate relationship, a marriage that is now over.
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Though there’s no mention in any of the articles about what the woman in the photos might think about being in said photos, a quick Google search reveals that his ex-wife did, and perhaps still does, have a problem. Back in 2013, in a short email exchange published on a photography blog, Northrup writes about how his wife had asked for these images not to be published. Northrup asked for permission and received a no in response. On Twitter, Alexandra Schwartz, who wrote the piece about Dream Away for the New Yorker, revealed that Northrup received a refusal for an initial edit and that this is a new set of photographs. But that doesn’t indicate permission.

Before continuing, it should be said that this is not an attempt to suggest that the book should not have been published and that its existence is somehow illegal. It’s more a question of what it means to ask someone a question, not receive the answer you want, and then move ahead. What are the ethics of producing this type of work? And what does it say about the relationship between a male photographer and a female subject?

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Northrup’s personal, written admission of his ex-wife’s refusal was then accompanied by a hearty helping of reasons why, as an artist, he has a right to publish his images: “I have a copyright lawyer here who says my first amendment rights trumps her rights to privacy as long as I meet some requirements.” He then expresses the opinion that he is “the creator” and “in the art world, once you pose with the understanding of the intentions of the photographer, then you’re giving rights.”

Reflecting a problematic view that if a woman says yes to one man in one circumstance, that should do for all men and if circumstances change, Northrup continues that since his ex-wife posed naked for another photographer and that photo has circulated without complaint, he should have no problem. Reading argument after argument — at one point Northrup says that his ex is “immoral” for denying his request for permission — it is hard not to feel that this is the attitude of a man who feels that he has a right to more than just a photograph. In the ensuing discussion (all amongst men, it should be noted), it is suggested consistently that the photographer’s rights trump that of the subject.

Max Houghton is a professor of photography at the London College of Communication, and she runs their master’s program in Photojournalism and Documentary Photography. She has spent a great deal of time thinking about the issues around photography and the representation of women both in images and in the field in general, recently publishing  Firecrackers: Female Photographers Now alongside Fiona Rogers. When asked about Dream Away and the issue of consent, “for me,” she says, “it is about this absolutely outrageous sense of entitlement.”

“I really hated the way that he brought up the fact that she posed for other people naked,” she says. “I detested the fact that he used that as if to say she’ll show herself anywhere. It just is not relevant. The guy literally thinks that he has the divine right because they were once married to do whatever he wanted.”

The female voice is pushed aside or silenced and the male project becomes all-encompassing. For Northrup, this isn’t work that has come out of a relationship between two people. This isn’t a creative partnership, perhaps like that of Emmet and Edith Gowin, which Houghton provides as a comparative example of photographer husband and photographed wife. “Close human relationships can be the most beautiful places to explore intimacy and what that is. It can be consensual,” Houghton explains. “But these things can change over time. Even if it is the male with the camera, with the power, with the framing, with everything, it’s not necessarily problematic from the word go.”

This is about an absolutely outrageous sense of entitlement.
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Instead, Northrup’s ex-wife simply becomes a vehicle for Northrup’s creative practice. “I’m also not sure why the concern is so heavy to the side of the subject instead of the photographer,” he complains, in the comment section of photographer Jin Zhu’s no longer active blog that took him to task for his perspective. “If I publish, she looses [sic] nothing. I would not publish images that I thought might damage her situation. And if you llook [sic] at the images I think you’d have trouble finding anything demeaning in them. If I don’t publish I loose [sic] 10 years of part of my life and the ability to share my work. I loose [sic] my freedom of speech.”

But we still do not have his ex-wife’s opinion in all of this, the simple fact of whether or not she’s okay with her often nude body being displayed in public. Considering this, it’s not hard to understand why so many images cut chunks of his ex-wife out of the picture. When she has a voice — a voice that denies his request for permission — she becomes a hindrance, an immoral denier of his free speech, of his art, of his solo “creation.” This attitude requires that he see her as nothing but an object, and he does, stating that the photographs don’t even display his ex-wife at all. They “have [her] likeness but that is only through the illusion of the photo.”

When she has a voice — a voice that denies his request for permission — she becomes a hindrance, an immoral denier of his free speech, of his art, of his solo “creation.”

No matter how much Northrup would like to pretend otherwise, the photographs in Dream Away did require two people to be made. Northrup can choose which photos to include and audiences can argue whether or not the photos are defamatory (which has occurred online), but this leaves out the other person — the one who was photographed repeatedly for a decade starting over 40 years ago. Northrup does not, in any discussion that he has had online, seem to recognize his own privileged position as artist, as photographer. Reflecting what has become a familiar men’s rights refrain, he sees the woman as being all powerful simply for denying him that which he feels entitled to.

Northrup complains that his ex-wife doesn’t have a good reason for questioning his publication of these photographs, but what is his reason for insisting? And why is it any more valid?

Beyond this, however, is perhaps an even wider question: What societal forces have allowed Northup to feel entitled and justified in his defense of his work? He clearly does not recognize the power and privilege that he holds as the man behind the camera. As Houghton puts it, “anyone can make a nice image these days, really. And so we do need to be asking more of people who choose to call themselves a photographer, an artist, a creator. If you are going to use those terms, they are loaded terms, they are privileged terms, and so what are you doing to earn that privilege?”

B y now you’ve probably read all about the comments Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie made in her Channel 4 interview — the ones where she said trans women have experienced “the privileges that the world accords to men” and was unable to call us women without qualification. Or you’ve read the more recent posts in which she doubled and tripled down on those statements. If you haven’t, take a minute to scan through, because they’re the basis of a journey we’re going to embark on together.

Back? I know, right? Wild.

In the days that followed the initial interview, it seemed like nearly the entire trans community pushed back as one against Adichie’s assertions; Laverne Cox told Twitter that she had been “bullied and shamed” for her feminine behavior as a child, Aaryn Lang started the sarcastic hashtag (sarcashtag?) #MalePrivilegeDiaries to document the violence transfeminine people experienced pre-transition, and countless think pieces remarked on how Adichie had seemingly abandoned her well-known maxim against only listening to a single story.

But there were problems on both sides of the argument. Mainstream (read: cisnormative) media outlets that covered the controversy made the mistake of fundamentally misunderstanding what was being debated in the first place; among others, the Washington Post claimed Adichie got flack for saying cis and trans women’s issues are different, a statement which no trans woman alive would contest. I’ve said it myself multiple times. What many transfeminine people reject is the notion that they have male privilege or were “socialized male.”

Mainstream media outlets made the mistake of fundamentally misunderstanding what was being debated in the first place.
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By engaging in this debate at all, trans folks need to take a side on an issue that doesn’t really line up with our experiences in a way that makes sense across the board. Trans author Imogen Binnie wrote on Twitter that “male privilege is a term invented by cis people” which “does not map neatly onto trans experiences.” When we as trans people engage with others using language coined to define fundamentally cisgender-centric power structures, are we really having an honest discussion about our experiences? Or are we just muddying the waters?

I suspect it’s the latter — for one thing, because although I heard plenty from people like Cox and trans writer/historian Morgan Page in the wake of Adichie’s interview, I heard next to nothing about trans people who had more complicated histories with privilege. Cox and Page have different backgrounds, but both were recognizably queer from a young age, to themselves and others; this impacted their lives by exposing them to systematic verbal and physical abuse specifically because of their gender expression. Not every experience echoes this exactly.

Since Adichie, Cox, Page, and I all agree that telling one single story can’t possibly capture the depth of real lived experiences, I want to share some of my own — and bring shades of grey into a discussion that is too often made black and white.

In high school, I worked as a member of the Foreign Exchange club. We put on events like dances and roller-skating parties in order to raise money for each member to spend a summer in another country. I worked for three years to raise two-thirds of the cost of my trip to Germany — but at the last second, I was granted a massive scholarship that paid my way instead. I got the best of both worlds, and though my essay was pretty good for a 16-year-old, I’d be a fool not to suspect that being read as male played a part in why I was chosen.

Years afterward, I obtained an internship at a small publishing company. There, I was one of two (largely unpaid) interns, the other being The Establishment’s own Alex DiFrancesco, who was still presenting as female. While the publisher made sure to lavish me with cool projects, several business lunches, and a connection at Publishers Weekly, he gave Alex little (if any) of the same treatment. Much later, Alex and I would reunite, discover that we were both trans, and share a good laugh — but at the time the disparity in treatment was blatant and uncomfortable.

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I never want to dismiss how my life has been shaped by these events, because to pretend that I haven’t been extended certain benefits in life due to my apparent status as a white male strikes me as dishonest. But like Binnie, I stop short at calling this “privilege.” As is commonly used in feminist vernacular, “privilege” refers to unearned advantages — things that one doesn’t pay for, but acquires through circumstance. What cis feminists call trans women’s “male privilege,” I would instead characterize as “fringe benefits,” because make no mistake: I paid for them.

There were signs I wasn’t really keen on being a boy as far back as kindergarten, when a couple of the neighbors’ kids coaxed me into trying on a frilly black princess dress at their house and then laughed hysterically. I remember being enchanted with how it felt to move and be present in that dress, but I also internalized a deep sense of wrongness in that moment: This was not something that was meant for me. This was a secret shame.

What cis feminists call trans women’s ‘male privilege,’ I would instead characterize as ‘fringe benefits,’ because make no mistake: I paid for them.
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I dutifully repressed everything about that incident for around two decades. But though my brain tried to forget it, the idea that there was an aspect of me that was broken, bizarre, disgusting — that stayed with me, and still does. It’s fed my struggles with anxiety and depression, and the unhealthily dependent side of my aspirational relationship with porn. It’s the reason I got so good at play-acting as a cis man; I wasn’t effeminate because my subconscious mind worked overtime to make sure of it.

At my core, there’s a deeply held belief that my relationship with gender makes me a fucked-up person. When you understand that, you’ll see that my transition isn’t just a physical one: It’s the process of unlearning toxic ideas I absorbed from cisnormative culture and drummed into myself over 20-odd years. I had to trade a significant chunk of my mental health to get the fringe benefits of “male privilege” — which is why that concept is fundamentally flawed with regards to trans identity.

Was it really a privilege to grow up that way? Would any cis women like to switch seats?

All this isn’t to say trans women have it worse than cis women, or that the idea of privilege is universally garbage. It’s actually vastly important to fully understand intersectionality; I’m unequivocally the beneficiary of white and able-bodied privilege, and those are systems I need to help dismantle. But the key word is “fully.” We need to be accurate in our understanding of how privilege is given and received.

Even those of us who spend years in relative comfort with our gender are socialized in a vastly more complex way than Adichie posits. When she says that we are “treated as male by the world,” that’s partly true, but ignores the other ways trans people are treated in Western society: as mentally disturbed fetish objects Hollywood can mine for cheap material. Small wonder I was never able to get rid of that sense of wrongness; it was always being reinforced by the world around me. This comic by Sophie Labelle illustrates (heh) the problem with movies like, say, Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, or The Hangover 2, or any number of other movies where the idea of transness is played for shock and/or laughs. Whether you know you’re trans or not, society has many ways of making sure you know the consequences of straying outside your prescribed gender.

The same hand that extends an invitation into a “man’s world” also shoves these ideas down our throats, so that our sense of identity and self-worth is chiseled away. When we talk about “male privilege,” that’s what we’re really referring to: the demonic barter millions of people have had to make in order to stay alive in a culture that, unconsciously or not, wants them dead or silent.

But we refuse to be either.

So pull up a chair and listen, cis feminists, because there are so many other stories that you still need to hear.