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PHOTOS: Meet the Agender Young Adults Challenging the Gender Binary

PHOTOS: Meet the Agender Young Adults Challenging the Gender Binary

Agender_lead

A new photo exhibit commissioned in response to an alleged hate crime against an agender teenager looks to challenge contemporary conceptions of male, female, and the space in between.

Commissioned by San Francisco Magazine following a harrowing alleged hate crime that left 18-year-old agender high school student Sasha Fleischman with second- and third-degree burns covering their legs, Chloe Aftel's "Agender" is an intimate photo series of agender, bigender, neutrois, and genderqueer young adults.

Set largely in domestic spaces with subjects -- including a bandage-covered Fleischman -- propped up by furniture and staring hauntingly into the camera, "Agender" is "a visual attempt to answer questions like 'What does it mean to have a body that is in between?' and 'What does that look like and feel like day to day?'" according to Aftel in an interview with Vocativ.

After the December attack in which Fleischman was set on fire by another teen who apparently took issue with what they perceived as a male body wearing a skirt, local and national news outlets began a conversation about words like "agender" and "genderqueer" and about the neutral pronoun "they" -- used by many nonbinary people instead of "he" or "she" -- in a way "we've never heard before in common culture," said Joel Baum of Gender Spectrum in an interview with NBC Bay Area.

Aftel's portraits present the vulnerable, human side to "this whole group of people galvanizing the debate about what gender is, and to a certain extent, what love is and what self-expression is," she told Vocativ. "The idea of fluidity with regards to gender just seems so exciting to me, and honestly, much more based in reality."

See some of the photos on the following pages.


Agender_01_0_0Ammo

Agender_02_0Ammo

Agender_03_0Edie

Agender_04_0Edie

Agender_05_0Finley

Agender_06_0Marilyn

Agender_07_0Mark

Agender_08_0Micah

Agender_09_0Micah

Agender_10_0Rain

Agender_11_0Rain

Agender_12_0Rain

Agender_13_0Sarah

Agender_14_0Sarah

Agender_15_0Sasha

Agender_16_0Sasha

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Mitch Kellaway