Art Historian, Cyle Metzger : Greer Lankton is an artist whose sketchbooks laid bare her experience of transition.
My name is Cyle Metzger. I’m an art historian.
She was born in 1958. Her family moved to a very cookie-cutter suburb of Chicago. For her, though, it was not the safe place that it was meant to be. She talks a lot about her teachers questioning whether she was a boy or a girl and her peers who would then challenge who she was.
In 1977, she describes having a breakdown and she was voluntarily admitted to a psychiatric hospital. This was a formative year for her, and I think that is evident in these drawings and journals.
Artist, P Staff: You see such a complex but honest reality of a trans person.
My name is P Staff. I’m an artist and fan of Greer Lankton.
I think that often, we are given this narrative of young person feels themselves to be in the “wrong body,” which I’m saying in air quotes, and therefore needs to become right and normal. And what often gets maligned in that is the ambiguity I think probably all of us feel in relation to gender.
We maybe call it gender affirmation, but I often think of it as harm reduction. Cis people engage with it as much as trans people do. Let me dress a certain way, let me pitch my voice in a certain tone, let me let this person read me in a particular way, because all we’re constantly doing is trying to reduce the harm that the normative world wants to put on us.