Why I Need to Make This Work: When a System Doesn’t See You, It Shapes Your Entire Life

I keep coming back to one fact because it says everything about the world I live in. Although Canada recorded sex- or gender-motivated hate crimes before 2021, transgender and gender-diverse targets were largely absorbed into an ‘other sex or gender’ category. It was not until October 2021 that national police reporting expanded to explicitly code transgender and non-binary targets, making these forms of hate statistically legible as distinct phenomena (Statistics Canada - Hate Crimes In Canada)

Hate crimes targeting 2SLGBTQ+ people were recorded, but the structure of reporting often fractured or obscured the bias itself. Incidents were sorted into categories like “sex,” “sexual orientation,” or “other sex or gender,” masking how gender-nonconforming, and trans experiences overlap in real life.

"Before the new wording in the legislation, police had not kept an official record on the hate crimes against trans and nonbinary folks. This invisibility had troubling implications for our criminal justice system. With no record of the violence we experience, there was no need for the government to act". (Curlew, Abigail: Transgender hate crimes are on the rise even in Canada). As a result, the full nature of 2SLGBTQ+-targeted hate was not clearly legible within the national record. People like many of the sitters I work with, existed only partially in that system—not because the violence wasn’t real, but because the format was not built to see us as whole.

This is why I make the work I make. These aren’t abstract ideas for me. They’re lived conditions.

When I talk about counter-legibility, I’m talking about the daily demand placed on queer and Trans people to make themselves readable inside formats designed without them. Legibility sounds neutral. It isn’t. It’s a cultural pressure that decides who counts, who is recorded, who is safe, and who is quietly pushed out of view.

Most people don’t notice this because they’ve never had to.If the system has always had a place for you, you don’t see the fog around it.You don’t notice the violence built into the form itself.

But for those of us who grew up outside the format, the fog is the air we breathe.

My work keeps asking what happens when the body a system tries to define refuses to shrink to fit the category. At the Table makes this explicit by placing each sitter at a white administrative table. It’s the same kind of surface where policies, codes, and decisions are drafted. The table represents the place where inclusion is promised, restricted, or withheld. Some people get a seat. Some don’t. And those exclusions shape real lives.

In At the Table, the bureaucratic fonts, rigid blocks of text, and clinical surface aren’t aesthetic choices. They’re evidence. They point to the systems that produce legibility. They show how authority writes itself into our bodies long before we ever speak.

This work continues because the problem continues.Systems claim neutrality while relying on categories that can’t hold who we are.And the violence that falls outside the format is treated as if it never happened.

I draw because I need to make that failure visible.I draw because I refuse to let the system decide who gets to appear.And I draw because the people who sit with me at that table live the consequences of these gaps every day.

This isn’t just art about social issues.It’s a record of what the system cannot read.