Summary
Mug vs. Mugshot confronts the uncomfortable truth that not all trans femininity is read—or protected—the same way. Through media coverage and visual culture this piece interrogates who is afforded softness, credibility, and sympathy—and who is criminalized, surveilled, or erased. The blog argues that visibility is not inherently protective, and that “passing” operates as an uneven privilege shaped by race, class, and proximity to normative femininity.
In December 2024, the British Fashion Council awarded Alex Consani, a 21-year-old openly transgender model, the prestigious Model of the Year award. Alex has modeled for major luxury fashion houses such as Chanel, Versace, Alexander McQueen, and Marc Jacobs, among others. She is presented not as a “trans model,” but simply as a model—an artist and muse.
Now, open a different browser tab and search for “trans woman of color news.” The images that appear—if any—are scattered and inconsistent, and they rarely reflect the lived realities or full identities of these women. But the articles tell a different, far more troubling story. What fills the screen is a steady stream of reports about harm: missing persons alerts, assault coverage, or yet another headline beginning with “Trans Woman of Color Killed in….” Many of these stories misgender the victim in the opening lines, rely on police statements as authoritative, and condense an entire life into a few paragraphs of violence and aftermath. In other words, even when the visuals fail to cohere, the news cycle still reproduces the same narrative—one where trans women of color are visible primarily through tragedy.
(A quick definition for clarity: In fashion and photography, a “mug” is industry slang for a model’s face—their ability to “sell” a look, their photogenic charisma. It’s an asset, a form of capital. A “mugshot,” of course, is a police photograph documenting an arrest.)
One is celebrated, the other criminalized. One is an individual, the other a statistic. This divide is not accidental. It is the product of a brutal hierarchy within femininity itself, governed by an unspoken system of privilege. That privilege is cis-passing—the ability to be perceived as cisgender—and it is a privilege deeply entangled with white supremacy and colonial beauty standards. This blog post argues that to be a cis-passing trans woman is to hold a kind of social capital that grants conditional access to mainstream acceptance, but that this access is predicated on reinforcing the very systems that make life untenable for trans women of color. The “mug” is offered only to those who most closely mirror the racialized, cis-normative ideal. The “mugshot” awaits those who do not.
Part 1: Cis-Passing as Social and Racial Capital
The pressure to “pass” is immense. But for trans women of color, especially Black trans women, this is not merely about gender affirmation—it is about navigating a gaze that has constantly policed Black femininity as inherently excessive, aberrant, or “not enough.”
However, the ability to “pass” is not a level playing field. Due to mainstream, western ideals of femininity, soft features, slim noses, certain hair textures, and body types that are overwhelmingly coded as white.
Black cis women have long been critiqued for features deemed outside the white feminine ideal. This is the legacy of racism and colonial beauty hierarchies. Trans women of color inherit this same brutal scrutiny, with a transmisogynistic twist. Where a Black cis woman might be perceived as “not properly feminine,” a Black trans woman is often denied the category of “woman” altogether based on those same racialized features; her broader nose, fuller lips, or darker skin. Which are weaponized by racist and transphobic logic to falsely “prove” masculinity.
This creates a double bind unique to transmisogynoir (a term coined by Trudy to describe the unique anti-Black, misogynistic, and transphobic violence). To be seen as a woman, one must perform a femininity that is, by design, racially exclusive. Yet, performing that femininity when one is Black can lead to being labeled as “exaggerated” or “a caricature.” Scholar C. Riley Snorton, in Black on Both Sides, details how the very concepts of “male” and “female” were consolidated through a racial project that positioned Blackness as fundamentally ungendered or hypergendered in violent ways. The modern pressure to “cis-pass” is an extension of this: it demands that trans women of color achieve a gendered legibility that was historically constructed against their bodies.
Thus, the “privilege” of cis-passing is not just about individual effort or presentation. It is a structural affordance that is disproportionately available to those whose bodies can more easily conform to a white, cis-normative blueprint.
What does this mean for trans women today? It means that white trans women like Alex Consani fall within the beauty standard due to their proximity to whiteness. Her features are interpreted as “androgynously high-fashion” rather than “other.” For Black trans women, features mark her race—fuller lips, a broader nose, darker skin, kinky hair— routinely read by a racist and transmisogynist gaze as “masculine.” The barrier to being seen as “authentically” feminine is therefore not just transphobia, but transmisogynoir. The trans body is seen as a double betrayal of both gender and racial norms.
Cis-passing privilege is not just about gender presentation. It is a racialized affordance. It functions similarly to white-passing privilege in historical contexts. During the Jim Crow era, the ability to “pass” as white granted access to safety, housing, and employment that were denied to those visibly marked as Black. This created painful fractures within communities. Similarly, the ability to “pass” as cis today grants access to a form of societal “safety” and recognition that is systematically denied to visibly trans people. It creates a hierarchy within the trans community, where the “good,” palatable trans person is the one who does not disturb racial and gender structures.
Part 2: The “Feminine” Ideal
So, who gets to be “feminine” in the mainstream eye? The answer is depressingly consistent: those who best perform femininity rooted in whiteness, wealth, and cis-normativity.
The fashion and beauty industries have positioned themselves as the gold standard against which this ideal is measured. When they decide to include a trans woman, it is almost always a calculated tokenism. The Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show is the perfect example: they selected trans models who could seamlessly fit into their pre-existing “Angel” mold—tall, thin, cis-passing, and racially ambiguous or white. Their transness was acceptable because it was aesthetic, not political. It did not challenge the brand’s core values; it provided a sheen of progressive branding.
This is the token’s bargain: you can have visibility, but only as a symbol of our inclusivity, not as a disruptor of our standards. You must give mug—a beautiful, consumable image. There is an unspoken agreement that media acceptance is “contingent on conformity.” The unspoken requirement is that you reassure the cis world that you are just like them, that your gender is just as orderly, binary, and pretty as theirs.
This bargain is almost exclusively available to white and white-passing trans women. Their success is then weaponized to create a “model minority” myth within transness. It fuels the narrative that if you just try hard enough to assimilate—to be pretty, polite, and passing—you will be safe and successful. It implicitly blames trans women of color, who face the compounded violence of racism and transmisogyny, for their own marginalization. It frames their struggles as a failure to perform acceptable femininity, rather than a systemic failure to protect them.
The 2025 Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show did not retreat from its “era of inclusion,” building on last year’s celebrated decision to feature an openly trans model for the first time. This year, the brand sought to double down on that momentum—quite literally—by adding one more trans woman to the lineup, bringing the grand total to two.
However, the limits of that progress became apparent almost immediately. During a red-carpet interview, celebrity stylist Law Roach—a Black gay man who is no stranger to navigating queerness, marginalization, and media scrutiny himself—engaged in conversation with actress and model Indya Moore, a Black non-binary trans femme, in the night’s most telling moment. His line of questioning edged uncomfortably close to outing Moore’s trans identity, packaged as celebration or insider camaraderie. That dynamic made the moment sting even more: harm coming not from an uninformed outsider, but from someone who, in theory, should understand how dangerous and invasive these boundary crossings can be. It was a reminder that proximity to oppression does not guarantee solidarity—and that some people are willing to leverage another’s vulnerability to position themselves as the “safe” or palatable queer figure in the room.
Moore’s response was a masterclass in self-advocacy. With composed firmness, they redirected the conversation and asserted a clear boundary between personal identity and professional appearance.
What was meant to be a glossy showcase of inclusion instead revealed the fragile, often conditional nature of acceptance for trans women and femmes of color—even within LGBTQ+ circles and even in spaces that claim to be “evolving.
Part 3: The Mugshot Frame
While Indya Moore navigates boundary violations on the red carpet, most trans women of color encounter media not as subjects of style interviews but as subjects of police reports.
The “mugshot” framing is not just biased reporting; it is a tool of systemic dehumanization. It reinforces the criminalization that trans women of color face in life—from “walking while trans” policing policies that target them for simply existing in public, to being misgendered and disrespected by law enforcement when they report violence.
Media studies scholars have written about how media engages in the symbolic annihilation of marginalized groups—either by not representing them or by representing them only in stereotypical roles. For trans women of color, the stereotypical role is the victim-criminal. They are hypervisible in stories of violence, prostitution, and HIV, but rendered invisible in stories about love, family, career success, or everyday life.
This “mugshot” framing is dehumanizing and has real-world consequences:
- It Erases Lived Humanity: It reduces a whole person to the worst moment of their life or to a single aspect of their identity. We don’t learn about their dreams, their humor, their talents. We learn about their victimhood or death.
- It Reinforces Criminality: By consistently pairing trans women of color with crime (either as victims framed as “involved in risky lifestyles” or as perpetrators in sensationalized stories), the media reinforces the false, racist trope that these women are inherently dangerous or disposable.
- It Absolves Systems of Power: Focusing on individual acts of violence (“a man killed a trans woman”) distracts from the systemic culpability: lack of legal protections, housing discrimination, healthcare barriers, and police violence that create the conditions for this violence. The narrative becomes about a “tragic event,” not a genocide.
The “mugshot” is not just an image; it is a tool of social control. It tells the public who is to be feared, who is to be pitied, and who is not to be seen as fully human. It is the direct antithesis to the curated “mug” of the fashion model.
Solidarity Beyond the Hierarchy
The “Mug vs. Mugshot” dichotomy is a trap. It pits trans people against each other and forces them to compete for a sliver of conditional humanity offered by a system that fundamentally dislikes them. Celebrating Alex Consani’s Vogue feature without critiquing the system that produces it is incomplete. Celebrating Victoria’s Secret’s inclusivity without critiquing the near-outing of Indya Moore is shallow.
True solidarity requires us to:
- Name the privilege of cis-passing and its racial dimensions without shame or blame, but with clear-eyed analysis.
- Reject tokenism that celebrates individuals while abandoning the collective. Support media that features trans people of color in all their complexity—not just as victims, but as leaders, artists, lovers, and heroes.
- Shift the lens from individual “passing” to dismantling the systems that make passing a matter of life and death in the first place.
The goal is not for every trans woman to become a “mug” in Vogue. The goal is a world where no trans woman’s primary public image is a mugshot. It is a world where our femininity is not judged by its proximity to whiteness and cisness, but celebrated in its boundless, racialized, and trans forms. We must break the camera that only knows how to shoot these two frames, and build a new one that can finally see us all.
References
Aiken, J., Modi, J. M., & Polk, O. R. (2020). Issued by Way of “The Issue of Blackness”. Transgender Studies Quarterly, 7(3), 427-444.
Bailey, M., & Trudy. (2018). On misogynoir: Citation, erasure, and plagiarism. Feminist Media Studies, 18(4), 762-768.
Ellison, T., Green, K. M., Richardson, M., & Snorton, C. R. (2017). We got issues: Toward a black trans*/studies. Transgender Studies Quarterly, 4(2), 162-169.
Wekker, G. (2016). White innocence: Paradoxes of colonialism and race. Duke University Press.
Snorton, C. R. (2017). Black on both sides: A racial history of trans identity. U of Minnesota Press.