Becoming is a 2D frame-by-frame mixed media animation that combines analog watercolour paintings and digital animation. It explores the way trans people come to be in our bodies more fully – how we become ourselves – using my own experiences and desires as a guide. It shows long-term masculinizing change over a short timeframe, aided by a fae, whimsical sort of magic. It destabilizes accepted narratives around transition: the sterile medicalization and pathologization of difference, the trans body as wounded, suffering, wrong. Instead, the body is a site of joy, of play, of change. Rendered in sketchy lines that reveal guidelines and shapes, the character themselves is in progress. They are developing, Becoming. And they are doing so with joy and love. I use in-jokes (top surgery is called yeeting (sic) the teats) and wordplay (testosterone is referred to as “T”, pronounced tea) to add to the playful tone of the piece, and found that actualizing these things lent themselves to the magic I wanted to make.

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DIRECTOR

MCKENNA PIPHER is a Nonbinary, Trans and Queer digital artist and animator with an interest in embodiment, joy and play. They are a graduate of OCAD University and live and work in Toronto, Ontario.