iO Tillett Wright: Living & Learning His Self-Evident Truth

We reunite with author and activist, iO Tillett Wright, who we first interviewed about four years ago for our What’s Underneath Project video series. In that interview, he told us about his radical self-awareness as a very young child, asking his parents if he could live as a boy, despite the fact that he was born into a female body. Even after a childhood of gender-bending, for the majority of his adult life, iO identified as a queer woman, and it wasn’t until 3 years ago that iO officially came out as trans, a shift that turned his life and his relationships upside down. In “Self-Evident Truths,” iO’s photo project of the past eight years, he photographs anyone who does not identify as 100% straight or 100% cisgender across all 50 states of America. “When I have 10,000 people I’m going to the National Mall to do an installation in front of the Washington Monument, and just ask people to confront the humanity of the community that, once again and throughout all of history, people have been trying to erase.” iO reminds us that we are all, each and every one of us, our own very special and unique self-evident truth. “If you asked an identical twin what makes up the essence of who somebody is, they're not going to tell you it's the body you come in. You know what I mean? It's who you are on the inside. It's your psyche. It's your mind. So if my brain is a male brain, that's probably 85-90% of who I am but what you see is the skin-suit that I come in. So if you call me ‘she’ you are erasing the only shot I've got at screaming to the world who I really am. You are erasing that 85-90% majority of who I actually am and reducing me to the thing that matters the least, which is the skin-suit that I come in.”