A big reason a lot of trans art does not appeal to large cis audiences is because many of our world-pictures are essentially cynical, jaded, nihilistic, and hopeless. We know trauma stays; healing narratives placate a perpetrator's sense of guilt.

"Healing" narratives are almost never stories of mutual repair or societal transformation. Instead they always locate the source of the trauma in the victim's perception of traumatizing experience. She must put forward the labor to fix herself, herself.

Even when anti-healing narratives are popularized, as with trauma porn, it has voyeurism in mind. Nothing invites viewers into nihilism because we are expected to react to pain, when insidious trauma teaches victims to do the exact opposite.

To be clear I am not a nihilist but I do see the particularities of how this dark pessimism impacts transgender lives, and I think art about us must engage with these particularities in a meaningful sense.