A sample of work from the multi-artist “Gender X” exhibition, back for a second year and currently on display across three venues: YS Pizza Company, Trail Town Brewing and the Emporium. (Photo by Reilly Dixon)
‘Gender X’ returns with greater hope
- Published: June 18, 2026
Last year, when local artist Iden Crockett launched “Gender X,” the art exhibition — which aimed to highlight the work and stories of trans and gender-nonconforming artists — was intended as a sort of alarm bell, as Crockett told the News at the time.
Launched in June — Pride Month — the show went up at YS Pizza Company and Trail Town Brewing amid a panoply of anti-trans legislation in Ohio and executive actions from the Trump administration. With “Gender X,” Crockett wanted to push back against what she described as the attempted erasure of trans and gender-nonconforming people.
This year, after mounting the second iteration of “Gender X,” she told the News the apprehension she felt last year, and named, still lingers.
“The rhetoric has not stopped, the legislative attacks haven’t stopped, and I think the danger is just as real,” Crockett said.
Nevertheless, she said something in her own thinking has shifted since last year; the “Gender X” show is larger this year, with work installed across three venues — YS Pizza Company, Trail Town Brewing and the Emporium — and with more artists. More to the point, last year’s sense of emergency has given way, she said, to a renewed hope.
“I feel less certain that they’re going to be successful in their attacks on us as time goes on,” Crockett said.
Last year, she said, she wondered if even staying in the U.S. was ultimately safe for her, and for other trans people in the country; now, she said, she believes her place is here.
“What I realized was that leaving the country wasn’t going to solve my problems,” she said. “It might save my life, in the short term, but … it’s a worldwide struggle.”
Local resident and artist Iden Crockett stood in protest against anti-trans measures near the courthouse in downtown Dayton last June. (Photo by Jen Hunter)
She added that the relationships she’s built within the trans and wider LGBTQ+ community — including those who might not have the money or flexibility to leave — weighed on her heart, too.
“I wouldn’t be able to leave them behind,” she said. “So it became like, OK, how do we stay and fight here and make our stand here?”
The second iteration of “Gender X” is part of that stand. The first exhibition, Crockett said, was organized quickly — “rough and basic,” as she put it — because she felt it was important to begin pushing back as soon as possible. This year, she wanted to return to the idea, but on a broader scale.
Last year’s show featured work by Crockett and fellow Ohio artists Ray Mathew-Santhosham, Dravyn Rosendahl and Lynn Jiminez. This year, Mathew-Santhosham and Rosendahl return, in addition to Nicki Graeling, Luna Cherry, Lola Betz and Lark Orbe. The exhibition includes digital collage, digital painting, found-object and wire work, mixed media on paper and acrylic painting.
Crockett said her primary requirement for the artists was practical: The submitted work had to be frameable and able to be installed in public-facing businesses where folks would be moving through their typical lives — approachable, both physically and in style and tone. That’s part of the central premise of the show as it was imagined last year, and this year: that your typical villager or visitor, out for a cup of coffee, a beer or a pizza, might encounter art by trans and gender-nonconforming artists and be drawn to engage with it.
And while they’re admiring the work, patrons of the host establishments will, with any luck, also read the short biographies and written responses to questions from Crockett, and get to know the artists as the fully-rounded people they are.
Last year, Crockett said, she received some good feedback from the venues where “Gender X” was installed. The most meaningful responses, though, came from the artists who participated.
“It seemed to make a great deal of difference to them, to have been able to speak and to share their work out,” she said. “For a lot of them, that was the first time that they’d shown any work.”
And though she hopes the show reaches people outside the trans community — people who might not otherwise seek out trans voices or stories — she said she has come to understand another benefit of the exhibition.
“I think that ultimately the real benefit of this is going to be in building community and giving strength to those other trans people and trans artists,” she said. “Building community is great, so if that’s all that comes out of it, then it’s worth the effort.”
She said she classifies community-building as its own brand of activism — maybe not the kind that upends legislation or incites large-scale public action, but the kind that, little by little, can result in cultural change.
“I think reaching people one on one and changing hearts and minds one at a time as you go is the sort of non-glamorous, dirty-in-the-trenches activism that we need more of,” she said. “We need more people to build personal connections, and to sort of risk their hearts and be vulnerable out there.”
Local resident Iden Crockett is the subject of a new documentary, “Iden: A Story of Love,” filmed by local resident and filmmaker — and Crockett’s aunt — Catherine Zimmerman.
And vulnerability often means sharing one’s own words, art and image in public, sometimes without knowing who will see them, or whether they’ll have the effect you hope they will, she said.
“You don’t really know if it makes a difference, and you have to have faith that it does,” Crockett said. “Maybe if 100 people look at your work, one person leaves different. But that’s one person who wasn’t going to be changed if you hadn’t put yourself out there, and that is what we build.”
Crockett said she knows the damage already done won’t resolve on its own, and that trans people can’t afford to “wait for people to wake up one day and care about” them. Full equality and acceptance for trans and gender-nonconforming people likely won’t come quickly — maybe not even in her lifetime.
Nevertheless, she said she doesn’t believe that work like what she hopes to build with “Gender X” is a drop in a bucket — or if it is, it’s one of the many drops that keep on dripping, and one day, the bucket will overflow.
“Things change very gradually — maybe they’ll change by the time I’m long gone,” she said. “But I was part of it, right? And we all have to step up and be part of it, and have that sort of faith, that hope, that this is worth it.”
“Gender X” is on display at YS Pizza Company, Trail Town Brewing and Emporium Wines and Underdog Cafe through June 30.
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