“A lot of trans people who are drag performers prior to transitioning could probably agree that drag was a kind of outlet,” she told me. It was an intuitive creative project for Goode, who’s been performing womanhood onstage since she was 15. Gazing at the photos, I thought of Simone de Beauvoir’s famous assertion: here was the woman not born, but becoming. It is alien to watch a woman’s body being constructed. In another, a surgical technician kneels, holding a pair of silicone breasts up to her chest the gesture of a supplicant, worshiping a false God.

Yet beneath the promise of fecundity runs an undercurrent of artifice. In one, facing a wall of mirrors, she could be a Degas ballerina, the lines on her back forming the corset of a tutu. Lines of black ink scrawl across Goode’s body, marking where it will meet the surgeon’s knife, but as they are drawn over the fat deposits that will go to her breasts, they also denote the soft, rounded contours of a female torso.

Shot in dramatic blue light by Max Bronner, with creative direction by Grant Vanderbilt-“I wanted them to be dark and moody,” Goode said-they manage to be intimate and icy in equal measure. The photos, which Goode graciously gifted to WUSSY for this issue, are a thrilling aestheticization of gender as performance (the video footage will be released on “Avalon TV,” a lifestyle series from Goode’s creative family, the House of Avalon, coming out this month on Wow Presents+). “As much fun as we were having, like, it’s a full surgery.” “They were glued to the wall in the back of the room,” she clarified with a laugh.

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