You're a teenage girl, and you're starting to wonder some things about yourself. Your body is changing, you're learning more about feminist politics and you think you might be gay, or something like it.

At 14, you write this: ''The thing to top my birthday wishlist is to be a guy and have a guy friend who would be as gay as I would be. This will never appear on lists that other people leave, obviously.''

Challenging norms: Tyza Stewart grapples with issues of gender identity in her work. Credit:Glenn Hunt

Those words come from the notebook of Brisbane artist Tyza Stewart. Now 22, Stewart is an emerging artist whose work deals with issues of transgender and identity. Stewart doesn't buy into the gendered pronouns of he or she, instead wishing that gender didn't matter at all.

''I guess I wasn't really aware of anything like transgender issues, I was more aware of gay and lesbian, so I kind of gravitated a little bit towards that,'' Stewart says of adolescence.