Letter to my cis best friend
I wanted to put this up because perhaps it may help other people understand. The piece has been edited for context and coherence.
hey ♥ I wanted to say I love you very much and thank you so much for being as honest as you were earlier. I know you always try so hard to be and also are as understanding as you possibly can.
I’m not sure about you but I didn’t feel at all like our conversation earlier about how I feel about my body vis-a-vis standards of female beauty was resolved and the reason I’m typing it out is that I want to collect my thoughts. So hopefully you see this tomorrow and you have some time to process.
I obviously have no idea how to help you understand if at all, and I certainly don’t want to force it down your throat and demand your understanding and whatnot, and I want to respect your feelings of discomfort when I bring these things up. Please feel free to just stop reading if you don’t feel comfortable doing so.
So I want to say first and foremost that this dislike of my body or parts of it are indeed very much about standards of female beauty, but at the same time also very much not. How do I explain this- when most cis women say that they dislike their bodies and when I say it the implications are deeply different. Many cis women dislike parts of their bodies because they do not fit into conventional beauty standards, whatever the convention may be, because they are not within the small bracket of people who do. I dislike parts of my body because I do not fit within the very large bracket of women whose bodies are more similar to each other than they are to mine. I think I failed to articulate things as clearly as I wanted earlier- it’s not that I took this long to get to where you were, it’s more like I’ve taken this long to still only be at a point where I’m just trying to look like the majority of women, a point even prior to being able to consider female standards of beauty. I’m very much more concerned with just standards of normalcy. We can say these are toxic, and they are, but I’m very fully aware how far my body diverges from even the majority of women I see around me. Each individual aspect of my body that diverges from that is generally fine, because hey, all women are different, but everything stacks as well. When I overlay all the parts of my body that remain so non-normative it’s so hard to feel as though I can be considered a woman, let alone a beautiful one. It’s not a beauty standard that calls me into question, it’s one that a minority of cis women even have to think about: whether they have the right to be called women. And theoretically I know that I do, theoretically of course I understand women are not just a set of aggregated physical characteristics. But of course it feels terrible when all my life the message has been that I cannot be a woman and it appears that the physical reality around me continues to affirm that statement. It makes me hate my body in a way that sees it as grotesque, monstrous, and invalid. It doesn’t make me want to be beautiful, it makes me want to be normal. And of course you can tell me that I’m normal and I’m beautiful etc., but that’s really not the truth, in a wider sense of it. If I’m conventionally attractive, I am so in a way that ignores the non-normality that the rest of my body screams, because often normality precedes attractiveness. And you can tell me that it’s fine to not be normal, but when I am not normal in a way that continues to pay dividends in discrimination and self-loathing I’d instantly tell you that I’d very much rather be normal because then I don’t have to deal with all this.
This, I think, is the crux of the dysphoria I feel regarding my body: that my body continues to reaffirm my deepest insecurities and most painful experiences, that my body and the way it is has formed the basis of so many negative responses to my identity, that it continues to call into question my validity, that it continues, despite time, to make me so vulnerable, that it is a constant reminder of my time living a life that was not mine and of the feeling that I don’t quite belong, that it exiles me to some extent, even if only psychologically, from a group I most identify with, that it is something I have always seen as necessarily wrong because the identity I experience in my head is right, that it continues to get in the way, and that it continues to be an emblem of not being able to grow up without fighting every step of the way just to be within sight of the starting line.
When this is tied so deeply to everything else, I cannot decide that I will not let it affect me since it is something I cannot change, because to do that is to attempt to ignore everything that comes with it, and I have neither the fortitude nor the grit to fight all of that at the same time. I honestly don’t care for beauty standards as much as I have perhaps seemed to – a lot of me wanting to be slimmer has simply stemmed from my desire to be less physically bulky overall in terms of bone structure, but since I cannot do that I try to diminish the amount of mass I carry to produce that effect. I just want to be normal, to be more similar in body composition to other girls my height than to guys. Is that too much to ask for? I’m not asking to be pretty, beautiful, whatever. Just…normal. Boring. Nondescript. Plain. And it feels like I am so far from even that.
I’m so sorry for ranting on so long. If you read through everything thank you so much I really really appreciate that ♥ and I do hope that more clearly explains where this comes from.
> sorry just an addendum: I just wanted to say that this is an incredibly, incredibly painful thing to go through, and I normally try not to think about it too much. The occurrences of me talking about it are already after me trying not to think about it too much because if I did, I would literally be breaking down every single day. To be excruciatingly honest with you, it feels as though I am ripping my heart and soul out and serving it up on a platter in the hopes that you may begin to grasp this. I really do hope it helps.
I implore people to understand, to empathise, to be receptive.
