Gender in Transitition, Body Image in Transition
I haven’t written a lot about body image lately. I’ve been writing a lot of informational pieces on body liberation and reflections on my past relationship with body image for my patrons. But I haven’t written anything about my relationship with body image right now. Because my current experience isn’t the empowered, fat-positive, confident message I like to put into the world. Right now, being in, living in, and thinking about my body is perplexing and painful.
Several months ago, my shaved head grew into a fauxhawk and I had a nervous breakdown. Yes, my gender transition really did start with my super sexy fauxhawk.
One night while I checked my reflection in the mirror, I noticed that in profile, I looked like a really hot guy. The thought made me so anxious I wanted to throw up, but it also made me inexplicably happy.
Then, I listened to the “She’s Too Butch!!!” episode of Fatties Talk Back. Fat activists Marquisele Mercedes (she/her), Da’Shaun Harrison (they/them), Caleb Luna (they/them), Bryan Guffey (they/them), and Jordan Underwood (they/he) broke down how fatness impacts gender. They explained how fatness limits the ways people can express their gender because of weight stigma. And I had another nervous breakdown.
I started Googling “what does it mean to be non-binary” and when the search results were insufficient, I went to r/NonBinary. I spent several hours, every day for more than a week, reading about people’s experiences of being non-binary. My body literally shook from anxiety that entire week.
I’d always known that I was a woman because those were the facts I had. I was born with female anatomy, and my female anatomy happened to be extremely loud. So, every month, or sometimes all month, I got the painful, messy reminder that I was, in fact, a woman.
Now before y’all start calling me a TERF, I was completely aware that biology is not the same as gender. But I didn’t really think that applied to my experiences, which sounds pretty stupid, but it’s true. I thought that it was perfectly logical for other people to feel like their genitals didn’t match their gender, but that wasn’t my experience. Even though I never felt like a girl, even when I was young. Even though I was always a “tomboy.” Even though I’d always felt uncomfortable calling myself a woman. Even though I hated every single expectation involved with being an American woman. Even though I completely rejected gender roles. Even though I was way more comfortable being “one of the boys” instead of “one of the girls.” I truly thought that I was just a feminist who knew gender and gender roles were a construct. It never occurred to me that I was not, in fact, a woman.
Until that week I spent on Reddit. And though I don’t typically recommend spending much time on Reddit, the people on r/NonBinary walked me through the daily breakdowns I had during that excruciating week. And they helped me understand the difference between gender, gender expression, and gender presentation. And they affirmed that if I felt non-binary, I was non-binary.
When I finally said it to myself, “I’m non-binary,” so much of my life made sense, as did so much of my hatred for my body. I didn’t just hate my fatness, I hated my femininity. And my fatness accentuated my femininity.
The happiest I’d ever been with my body before eating disorder recovery wasn’t just when I was thin, it was when I was thin enough to pass as androgynous if I wanted to. The picture of myself that I still think is me at peak hotness is a picture of me in jeans, a studded belt, a half-open button down, and a tie, with close cropped, bleach-blond hair. Though I looked a bit more femme than masc, I was peak androgyny.
When I gained weight in recovery, my fatness revealed all my femininity. The breasts that I used to be able to flatten to almost nothingness bulged and protruded. My straight waistline filled out in all the “right” feminine places, creating a “perfect” hourglass figure, even when I was truly fat. I was undeniably “woman” and I hated it. But I didn’t know I hated my womanly body at the time. I just knew I hated my fat.
I went through the agony of eating disorder recovery thinking of myself as a woman. I gained weight on a female body. I was mired in the expectations of having a female body and being a woman as I learned to accept my fat body. And one of the things I internalized during that process was that displaying my fat, female body was revolutionary. Wearing a bikini, wearing shorts, wearing crop tops, wearing leggings, wearing short skirts and dresses, posing nude, and posting the pictures was a big “fuck you” to the society that told me to be small, the society that told me to starve myself, the society that told me fatness made me worthless. And telling everyone to fuck off and accept my big fat body as beautiful made me feel really good.
But that “fuck you, I’m beautiful” narrative was inseperable from femininity. Even as I tried to subvert the beauty standards established in Western culture, I was still framing my body as beautiful, which required femininity and still existed in the schema of “beauty.” This is a common pitfall in body positive and even fat positive spaces. Instead of trying to annihilate the “body hierarchy” as Sonya Renee-Taylor calls it, many plus-sized and fat folks try to make their bodies acceptable by emphasizing their proximity to attractiveness, which often requires the performance of femininity. There’s little focus on masculine bodies, bodies that don’t adhere to beauty standards, and bodies that refuse to perform femininity.
And the “empowered,” “fat-positive,” “confident” photos and videos all over my Instagram were totally rooted in my performance of femininity. Which is wild to me, since I thought of myself as someone who rejected femininity as much as I could without completely rejecting my womanhood. I haven’t worn makeup on a regular basis for several years. I haven’t worn makeup at all in at least three years, probably more. I don’t have a skincare routine, I don’t like fashion, I hate dresses and skirts, even though I forced myself to wear them, I hate jewelry, and beauty products. The only reason I shave my armpits and legs is because I have huge sensory issues with body hair. I firmly believed that I was actively rejecting the performance of femininity.
But I got sucked into the performance of femininity that I thought made me body positive and later fat positive. I thought that flaunting my body, framing it as attractive and sexy, and wearing the clothes I “wasn’t supposed to wear” as a fat person was the same thing as being fat positive. And for some people it is the same thing, and I guess that’s okay. My fat politic is much more than that these days. But for literally years, my “fat activism” reinforced the body hierarchy through my performance of femininity. And when I listened to that episode of Fatties Talk Back, I began to realize that flaunting my femininity as a way to express how comfortable I was in my body was an elaborate performance. It was fake.
As soon as I admitted that to myself and started to explore a more masculine gender expression, my body image got really complicated. These parts of my body that I had learned to love through the lens of femininity — my hourglass figure, my gigantic breasts, my ample butt — felt very wrong through the lens of masculinity. I spent years, slogging through the excruciating work of body neutrality, body acceptance, body positivity, and even radical self-love, and now the body that I’d learned to accept most of the time, and even love some of the time, was all wrong.
But sometimes, it wasn’t all wrong at the same time. There are parts of my body that I still like, parts of me that I don’t ever want to change. But other parts started to feel alien to me, which is incredibly uncomfortable.
This probably sounds like an abrupt change, and it felt that way to me too. But as I reflected on my body and my experience of gender, I began to see all the ways my body had never felt quite right to me. I realized how often I wished that my body was different. Not just smaller or more conventionally attractive, but anatomically different, and how often I fantasized about gender swapping, which apparently cis people don’t really think about? And I began to understand that my constant desire to change my body was about much more than pathological control issues and beauty standards. I wanted, and still want, a completely different body.
To complicate things further, I don’t want a completely different body of the opposite sex. I’m not a trans man. Though I’m more masculine than feminine, I don’t want a male body. But I don’t want all of my female body either. I don’t want a body that cannot be perceived as anything other than a woman. It’s not that I’m super invested in “passing” as a certain gender, but the fact that my body can pretty much only be perceived as “woman,” quite frankly, sucks.
If you’re confused by this point, trust me I am too. Just because I’ve figured out that I’m non-binary doesn’t mean that I totally understand what that means for me. I have a general idea. I know for sure that I’m not a woman or a man, but beyond that, there’s a lot I’m unsure about.
That uncertainty makes my body a really uncomfortable and difficult place to be in right now. Some days, I’m back to standing naked in front of the mirror scrutinizing every inch of my body, imagining in vivid detail what I would change if I had a magic wand… or some anesthetic and a scalpel. Sometimes, I stand there and hate everything I see. Sometimes, I’m okay with what I see. But there’s always that forlorn longing so familiar to those of us with body image issues (so pretty much all of us), that longing for something, or everything, to just be different.
I haven’t resorted to any self destructive behaviors to change my body, which is a huge win. And I haven’t even thought about taking out my discomfort about my body on my body, another huge win.
I’m so grateful that I’m seven years into eating disorder recovery and almost twelve years sober, because if I wasn’t, I don’t think I could say that I hadn’t restricted, self-harmed, drank, or used drugs over this discomfort. But I haven’t, because of all the self-work I’ve done, the same self-work that taught me to reflect on my internal experience, which allowed me to discover who I actually am.
But for right now, I’m back in a place where body image is really f’ing uncomfortable and I’m sitting with that on a daily basis. I know this discomfort will shift. It has to because nothing stays the same forever. Existence is change, as this transition has taught me in a way nothing else could.
