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So Long, Body Positivity.
It was a good effort, but the tide was too strong.
Nothing ticks me off more than stick-thin, newly-hatched trans girls complaining about being flat-chested. You want breasts? Then you need to put on weight. If there’s no weight to redistribute, your body shape won’t change. But, ermagawd, they say, being fat is gross! Well to hell with you, then. Enjoy looking like a twig, you fatphobic ass.
It behoves me to point out that some people’s natural state could best be described as twig-like, and I support them. Be who you are and take pride in yourself, just don’t covet aspects of another body-type whilst — in the same breath — dismissing that type as grotesque. Are you a happy twig? Good. Be a happy twig, with 100% of my blessing and love. Good on you.
For a little while there, it felt like we were challenging that “fat is gross” mentality. It wasn’t that long ago it felt like we had some media role models, influencers and models blazing a trail for all bodies to be acceptable. After all, you only get one body, and it’s doing its best, so you should be proud of it. You get this life, and no other, so go live it how you feel best.
We had a plus-size model on the cover of Vogue. We had a variety of body sizes in Dove’s ad campaigns. We had plenty of celebs who were out doing their proud thing — Lizzo, Adele, Rebel Wilson.
Then semaglutide came, sold under the brand-names Wegovy and Ozempic. In return for a few coins, we could pay to be thin. Cue any number of salacious tabloid stories about previously big celebrities slimming-down; pro-ozempic articles turning up everywhere breathlessly reporting their positive effects and minimising their downsides; weight-loss jabs being suddenly the go-to cure for a bunch of conditions under the NHS.
The story is always the same: I’m not vain, I just worry about my/your health.
The effect is quite the opposite: we don’t need to pretend being fat is okay anymore, because now you can just pay for an injection and be pretty and thin! Consequences schmonsequences.
Let me remind you, best beloved, that we hand-wring over puberty blockers, which have been in use for thirty years for trans youth, whilst actively celebrate semaglutide which only started trials in 2021. Why is that? Because being fat is bad, so we should fight it, but being cisgender is good so we should encourage it.
Now, there are two very real aspects of this that I’m sure you’re just busting to remind me of. Firstly, that being fat is unhealthy and, secondly, that some people genuinely are miserable because they are fat. Shouldn’t I, as a trans woman, therefore support their changing their bodies to find happiness?
Let’s tackle the health aspect first. Yeah, being fat is correlated with loads of health risks. I think that the strong focus on those health risks stems from a place of cultural disapproval of being fat — or, put another way, thinking fat people are ugly comes first then the health justification follows. My evidence for that statement is that you and I, best beloved, are literally full of micro-plastics. We breath pollution from cars. Our fish is contaminated. Our meat is cued to be pumped with hormones and preservatives, just like in North America. Our vegetables are sprayed with “forever” pesticides. Not to reduce this to whataboutery, but yes: being fat is unhealthy, and so are all those other things! Why does being big get so much media attention whilst those other things largely are shrugged-off?
Because it is culturally acceptable to dispute being fat — if you’re heavy, you must be stupid, lazy, greedy or ill. Culture has very little to say about micro-plastics and pesticides, because they are invisible supply-chain elements.
Additionally, those health-harmers are all products of Capitalism. Cars make fumes. Manufacturing makes micro-plastics. Industrial farming uses hormones. You want to interfere with those things? You’re going to have an uphill battle. Besides, rejecting fat people also makes money because we can sell them diets, drugs, foods, pills, makeup and clothes to try to minimise the shame we make them feel. Not only that, we can upsell to thin-people to help them prevent getting fat — because you don’t want to die, do you?
That last sentence needs some extra explanation, and I’m afraid it’s a bit of a rabbit-hole. We have divorced death from our real-world experiences. It is now something that happens over there — in a hospital or a nursing home — and is handled over there at the morgue and the funeral parlour — and the cycle ends over there at the church or crematorium. Death is something that drops-in suddenly, rather than an essential seam in the fabric of existence. It’s a reality for everyone, except Optimus Prime and Jesus. Furthermore, because we’ve sanitised it into an abstract concept, we can easily marry it to the just-world fallacy and assume anyone who dies must have deserved it.
I want to unpack that even further.
There’s an episode of Frasier where the titular radio celebrity learns of a contemporary’s death, and spends the whole story trying to insert himself into the family’s shivah — desperate to probe the grieving relatives for details on what killed him. Was he fat? Did he eat “bad” foods? Didn’t he exercise? In the end, Frasier has to accept that the guy did everything “right” and still died. His number was just up, as it will be for me and you one day.
I had a colleague — a nice, affable fellow — who more-or-less dropped-dead at his desk two years ago. He was minding his own business, working at his PC, when he just collapsed. The first-aiders rushed to him. An ambulance collected him. Casualty processed him. The intensive-care unit attended to him. He was gone within 24 hours. The cause was a massive series of blood clots that would never have been found without an intentional search. They had no obvious cause, and they killed him. He jogged, eat healthily and was only in his 50s. It was just one of those things.
I have a contemporary in the performing arts — they are in their mid-twenties. I met them at an online workshop, just after the pandemic started, and we went on to chat and support one another on social media. They discovered they had cancer just a few weeks after we met — something in their chest that required immediate surgery and chemo. They survived and, touch wood, have not yet had a reoccurence. It’s the cruelty of cancer that you’re never really cured of it… you just push it back enough to not be a problem, but there’s no saying how long it will stay ‘not a problem’. That’s where survival rates come in: 70% survival rate after 5 years means ⅓ of people died from it just 60 months later. Each cancer is different, and you can probe the relative survival rates and how they drop with time. 50% survival rate at 7 years. 30% survival rate at 10 years. So on and on it goes. I sincerely hope that my contemporary goes the rest of their life without a recurrence, but they will live in its shadow forever. So do we all.
It isn’t just death that we must be afraid of, either.
My grandfather made it to 79. Both he and my grandmother grew up in a world where horses and carts were far more common than cars. They were old kids during the Second World War. They’re both dead now, a connection to a very different world forever lost. He started showing signs of Alzheimer’s disease about five years before he died — little things, like forgetfulness and irritability. The forgetfulness turned into a severe handicap, with him forgetting when he’d switched the hob or the kettle on. Then came incontinence and, eventually, a nursing home. My grandmother did her best, but she had to admit defeat in the end. We all do. So, he was taken away — clutching a book he’d started months before, and from which he’d been reading the same chapter over and over again. The whole paperback was reduced to a tattered cover with most of its pages missing. He died in hospital, unaware of anyone or anything, with the sole exception of my uncle. The youngest and best-natured, both my grandparents always had a soft spot for him and, I believe, my grandfather recognised him right up to the last moment.
My husband’s aunt was a vital woman. A Catholic who actually lived up to the tenants of Christianity: humble, generous, non-judgemental, patient and caring — with a frankly wicked sense of humour. Her decline started slowly: motor-neurone disease. It affected her speech first, then her mobility. She was given a text-to-speech machine, but she hated it — using it only once for the amusement of saying rude words — and instead kept a notebook and pen. We both recognised the moment when it really was all over for her: it was when the disease reached the point that she could no longer write. That broke her. It breaks us all, in the end. It was all she had left, and you could see the fire in her eyes — the vitality, the effervescence — was extinguished. She died shortly after.
There’s a scene in Star Trek Generations (1996) where Captain Picard (Patrick Stewart) comes to terms with his own aging and mortality. Whereas the film’s villain saw death as a predator to be cheated, Picard came to a different perspective. He said “death is a companion, that goes with us on the journey, and reminds us to treasure every moment because they will never come again”.
My point, with these anecdotes and film scenes, is not to be blasé about death, nor to promote nihilism, nor to make you sad, best beloved. My point is the same as Picard’s: death is with us, always, and the notion that we can somehow cheat it by eating right, exercising right and living right is a fiction. If you enjoy going to the gym then do it, but don’t kid yourself you’ll evade death, or even the degenerative illnesses associated with old-age. You can’t.
Okay, that was a long way around, but it ends my answer to the first point around fatness and health. Yes, being fat is unhealthy, yet it gets far more attention than other (possibly much more harmful) elements because the unhealthiness is secondary to our cultural disregard for fat people. It is also played off of an elegant fiction around eternal life and vigour — just eat omega 3 oil, fibrous husks and soylent green and you’ll never get sick or die! As a bonus, it allows us to shift liability for illness.
The second aspect, that some people are legitimately made miserable by their body, I address like this. Whether it’s their weight; aspects of their features or whatever, I certainly do not dismiss the rights of anyone to change their body how they wish to be happy. All I ask for is honesty and consistency. If semaglutide is acceptable, with only a cursory check at the pharmacy, then so are hormones for being trans. So are breast implants/reductions. If that’s not acceptable, then apply the gatekeeping consistently: are you sure your unhappiness is your weight? There’s nothing else? It’s not how society treats you? Are you sure you want to alter your body chemistry with injections? Should you not see a psychiatrist before using drugs?
The lack of consistency betrays the underlying attitudes: cherry-picking based on vibes emits the aroma of fostering a nation of thin, cis people who will have to blame their own choices if they get sick. Just be consistent. It’s either down to what people say they want, or it isn’t. People either have responsibility — and therefore control — over their own bodies, or they don’t.
I also mentioned honesty. There is serious double-think around Western cultural attitudes to body types and sizes. At the start, I mentioned razor-thin trans girls wishing for large breasts and butts. Thick thighs are a common goal for exercise. Plenty of people like fat girls and boys. A lot of celebs got at least some of their fanbase by appealing to their pride in their larger bodies.
Yet, the first chance they got, Rebel, Lizzo and Adele slimmed-down. My family have made comments implying that an illness affecting my in-law, an avid runner, should only affect people like me. Eating is increasingly seen as a balancing act of chemistry: just enough of this, not too much of that, a dose of this and a pinch of another. Salt is bad. Except when it’s good. Sugar is good except when it’s bad. Fats are good/bad/good/bad.
What’s lacking here is simple honesty: if someone wants to change their body, then fine. Do that. But don’t play along with body-positivity whilst it suits your purposes and then ditch it when being thin becomes an option for you. Stop talking about health when it is very clearly about looks, or did I miss the nutritional plan that gives you big breasts, thicc thighs and a large butt?
I’ve said a lot, so I should summarise.
Capitalism. An inability to face mortality. An “it can’t happen to me because I paid my dues” attitude to illness. Exalting healthiness, whilst ignoring the myriad ways modern human life poisons us. Seeing exercise as a virtue to earn something. Coveting aspects of larger bodies. Playing with body-positivity to win popularity, before deciding being thin was better. Pretending fatphobia is all about health, ignoring the cultural fetishisation of thinness.
And now, now being thin can be yours with just a purchase of an injection. You’ll need to take it for the rest of your life. God knows what the side effects are. I know, from experience, it makes some people permanently queasy — so you’ll never enjoy another meal again. But that’s fine, forget that food and meals are an important social concept and just focus on ingredients as though it’s a chemistry lesson.
I sincerely hate that we came so close to accepting people like me, then turned away from it. I hate seeing so many people, so often, fall into this trap of thinking “if only I weighed a bit less then I would be happy”. People I know, who were heavier and nominally proud of their bodies, are now parading their new thin figures, as though they’re safe from advertisers... like it will stop them getting sick, or dying. I think they’re traitors, because they lied.
Life is for living and happiness comes from inside: accepting, and being accepted. What we’re learning is the wrong damned lesson: as a society, we’ve decided an injection is better. We’ve decided being thin is better. No acceptance, just a problem to be solved.
Let me illustrate:
Today I filled in an admission form to be tested for sleep apnea. I want to know if it’s something I need to manage. Four separate questions on the form asked me for my weight. Three asked my height. One my BMI. Two my neck circumference. I just want to know if sleep apnea is something I should be aware of, whether or not I am big was not a question I needed answering. I know I am. What I will get from this form is the joy of the same conversation with the sleep centre staff as I’ve had with doctors, over and over again, year after year.
Yes, I know I’m fat, I’ll say. Yes, I’ve tried dieting, I’ll tell them. No, it plateaued quickly. Yes, I was exercising: walking 5 miles a day. Yes, I counted calories. No, it made me miserable because food is something I enjoy and this took it away from me — not great when I already suffer from severe depression. No, I don’t have any other health problems. Yes, I tried semaglutide. No, it was expensive, made me constantly nauseous and supply-issues forced me to start the plan over again. Yes, I know what stomach-stapling is. No, I am not interested: that is a serious, non-trivial surgery and I don’t believe my weight and its risks to my health warrant that. Oh… there’s nothing else you can suggest? Good. Maybe now we can talk about the thing I came to you for, which amazingly is nothing to do with my weight?
I hate that we came this close, then turned away. Rest in peace, body positivity. You tried.
