![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
Big Mood Little Mood: My Shifting Self
My Shifting Self
APRIL 14, 20229:34 AM
Slate podcast transcripts are created by Snackable using machine-learning software and have not been reviewed prior to publication.
LISTEN TO THIS EPISODE
Danny: This Ad free podcast is part of your slate plus membership. Lucky you. Hello and welcome back to you big made little mood. I am your host Daniel M Lavery. And with me in the studio this week is June Thomas, the co-host of Working Slate’s podcast about the creative process. And this is June’s last day at Slate, and June is also working on a book about lesbian spaces that I am very much looking forward to hearing about. June, welcome to the show.
June: Thank you so much, Danny, for having me. I really appreciate it.
D: Thank you so much for for being here, especially again on your last day when you have lots to do. And I already feel excited about giving advice together because we just finished having a conversation about browser windows. I usually minimize or get rid of mine. I think it’s just like a useful insight into our ways of working, which is, you know, if you wouldn’t mind sharing with the people what your feelings about having multiple tabs open are.
J: Yeah, it’s my only non sin. I really I’m not prone to window or tab multiplication. I’m a mess in many ways, but not in that particular one.
D: I admire that and I think the one thing that sets me apart from the sort of classic to many browsers, the open problem is I’ll get about ten or 11 in a row and then I think that’s too many. I minimize the whole window and I start a new window and I get more browsers going. So I forget--I’m also calling them browsers like as each individual tab where it’s own browser, which is not true. But that way I get the illusion of sort of like, Oh, I’m working clean, I’m just working with seven right now. But actually there’s 40 underneath and they’re smoking.
J: I believe that’s called out of sight, out of mind, and I applaud it. It’s a great way of stuffing down the feelings and stuffing down the excessive tabs.
D: Man. You know, this is, this is what is unfortunate. However, I don’t know if it’s the way that I’m wired or what, but I can walk out of a room and forget things, you know, easily. But I can’t stuff down feelings as easily. So I often find, like, I wish that I could forget what I was feeling as easily as I could forget keys, wallets, people’s names, my own deadlines. Like, why doesn’t this translate?
J: I think that’s probably very good for you as a person. But yeah, that is one of the eternal questions I think.
D: Always remember a grudge.
D: Well, hopefully there will be something especially like invigorating or freeing about being here on your last day at Slate so that that will creep into our advice.
I’m really excited about this first letter, mostly, I think, because I feel like I have finally started getting updates at the rate at which I’ve always wanted them. Like I just had asked for them so many times over the last few months that people finally started writing in and I love it. So this is actually a letter from someone who wrote in back when I was doing this column as part of the Dear Prudence sort of aegis. And they have a sort of new spin on an old question. So it’s it’s part update, but also a new question. So the subject here is, "rocking the boat":
Three years ago, I wrote to you as a scared fat girl, nervous about the prospects of my romantic and sexual future. Your advice helped pull me out of the self-hatred I felt like I was drowning in. I spent the following years dragging myself--kicking and screaming--towards loving my body and expecting the same from others. I’m writing to you again with a similar problem, but a new twist. I recently came out as genderfluid. I’ve realized that my waxing and waning fondness for femininity has a lot to do with not feeling like a woman some of the time.
Now that I’ve named that, I can’t put the cat back in the bag. I’ve accepted my body and my fatness, but it always feels like a woman’s body. I’m on the more masculine side, but I sometimes feel like crawling out of my skin because dress doesn’t always affect whether I’m seen as a woman. I can’t get a flat chest when I bind despite trying numerous options, and an ineffective bind makes me feel worse than not binding in the first place. And my hips are very wide. I cut off most of my hair, which helped immensely, and I buy more clothes that feel right, but there are days when dressing like a man still feels like a lie. My gorgeous body is now coming back to bite me in a new way. I’m struggling to find fat transmascs to look up to or ways to make my body feel comfortable for those times when I’m just not a woman.
I hesitate to think about other interventions like top surgery or the possibility of HRT, because when I do feel like a woman, I love my body and it does feel like home. I’ve worked hard to feel this way and changing that feels like it could be a betrayal to the work that I’ve been doing. A lot of the stories that I see are of binary or non fluid trans folks making their bodies feel like home, and I’m not sure how to do that when my sense of myself is shifting and changing constantly. How can I find footing inside myself?
I love that, like, I loved that last little image. The idea of trying to find footing within your own body was such a lovely image.
J: I agree then. And I found that really the key to the letter in a way, because I’m in sympathy with this letter writer. I want to compliment you because clearly your advice three years ago was of use to them and really help them kind of find some footing. And, you know, they do seem to be discovering more things about themselves, which is really only possible when you are open to listening to your body and to yourself and to your feelings. And I do think that the key to finding more kind of solid ground with what the letter writer is going through right now is around finding some kind of anchor. You know, where in yourself, inside yourself, you kind of find the support for your fluidity. It’s been recognized, but it hasn’t yet kind of found equilibrium. And I can sympathize enormously because I imagine that feeling of, you know, I’m kind of picturing the letter writers emotions as it’s kind of being on a on a boat that that’s like in rough seas. And, you know, it’s, it is hard to find your footing and hard to, you know, to settle. But I think I’m going to say something quite banal, perhaps. But I think that, you know, rough seas do, you know, they calm. And I think that just trying to stay present, trying to listen to themselves, trying to figure out, you know, the different--how they--at the moment, it sounds like they’re kind of feeling different things on different days and just kind of having some patience with themselves, giving themselves some grace to just kind of understand their feelings. Does that seem right to you or is that a kind of an outsider’s view there?
D: No, hugely. I mean, there’s so much about this that is specific to like gender fluidity within non-binary and trans sort of contexts. And there’s also elements of this that have to do with more universal aspects of aging, contending with fatphobia, especially like in the context of aging. Like I think people will sometimes talk or think about the idea of achieving peacefulness with one’s body or a sense of neutrality or even affirmation and affection. And then, you know, a couple of years go by and you see your body start to change. It’s like, no, no, no. My, my contract was with the last body. I don’t know this guy, who’s this? Like. Yeah, somebody just showed up!
And so there’s ways in which I think this can be thought of from a number of different angles. I think that’s really, really useful and meaningful and lovely and you know, letter writer, it was just really meaningful to me and moving to get to read this letter. And I especially found the sort of language of dragging myself and kicking and screaming in that first letter. It felt cheeky. It didn’t, I didn’t read that and feel worried, like, are you being too hard on yourself? Like it felt sweet and sort of whimsical. So I can appreciate that kind of language of like, this is difficult work and a large part of me resists it because there’s a part of me that’s very, very attached to loathing my own size or fatness because either it makes me feel safe or I feel like it’s preventative because someone else will do it if I don’t. Or I feel like that’s what I owe the world. So I can really, really understand and imagine that the work, like just the actual effort that that has taken.
And yeah, you know, I think certainly when it comes to, you know, more specific resources, unfortunately, I mentioned in my last recording, I’ve just gotten over COVID and I’m in an apartment in the U.K. where there’s just the thinnest hum of of Internet access. So I have no ability to sort of do some of the lighter background research I might have liked. So letter writer, I will just say I would really encourage you to seek out a lot of fat transmasculine people and a lot of fat genderfluid and nonbinary people. I think often a good place to start--because it’s not exactly like, Oh, this is an exhaustively well-researched area with tons of prominent, you know, figures in the movement--you know, Google, go on your favorite social media sites and you know, go for a couple of search terms, whether that be like "fat trans masc", "fat gender fluid", you know, add or subtract terms to that as you like. Try a multiple rounds where you’re putting in a lot of different synonyms. Just see what you get, look at it, engage with it, see what speaks to you, see what doesn’t. But just set aside a little time to think, you know, I want to make sure that I have a few names at the top of my head or a few maybe, you know, articles or books I can read or people I can maybe even, like potentially be in community with. Sometimes if you live in a city where there’s a large enough LGBT center, there’s often like really, really robust support groups. Like they get incredibly atomized sometimes where it’s just like, Oh, I didn’t even know someone with these eight intersecting identities that there was a support group for that. But you may very well find that there’s like recovery groups or support groups for people either who are like struggling to like live in an ongoing way with like body acceptance or contend with fatphobia or specifically for like fat trans people. That may be possible.
J: Yeah, I agree that that finding some some community finding someone to talk to, more than one person preferably. And obviously, you know, I’m not going to act like it’s 1997. And, you know, we have to give warnings about, you know, don’t trust people online. But obviously, this is an area where it is difficult to trust that the person that you are, you know, remotely speaking with or communicating with is who they say they are. But, you know, doing what one can do to to feel that, you know, you’re in a trusted circle. I think finding someone to talk to, multiple people, preferably, would be so useful. You know, in many ways, again, I, you know, I’m a cis lesbian woman, but I kind of identify as a cross-dresser. And, you know, I always wear men’s clothing. I always have. I find that, you know, that’s those are the looks that I am attracted to that are not not attracted to us in that I fancy, but that I want to wear that I want to look like that. I want to look like a kind of a sharp--but this this let me finish the rest of this sentence--I want to look like a sharp, thin guy. And I am not, and don’t have any kind of desire to be a thin guy. But, you know, there are many of us who who want to look a certain way, like would like to look a certain way and just can’t. Like I have hips out the wazoo. I, you know, I love those suits. They just don’t fit me. They don’t look right. And so, like, there are a lot of people who we’re not looking like we wish we could, but that doesn’t mean that we need to be unhappy that, you know, we can’t find some kind of kernel of of happiness or kernel of satisfaction or definitely not hate the way we look or hate the way our bodies are. So I, you know, the letter writer's situation is very specific and I love that specificity. But she’s definitely not alone. There are many of us who are facing similar sort of issues who are not gender fluid and are not kind of struggling with those specific feelings that she is working through. But, you know that there is support out there. It’s just I admit it’s maybe not as easy to find as just going to the end of the street and yelling.
D: Yeah, no. And I think as you were kind of talking about the various ways in which yours and the letter writers interests might in some ways overlap. I was thinking, yeah, there’s between the three of us, there’s a Venn diagram. And there’s, you know, a fairly substantial middle despite being three different people with three different sort of like identity terms or ideas of ourselves. And so I think that’s kind of lovely to both acknowledge like, well, there’s some shared areas in the middle and there are some distinct areas that each of us hold in our own. And so trying to think about it, I want to try to approach things that may be helpful to the letter writer and that I hope might be useful as thought exercises or as guidance for finding additional support in their own community.
J: Yeah.
D: I think, you know, especially when you were saying earlier, like I love that distinction between the types of clothes and look that I’m going for evoke an idea of a thin and sharp guy. Hang on a second. It’s not that I want to be a thin man, but there’s something about maybe some of the elements of what you’re looking for in fashion that have to do with a streamlined look, a well-tailored look, a thing where lines blend into one another nicely and, you know, through through no fault of any of our own, the fashion industry usually only puts out those garments in a on a thin person’s body.
J: Mhm.
D: Those things are not actually exclusive to thinness, but most, you know, companies, designers, tailors, etc., don’t spend the additional time, energy, expertise and money on creating those looks for other types of body. So I think that was such a useful moment of thinking through letter writer. You’ve kind of talked about how there’s ways in which some of what you’re experiencing is helped by or addressed by interventions like dress and hairstyle, and there’s ways in which it isn’t. And I think it can be really useful whenever you’re thinking about especially a project like I’d like to replace a big part of my wardrobe thinking about what are some of the looks or styles or silhouettes that appeal to me the most that I might think of as, No, that is only something that goes with thinness, but with, you know, additional research I might be able to find, you know, somebody has actually thought for more than 30 seconds, "What if someone fat wanted to wear clothes?" and has created something. And again, that doesn’t mean all those clothes will be immediately available or affordable, but is, I think, worth doing that, that background research?
I did want to speak specifically to the subject of binding just because I do have some expertise in that area. And letter writer, it sounds like you’ve already kind of landed on a relationship to binding, which is just mostly it’s not for you. That makes a lot of sense to me. I don’t have any investment in suggesting that you change that. I just wanted to mention because you say you can’t get a flat chest when you bind. And I do think one thing that I think is just helpful to say out loud: very few people bind so that they have a flat chest. That’s very, very difficult. That requires relatively little breast tissue in order to to get a fully flat chest. And so I think, especially if you’re trying it sort of on your own for the first time and maybe don’t have a lot of friends who have also bound, it can feel like, well, obviously the goal is like perfect flatness. And if I didn’t get that, then I have done something wrong or it won’t work for me. And again, you may feel like you’ve also said that like ineffective binding feels worse than not doing it at all. So you might hear this and say, great, helpful information, still don’t want to do it. That’s totally understandable. I just sometimes it can be helpful to get a better sense of like, what’s the norm, right? Like, where do I fall within most people who bind? Most people who bind see, you know, a more streamlined silhouette. They see a reduction in volume. Obviously, the shape of the chest looks different. It doesn’t look like a bosom in the same way that it might without that kind of intervention. But I would go so far as to say most people who bind do not achieve total flatness. And so, again, you might still decide, I don’t want to do it anyways. And that would be perfectly reasonable. But just so if it’s at all helpful to know that that’s not actually a a horizon that most binders approach, you know. Yeah, the best I usually got was like something that I have sometimes affectionately referred to as the uniboob. And it was, you know, it was flat inasmuch as it didn’t have like an obvious roundness. And I could put a flat shirt over it and it would button up more easily. But it was not flat in the sense that, you know, if you if you would put me next to a version of me after top surgery, those two shirts would look the same.
Anyway, it’s kind of a long, rambling way to address a line that doesn’t actually bring up a lot. I just think, you know, it’s so hard already trying to change your appearance when you already struggle with, you know, internalized fatphobia or fear or anxiety. And so then especially if you’re doing something new and you worry, oh, I’m doing it wrong, that can feel just like I’m alone and I’m failing. And those two things are two terrible tastes that go badly together. And sometimes that could just help to hear somebody else say, You’re not alone in that.
J: Hmm. Well said.
D: You know, I feel kind of grateful here that we have two different people with sort of distinct, but also non-fl--like you and I are both, we have different identities, two letter writer and to each other, but they both don’t involve the word fluid. So we can maybe try to speak to that elements again, like not thinking we’re going to be able to offer a perfect solution. But do you have any thoughts about how you might want to advise someone who says, I’m trying to think about my life in the context of possible transition and hormonal interventions, but it’s really important to me to acknowledge I don’t always feel this consistently. So what’s on the table, what’s not on the table for me, given that.
J: You know, I really appreciate that the the letter writer is really, you know, thinking through this thinking about potential interventions, potential solutions to their problems. But it also seems to me that maybe they are not quite ready yet to do anything. And I would just say with with the greatest of respect for everyone’s choices, that maybe, maybe the time is not yet right. That does not mean that there won’t be some interventions. But I don’t that’s the kind of the feeling that I’m getting. Yeah.
D: I mean, I would also share your sense of if somebody says, I really hesitate to even think about top surgery or starting HRT, you know, you’re simply acknowledging and affirming what is frankly already the letter writers decision to say that’s not on the table right now. So, you know, just just to let you off the hook, I do not feel like you are attempting to gatekeep somebody or just say, why don’t we always err on the side of not transitioning so you can don’t worry.
And yeah, you know, I think letter writer. Absolutely there is a real challenge before you in terms of how do I make decisions of, you know, short term, medium term and long term consequences when I know that I have sometimes quite different, not necessarily contradictory, but maybe sometimes mutually exclusive feelings, impulses and desires. And I don’t have like a straightforward answer of, oh, just transition this much with this amount of that, and then you’ll feel great. So much as...continue to pay attention to...and, you know, I often advise people to write stuff down, especially when they are even just thinking about thinking about the possibility of some aspects of transition. Because I think especially if you kind of go back and forth on a daily basis or a weekly basis of, oh, I feel so differently now from how I did three days ago, it can feel so volatile and difficult to know where you stand that just having even like a brief log that you kind of update every day or two with just a sentence or two maybe about how you felt. Maybe if there was like a particularly memorable day where you wore an outfit that felt especially good to one particular aspect of your gender fluidity, make a note of it. It doesn’t have to be like I’m, I’m, you know, assigning deep, permanent value to every impulse or feeling that flashes across my head. But, you know, maybe just a project of like, alright, for the next two weeks, I’m going to keep a little log, maybe in my room or maybe on my notes app on my phone, wherever, just so I can go back and look at the end of two weeks and think like, Did I learn anything that surprised me? Did I feel much more in one way than the other than I would have expected? What what were the sort of patterns of the changes that I experienced? Because that can help you just decide, you know, is there a mode that I want to prioritize right now? Is there something that I’m now realizing when I see it written down makes me feel worse that I used to think made me feel better. And since you are, you know, more than anyone else alive, an expert in your own experience of your gender, you will be able to give yourself the best information, even though I also really hope you’re able to find a lot of different like fat transmasculine and non-binary and gender fluid people who can help you.
I would also encourage you to find lots and lots of those people, in part because for all the ways in which somebody who thinks of themselves as a trans man straightforwardly versus somebody who thinks of themselves as gender fluid might have really different experiences. It’s also true that there’s often lots that we have in common. So I guess why I want to encourage you to look for a lot of different people that you can talk to or who sort of like life you can follow in some parasocial way is, is because I don’t want you to feel like anything that’s useful to a, like a quote unquote binary trans guy probably won’t work for me. And so I need to think of it as off the table. Same with a lesbian, because, you know, she calls herself a lesbian, even though we might have a lot of other things in common. If it works for her, it might not work for me.
I just want you to feel really agnostic about method, technique and practice. So if you find something, frankly, like if you find something from a fat trans woman that you find helpful, use that. If you find something from a fat trans man who’s sometimes gender fluid and sometimes not like, I just want you to feel such freedom and permission to investigate with deep curiosity and nonanxiety as many queer and trans people as you can find. Again, not like going up to people in the street and saying like, what socks are you wearing right now? But, you know, within the realm of of politeness so that you really feel not like transition is one big thing that you either do all the way or not at all. So much as just people do so many things when they feel any version of what we sometimes call dysphoria and we sometimes call other things, and you can take many of them in pieces. You can mix and match, you can combine, you can do them for a while and then stop. And that’s what I want for you. I don’t want you to feel like, you know, either, never think about top surgery because it’s not allowed for me, or just like top surgery would never work for me because it only works for binary people. And again, I say all that with no investment in like if you do or don’t ever get anything quote unquote done. So it’s just that I want you to feel freedom. It’s not that I want you to like, you know, eventually push yourself in the direction of hormonal or medical interventions.
So that’s, I think, my biggest guiding point there is, you know, you’re right now you’re imagining and imagining is free and it doesn’t commit you to anything. So give yourself permission to imagine all sorts of things and try to keep a record whenever you can.
You know, I think next I want to think about that line. I’ve worked really hard to love my body changing. It feels like it could be a betrayal to the work that I’ve done, and I think I really get where that comes from because it’s like, this is what my body looks like right now. This is all the work I’ve done to get here. If I were to commit to any kind of, you know, more significant change than a haircut, I would be changing the body I just work so hard to love. Wouldn’t that invalidate the love? And again, without saying this or that surgery or this or that type of hormone would or wouldn’t qualify as such. I just think your body is going to change every day until the day that you die. And it’s going to change in ways you could not have imagined five years ago, ten years ago, 15 years ago. And it will change sometimes in ways that you could anticipate or see coming, and it will change sometimes in shocking ways.
Does that feel useful, June? Like I don’t want to like get too lost in the weeds of like, hey, menopause is like transition that nature forces on you. But, you know, to me that feels relevant.
J: No, it really does. Just and as as I’m listening to you, I’m kind of just hearing a reminder that, you know, we can’t control everything. There are some things we can control or at least exercise some form of control over. But it’s not something really--you have to kind of acknowledge or give up a certain amount of like--it just is simply isn’t possible to control of the people’s responses, to control, you know, sometimes what just immediately hits you in the in, you know, inside yourself. There’s just it’s, it’s, it’s kind of pointless and damaging to try to kind of go for perfect control and but rather just to kind of keep kind of the constant struggle, you know, that doesn’t necessarily have to be a terrible, painful thing. But just being conscious that there are some things that you basically that you’re working on, you know, understanding yourself and finding happiness. And that really is, is, you know, the great work.
D: Yeah. And I just feel really strongly that it is not incompatible to think about, you know, long term or permanent changes to one’s body and loving and accepting one’s body. You know, I don’t think that, you know, achieving hard fought self-acceptance or neutrality or even affection then means the only way for this to be real and meaningful is me to commit to never make a change. So I’ll just say on that front letter writer, I feel pretty strongly, you know, as as somebody else who, you know, I’m also fat. I think one of the things that was really challenging about transition was there were ways that the idea of transitioning felt less daunting if I could feel like, but I’ll be like muscular and thin on the other side, right? And like transitioning and being like a fat guy as opposed to a fat woman? That brings up a lot of different kinds of like fears or uncertainties or insecurities and and was a different kind of emotional prospect. And one of the things that I think has been meaningful, grounded and like consistent with the values that I have of like feminism and autonomy have, have had to do with that kind of, you know, I’m taking the body with me where I’m going.
So it’s, you know, if all that is just to say the possibility of medical or hormonal transition is not antithetical to the work of self-acceptance and self-love. And I think. If I were to guess, you know that’s true about other people. And so it’s just the question of turning it on yourself. And I think it’s not uncommon for, you know, people who are thinking about the possibility of a trans masculine-ish transition is that fear of, is that abandoning a feminist project of self-love? And, you know, congratulations, the jury’s back in on that one. It’s not incompatible. We checked, we asked. It’s okay. The water’s fine. Letter writer. I realize I’ve gone way over time on this one because it spoke to my heart. You know, I got--you and I have fatness and trans masculinity question mark in common. So, you know, I just. I feel for you deeply, Write back any time you don’t have to wait three years, you know, keep that log, do the two weeks, write back, let me know what you think or don’t you know, tell me you didn’t and that you thought it was a dumb idea. That’s fine.
But we should we should keep going. I love all fat trans people. I just think they’re terrific and great. Anyways, June, if you would be so good as to read our second letter, I will try to calm down.
(Lightly edited for intelligibility. Fascinating that the speech-to-text software is fine with "aegis" but interpreted that last line as, "Anyways, June, if you would visit get is Doritos second letter. I will try to call down.")
APRIL 14, 20229:34 AM
Slate podcast transcripts are created by Snackable using machine-learning software and have not been reviewed prior to publication.
LISTEN TO THIS EPISODE
Danny: This Ad free podcast is part of your slate plus membership. Lucky you. Hello and welcome back to you big made little mood. I am your host Daniel M Lavery. And with me in the studio this week is June Thomas, the co-host of Working Slate’s podcast about the creative process. And this is June’s last day at Slate, and June is also working on a book about lesbian spaces that I am very much looking forward to hearing about. June, welcome to the show.
June: Thank you so much, Danny, for having me. I really appreciate it.
D: Thank you so much for for being here, especially again on your last day when you have lots to do. And I already feel excited about giving advice together because we just finished having a conversation about browser windows. I usually minimize or get rid of mine. I think it’s just like a useful insight into our ways of working, which is, you know, if you wouldn’t mind sharing with the people what your feelings about having multiple tabs open are.
J: Yeah, it’s my only non sin. I really I’m not prone to window or tab multiplication. I’m a mess in many ways, but not in that particular one.
D: I admire that and I think the one thing that sets me apart from the sort of classic to many browsers, the open problem is I’ll get about ten or 11 in a row and then I think that’s too many. I minimize the whole window and I start a new window and I get more browsers going. So I forget--I’m also calling them browsers like as each individual tab where it’s own browser, which is not true. But that way I get the illusion of sort of like, Oh, I’m working clean, I’m just working with seven right now. But actually there’s 40 underneath and they’re smoking.
J: I believe that’s called out of sight, out of mind, and I applaud it. It’s a great way of stuffing down the feelings and stuffing down the excessive tabs.
D: Man. You know, this is, this is what is unfortunate. However, I don’t know if it’s the way that I’m wired or what, but I can walk out of a room and forget things, you know, easily. But I can’t stuff down feelings as easily. So I often find, like, I wish that I could forget what I was feeling as easily as I could forget keys, wallets, people’s names, my own deadlines. Like, why doesn’t this translate?
J: I think that’s probably very good for you as a person. But yeah, that is one of the eternal questions I think.
D: Always remember a grudge.
D: Well, hopefully there will be something especially like invigorating or freeing about being here on your last day at Slate so that that will creep into our advice.
I’m really excited about this first letter, mostly, I think, because I feel like I have finally started getting updates at the rate at which I’ve always wanted them. Like I just had asked for them so many times over the last few months that people finally started writing in and I love it. So this is actually a letter from someone who wrote in back when I was doing this column as part of the Dear Prudence sort of aegis. And they have a sort of new spin on an old question. So it’s it’s part update, but also a new question. So the subject here is, "rocking the boat":
Three years ago, I wrote to you as a scared fat girl, nervous about the prospects of my romantic and sexual future. Your advice helped pull me out of the self-hatred I felt like I was drowning in. I spent the following years dragging myself--kicking and screaming--towards loving my body and expecting the same from others. I’m writing to you again with a similar problem, but a new twist. I recently came out as genderfluid. I’ve realized that my waxing and waning fondness for femininity has a lot to do with not feeling like a woman some of the time.
Now that I’ve named that, I can’t put the cat back in the bag. I’ve accepted my body and my fatness, but it always feels like a woman’s body. I’m on the more masculine side, but I sometimes feel like crawling out of my skin because dress doesn’t always affect whether I’m seen as a woman. I can’t get a flat chest when I bind despite trying numerous options, and an ineffective bind makes me feel worse than not binding in the first place. And my hips are very wide. I cut off most of my hair, which helped immensely, and I buy more clothes that feel right, but there are days when dressing like a man still feels like a lie. My gorgeous body is now coming back to bite me in a new way. I’m struggling to find fat transmascs to look up to or ways to make my body feel comfortable for those times when I’m just not a woman.
I hesitate to think about other interventions like top surgery or the possibility of HRT, because when I do feel like a woman, I love my body and it does feel like home. I’ve worked hard to feel this way and changing that feels like it could be a betrayal to the work that I’ve been doing. A lot of the stories that I see are of binary or non fluid trans folks making their bodies feel like home, and I’m not sure how to do that when my sense of myself is shifting and changing constantly. How can I find footing inside myself?
I love that, like, I loved that last little image. The idea of trying to find footing within your own body was such a lovely image.
J: I agree then. And I found that really the key to the letter in a way, because I’m in sympathy with this letter writer. I want to compliment you because clearly your advice three years ago was of use to them and really help them kind of find some footing. And, you know, they do seem to be discovering more things about themselves, which is really only possible when you are open to listening to your body and to yourself and to your feelings. And I do think that the key to finding more kind of solid ground with what the letter writer is going through right now is around finding some kind of anchor. You know, where in yourself, inside yourself, you kind of find the support for your fluidity. It’s been recognized, but it hasn’t yet kind of found equilibrium. And I can sympathize enormously because I imagine that feeling of, you know, I’m kind of picturing the letter writers emotions as it’s kind of being on a on a boat that that’s like in rough seas. And, you know, it’s, it is hard to find your footing and hard to, you know, to settle. But I think I’m going to say something quite banal, perhaps. But I think that, you know, rough seas do, you know, they calm. And I think that just trying to stay present, trying to listen to themselves, trying to figure out, you know, the different--how they--at the moment, it sounds like they’re kind of feeling different things on different days and just kind of having some patience with themselves, giving themselves some grace to just kind of understand their feelings. Does that seem right to you or is that a kind of an outsider’s view there?
D: No, hugely. I mean, there’s so much about this that is specific to like gender fluidity within non-binary and trans sort of contexts. And there’s also elements of this that have to do with more universal aspects of aging, contending with fatphobia, especially like in the context of aging. Like I think people will sometimes talk or think about the idea of achieving peacefulness with one’s body or a sense of neutrality or even affirmation and affection. And then, you know, a couple of years go by and you see your body start to change. It’s like, no, no, no. My, my contract was with the last body. I don’t know this guy, who’s this? Like. Yeah, somebody just showed up!
And so there’s ways in which I think this can be thought of from a number of different angles. I think that’s really, really useful and meaningful and lovely and you know, letter writer, it was just really meaningful to me and moving to get to read this letter. And I especially found the sort of language of dragging myself and kicking and screaming in that first letter. It felt cheeky. It didn’t, I didn’t read that and feel worried, like, are you being too hard on yourself? Like it felt sweet and sort of whimsical. So I can appreciate that kind of language of like, this is difficult work and a large part of me resists it because there’s a part of me that’s very, very attached to loathing my own size or fatness because either it makes me feel safe or I feel like it’s preventative because someone else will do it if I don’t. Or I feel like that’s what I owe the world. So I can really, really understand and imagine that the work, like just the actual effort that that has taken.
And yeah, you know, I think certainly when it comes to, you know, more specific resources, unfortunately, I mentioned in my last recording, I’ve just gotten over COVID and I’m in an apartment in the U.K. where there’s just the thinnest hum of of Internet access. So I have no ability to sort of do some of the lighter background research I might have liked. So letter writer, I will just say I would really encourage you to seek out a lot of fat transmasculine people and a lot of fat genderfluid and nonbinary people. I think often a good place to start--because it’s not exactly like, Oh, this is an exhaustively well-researched area with tons of prominent, you know, figures in the movement--you know, Google, go on your favorite social media sites and you know, go for a couple of search terms, whether that be like "fat trans masc", "fat gender fluid", you know, add or subtract terms to that as you like. Try a multiple rounds where you’re putting in a lot of different synonyms. Just see what you get, look at it, engage with it, see what speaks to you, see what doesn’t. But just set aside a little time to think, you know, I want to make sure that I have a few names at the top of my head or a few maybe, you know, articles or books I can read or people I can maybe even, like potentially be in community with. Sometimes if you live in a city where there’s a large enough LGBT center, there’s often like really, really robust support groups. Like they get incredibly atomized sometimes where it’s just like, Oh, I didn’t even know someone with these eight intersecting identities that there was a support group for that. But you may very well find that there’s like recovery groups or support groups for people either who are like struggling to like live in an ongoing way with like body acceptance or contend with fatphobia or specifically for like fat trans people. That may be possible.
J: Yeah, I agree that that finding some some community finding someone to talk to, more than one person preferably. And obviously, you know, I’m not going to act like it’s 1997. And, you know, we have to give warnings about, you know, don’t trust people online. But obviously, this is an area where it is difficult to trust that the person that you are, you know, remotely speaking with or communicating with is who they say they are. But, you know, doing what one can do to to feel that, you know, you’re in a trusted circle. I think finding someone to talk to, multiple people, preferably, would be so useful. You know, in many ways, again, I, you know, I’m a cis lesbian woman, but I kind of identify as a cross-dresser. And, you know, I always wear men’s clothing. I always have. I find that, you know, that’s those are the looks that I am attracted to that are not not attracted to us in that I fancy, but that I want to wear that I want to look like that. I want to look like a kind of a sharp--but this this let me finish the rest of this sentence--I want to look like a sharp, thin guy. And I am not, and don’t have any kind of desire to be a thin guy. But, you know, there are many of us who who want to look a certain way, like would like to look a certain way and just can’t. Like I have hips out the wazoo. I, you know, I love those suits. They just don’t fit me. They don’t look right. And so, like, there are a lot of people who we’re not looking like we wish we could, but that doesn’t mean that we need to be unhappy that, you know, we can’t find some kind of kernel of of happiness or kernel of satisfaction or definitely not hate the way we look or hate the way our bodies are. So I, you know, the letter writer's situation is very specific and I love that specificity. But she’s definitely not alone. There are many of us who are facing similar sort of issues who are not gender fluid and are not kind of struggling with those specific feelings that she is working through. But, you know that there is support out there. It’s just I admit it’s maybe not as easy to find as just going to the end of the street and yelling.
D: Yeah, no. And I think as you were kind of talking about the various ways in which yours and the letter writers interests might in some ways overlap. I was thinking, yeah, there’s between the three of us, there’s a Venn diagram. And there’s, you know, a fairly substantial middle despite being three different people with three different sort of like identity terms or ideas of ourselves. And so I think that’s kind of lovely to both acknowledge like, well, there’s some shared areas in the middle and there are some distinct areas that each of us hold in our own. And so trying to think about it, I want to try to approach things that may be helpful to the letter writer and that I hope might be useful as thought exercises or as guidance for finding additional support in their own community.
J: Yeah.
D: I think, you know, especially when you were saying earlier, like I love that distinction between the types of clothes and look that I’m going for evoke an idea of a thin and sharp guy. Hang on a second. It’s not that I want to be a thin man, but there’s something about maybe some of the elements of what you’re looking for in fashion that have to do with a streamlined look, a well-tailored look, a thing where lines blend into one another nicely and, you know, through through no fault of any of our own, the fashion industry usually only puts out those garments in a on a thin person’s body.
J: Mhm.
D: Those things are not actually exclusive to thinness, but most, you know, companies, designers, tailors, etc., don’t spend the additional time, energy, expertise and money on creating those looks for other types of body. So I think that was such a useful moment of thinking through letter writer. You’ve kind of talked about how there’s ways in which some of what you’re experiencing is helped by or addressed by interventions like dress and hairstyle, and there’s ways in which it isn’t. And I think it can be really useful whenever you’re thinking about especially a project like I’d like to replace a big part of my wardrobe thinking about what are some of the looks or styles or silhouettes that appeal to me the most that I might think of as, No, that is only something that goes with thinness, but with, you know, additional research I might be able to find, you know, somebody has actually thought for more than 30 seconds, "What if someone fat wanted to wear clothes?" and has created something. And again, that doesn’t mean all those clothes will be immediately available or affordable, but is, I think, worth doing that, that background research?
I did want to speak specifically to the subject of binding just because I do have some expertise in that area. And letter writer, it sounds like you’ve already kind of landed on a relationship to binding, which is just mostly it’s not for you. That makes a lot of sense to me. I don’t have any investment in suggesting that you change that. I just wanted to mention because you say you can’t get a flat chest when you bind. And I do think one thing that I think is just helpful to say out loud: very few people bind so that they have a flat chest. That’s very, very difficult. That requires relatively little breast tissue in order to to get a fully flat chest. And so I think, especially if you’re trying it sort of on your own for the first time and maybe don’t have a lot of friends who have also bound, it can feel like, well, obviously the goal is like perfect flatness. And if I didn’t get that, then I have done something wrong or it won’t work for me. And again, you may feel like you’ve also said that like ineffective binding feels worse than not doing it at all. So you might hear this and say, great, helpful information, still don’t want to do it. That’s totally understandable. I just sometimes it can be helpful to get a better sense of like, what’s the norm, right? Like, where do I fall within most people who bind? Most people who bind see, you know, a more streamlined silhouette. They see a reduction in volume. Obviously, the shape of the chest looks different. It doesn’t look like a bosom in the same way that it might without that kind of intervention. But I would go so far as to say most people who bind do not achieve total flatness. And so, again, you might still decide, I don’t want to do it anyways. And that would be perfectly reasonable. But just so if it’s at all helpful to know that that’s not actually a a horizon that most binders approach, you know. Yeah, the best I usually got was like something that I have sometimes affectionately referred to as the uniboob. And it was, you know, it was flat inasmuch as it didn’t have like an obvious roundness. And I could put a flat shirt over it and it would button up more easily. But it was not flat in the sense that, you know, if you if you would put me next to a version of me after top surgery, those two shirts would look the same.
Anyway, it’s kind of a long, rambling way to address a line that doesn’t actually bring up a lot. I just think, you know, it’s so hard already trying to change your appearance when you already struggle with, you know, internalized fatphobia or fear or anxiety. And so then especially if you’re doing something new and you worry, oh, I’m doing it wrong, that can feel just like I’m alone and I’m failing. And those two things are two terrible tastes that go badly together. And sometimes that could just help to hear somebody else say, You’re not alone in that.
J: Hmm. Well said.
D: You know, I feel kind of grateful here that we have two different people with sort of distinct, but also non-fl--like you and I are both, we have different identities, two letter writer and to each other, but they both don’t involve the word fluid. So we can maybe try to speak to that elements again, like not thinking we’re going to be able to offer a perfect solution. But do you have any thoughts about how you might want to advise someone who says, I’m trying to think about my life in the context of possible transition and hormonal interventions, but it’s really important to me to acknowledge I don’t always feel this consistently. So what’s on the table, what’s not on the table for me, given that.
J: You know, I really appreciate that the the letter writer is really, you know, thinking through this thinking about potential interventions, potential solutions to their problems. But it also seems to me that maybe they are not quite ready yet to do anything. And I would just say with with the greatest of respect for everyone’s choices, that maybe, maybe the time is not yet right. That does not mean that there won’t be some interventions. But I don’t that’s the kind of the feeling that I’m getting. Yeah.
D: I mean, I would also share your sense of if somebody says, I really hesitate to even think about top surgery or starting HRT, you know, you’re simply acknowledging and affirming what is frankly already the letter writers decision to say that’s not on the table right now. So, you know, just just to let you off the hook, I do not feel like you are attempting to gatekeep somebody or just say, why don’t we always err on the side of not transitioning so you can don’t worry.
And yeah, you know, I think letter writer. Absolutely there is a real challenge before you in terms of how do I make decisions of, you know, short term, medium term and long term consequences when I know that I have sometimes quite different, not necessarily contradictory, but maybe sometimes mutually exclusive feelings, impulses and desires. And I don’t have like a straightforward answer of, oh, just transition this much with this amount of that, and then you’ll feel great. So much as...continue to pay attention to...and, you know, I often advise people to write stuff down, especially when they are even just thinking about thinking about the possibility of some aspects of transition. Because I think especially if you kind of go back and forth on a daily basis or a weekly basis of, oh, I feel so differently now from how I did three days ago, it can feel so volatile and difficult to know where you stand that just having even like a brief log that you kind of update every day or two with just a sentence or two maybe about how you felt. Maybe if there was like a particularly memorable day where you wore an outfit that felt especially good to one particular aspect of your gender fluidity, make a note of it. It doesn’t have to be like I’m, I’m, you know, assigning deep, permanent value to every impulse or feeling that flashes across my head. But, you know, maybe just a project of like, alright, for the next two weeks, I’m going to keep a little log, maybe in my room or maybe on my notes app on my phone, wherever, just so I can go back and look at the end of two weeks and think like, Did I learn anything that surprised me? Did I feel much more in one way than the other than I would have expected? What what were the sort of patterns of the changes that I experienced? Because that can help you just decide, you know, is there a mode that I want to prioritize right now? Is there something that I’m now realizing when I see it written down makes me feel worse that I used to think made me feel better. And since you are, you know, more than anyone else alive, an expert in your own experience of your gender, you will be able to give yourself the best information, even though I also really hope you’re able to find a lot of different like fat transmasculine and non-binary and gender fluid people who can help you.
I would also encourage you to find lots and lots of those people, in part because for all the ways in which somebody who thinks of themselves as a trans man straightforwardly versus somebody who thinks of themselves as gender fluid might have really different experiences. It’s also true that there’s often lots that we have in common. So I guess why I want to encourage you to look for a lot of different people that you can talk to or who sort of like life you can follow in some parasocial way is, is because I don’t want you to feel like anything that’s useful to a, like a quote unquote binary trans guy probably won’t work for me. And so I need to think of it as off the table. Same with a lesbian, because, you know, she calls herself a lesbian, even though we might have a lot of other things in common. If it works for her, it might not work for me.
I just want you to feel really agnostic about method, technique and practice. So if you find something, frankly, like if you find something from a fat trans woman that you find helpful, use that. If you find something from a fat trans man who’s sometimes gender fluid and sometimes not like, I just want you to feel such freedom and permission to investigate with deep curiosity and nonanxiety as many queer and trans people as you can find. Again, not like going up to people in the street and saying like, what socks are you wearing right now? But, you know, within the realm of of politeness so that you really feel not like transition is one big thing that you either do all the way or not at all. So much as just people do so many things when they feel any version of what we sometimes call dysphoria and we sometimes call other things, and you can take many of them in pieces. You can mix and match, you can combine, you can do them for a while and then stop. And that’s what I want for you. I don’t want you to feel like, you know, either, never think about top surgery because it’s not allowed for me, or just like top surgery would never work for me because it only works for binary people. And again, I say all that with no investment in like if you do or don’t ever get anything quote unquote done. So it’s just that I want you to feel freedom. It’s not that I want you to like, you know, eventually push yourself in the direction of hormonal or medical interventions.
So that’s, I think, my biggest guiding point there is, you know, you’re right now you’re imagining and imagining is free and it doesn’t commit you to anything. So give yourself permission to imagine all sorts of things and try to keep a record whenever you can.
You know, I think next I want to think about that line. I’ve worked really hard to love my body changing. It feels like it could be a betrayal to the work that I’ve done, and I think I really get where that comes from because it’s like, this is what my body looks like right now. This is all the work I’ve done to get here. If I were to commit to any kind of, you know, more significant change than a haircut, I would be changing the body I just work so hard to love. Wouldn’t that invalidate the love? And again, without saying this or that surgery or this or that type of hormone would or wouldn’t qualify as such. I just think your body is going to change every day until the day that you die. And it’s going to change in ways you could not have imagined five years ago, ten years ago, 15 years ago. And it will change sometimes in ways that you could anticipate or see coming, and it will change sometimes in shocking ways.
Does that feel useful, June? Like I don’t want to like get too lost in the weeds of like, hey, menopause is like transition that nature forces on you. But, you know, to me that feels relevant.
J: No, it really does. Just and as as I’m listening to you, I’m kind of just hearing a reminder that, you know, we can’t control everything. There are some things we can control or at least exercise some form of control over. But it’s not something really--you have to kind of acknowledge or give up a certain amount of like--it just is simply isn’t possible to control of the people’s responses, to control, you know, sometimes what just immediately hits you in the in, you know, inside yourself. There’s just it’s, it’s, it’s kind of pointless and damaging to try to kind of go for perfect control and but rather just to kind of keep kind of the constant struggle, you know, that doesn’t necessarily have to be a terrible, painful thing. But just being conscious that there are some things that you basically that you’re working on, you know, understanding yourself and finding happiness. And that really is, is, you know, the great work.
D: Yeah. And I just feel really strongly that it is not incompatible to think about, you know, long term or permanent changes to one’s body and loving and accepting one’s body. You know, I don’t think that, you know, achieving hard fought self-acceptance or neutrality or even affection then means the only way for this to be real and meaningful is me to commit to never make a change. So I’ll just say on that front letter writer, I feel pretty strongly, you know, as as somebody else who, you know, I’m also fat. I think one of the things that was really challenging about transition was there were ways that the idea of transitioning felt less daunting if I could feel like, but I’ll be like muscular and thin on the other side, right? And like transitioning and being like a fat guy as opposed to a fat woman? That brings up a lot of different kinds of like fears or uncertainties or insecurities and and was a different kind of emotional prospect. And one of the things that I think has been meaningful, grounded and like consistent with the values that I have of like feminism and autonomy have, have had to do with that kind of, you know, I’m taking the body with me where I’m going.
So it’s, you know, if all that is just to say the possibility of medical or hormonal transition is not antithetical to the work of self-acceptance and self-love. And I think. If I were to guess, you know that’s true about other people. And so it’s just the question of turning it on yourself. And I think it’s not uncommon for, you know, people who are thinking about the possibility of a trans masculine-ish transition is that fear of, is that abandoning a feminist project of self-love? And, you know, congratulations, the jury’s back in on that one. It’s not incompatible. We checked, we asked. It’s okay. The water’s fine. Letter writer. I realize I’ve gone way over time on this one because it spoke to my heart. You know, I got--you and I have fatness and trans masculinity question mark in common. So, you know, I just. I feel for you deeply, Write back any time you don’t have to wait three years, you know, keep that log, do the two weeks, write back, let me know what you think or don’t you know, tell me you didn’t and that you thought it was a dumb idea. That’s fine.
But we should we should keep going. I love all fat trans people. I just think they’re terrific and great. Anyways, June, if you would be so good as to read our second letter, I will try to calm down.
(Lightly edited for intelligibility. Fascinating that the speech-to-text software is fine with "aegis" but interpreted that last line as, "Anyways, June, if you would visit get is Doritos second letter. I will try to call down.")