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No Trans Fats: Body Liminality and the Theft of Fat and Trans Joy

Being both fat and transgender, I often feel that my body exists in an in-between state. On one side, maleness, on the other side, femaleness. On one side, fatness, on the other, thinness. As a trans woman, I am expected to make every effort humanly possible (and then some) to pass as female. If I do not take measures deemed adequate by larger cisgender society, I am denied my womanhood. As a fat person, I am expected to restrict my diet and exercise regularly with the goal of losing weight, lest I be denied my personhood. In both instances, my body is placed under intense scrutiny by larger society; my humanity is conditional.

Fat bodies are, in the best case scenario, invisible to the broader public. Much more commonly, they are subjects of derision and socially sanctioned cruelty. This ridicule is often obfuscated with claims of concern for the fat person’s health. However, with the advent of GLP-1 class drugs (a class of medications originally intended to treat diabetes and prediabetes), it becomes clear that this concern is disingenuous. If large amounts of fat can be lost by taking a drug, without the implementation of healthy lifestyle changes, then widespread use of GLP-1 drugs serves not to better the health of fat people, it seeks to eliminate fatness. It is clear to me, as someone who has been fat her entire life, that strangers who claim to care about my weight simply do not want to see fat people. They are disgusted by us, and the most acceptable way to communicate that disgust is through feigning concern. Their goal is not to improve my health. They do not want to cheer me on as I make lifestyle changes. They do not want to comfort me when I fail. They want me gone.

Suppose I do follow their advice. Suppose I do commit to losing more than half my body weight. This requires years of grueling work, both mental and physical. What am I to do in the meantime? If a stranger approaches me halfway through my weight loss journey, they don’t know that I’ve already made significant progress. All they see is someone who’s still fat, someone who’s still fair game for abuse.

It is near impossible not to think about the light at the end of the tunnel when it comes to weight loss. I can’t help but fantasize about being skinny, after it all. Will people treat me differently? Will I get better job opportunities? What will it feel like to move my body without so much bulk? To ask these questions is natural, but doing so necessarily highlights the despair I feel in the present. People do treat me poorly because of my weight. I do have fewer job opportunities. It often hurts to simply inhabit my body. All of these things I could deal with, were I not constantly imagining how much better life will be once I’m skinny. It steals my joy from the present, projecting it onto a self which does not yet (and may never) exist. And still, my mind settles on the target, neglecting the here and now. Truly, the ugliest words in the English language are “goal weight.”

Similarly, for my gender transition, my focus goes to the future. In this case, there is not as concrete an “end” to the journey as there is in regards to weight loss. The happy ending is me living the rest of my life as a woman. However, there are certain milestones that hold my attention and induce maladaptive daydreaming, namely being a short list of gender affirming surgeries, the complete overhaul of my wardrobe, and the ability to confidently present as a woman in public. This leads to feelings of longing, a desperate desire to escape the body I’m in, to shed the chrysalis that is my unmistakably masculine form.

Much of the trans experience has to do with transformation in a similar way to weight loss. In both cases, one recognizes that they are unhappy with their current body and imagines a body they wish to have. To transition is to seek out that body, as is the act of intentional weight loss. One typically involves sex hormones, sometimes surgery. The other involves diet and exercise. With each experience, one finds themselves in a state between their initial body and their goal body. People often document their transitions with selfies which they later arrange into timelines, same with fat loss. It can be profoundly satisfying to visualize the progress. In the middle of these transformations, one can be happy with the progress they’ve made, but ultimate satisfaction is reserved for the finish line–the day they reach their goal weight, the day they wake up and see themselves in the mirror for the first time.

This is why I am writing this essay: the state of being between where we were and where we want to be. I call it body liminality, where liminality refers to the feeling of being between states. For many, to be transgender (literally: “across genders”) entails a years-long process of body modification through hormones. To embark on a journey of intentional fat loss is to endure a years-long process of body modification through calorie restriction and exercise. In these in-between years, one must live with the knowledge that they are not yet where they want to be, and that often their goals will not be realized until far into the future. How does one live in the present when one is compelled to spend so much time imagining a better future? In these middle stages, it can be so difficult to maintain morale, but if one has any hope to reach their goals, they must.

To some degree, my simultaneous goals of weight loss and transition act against each other. I take estrogen as well as androgen blockers, which causes my metabolism to more closely resemble a cisgender woman’s than a cisgender man’s. Since women typically carry more body fat, it can be far more difficult for a woman to lose weight than it is for a man. My feminized physiology is actively thwarting my efforts to lose weight, but losing weight also conflicts with my transition. There is a concept in some of the more judgmental trans communities of “fat passing,” in which fat trans women are thought to have an easier time passing than skinny trans women, by virtue of our softer features and fat distribution. As I drop pounds, my masculine frame becomes more visible. My facial features sharpen. My breasts and hips shrink. Dysphoria creeps in like mold into a damp basement. These compounding difficulties are deeply discouraging.

Nevertheless, I see weight loss as an essential step in my transition. Women are expected to be small, to take up as little space as possible, to shrink ourselves down enough to make the men around us comfortable. Trans women in particular are expected to be rail thin, to have started out with a twinkish build and to remain frail. In spite of my ardent transfeminism, I still aspire to meet these sexist and fatphobic standards. I would never expect another woman to do the same, though our standards for ourselves are often very different from our standards for others.

A part of me still believes that I can be either trans or fat. To be both is to risk abuse from strangers daily. I fear that most people see my body as disgusting. I have internalized this to a disturbing degree, and undoing that social programming is a process that has taken years. I performed a personal exercise of staring at my body in the mirror and examining the emotions that arise. To simply sit in that feeling can be as excruciating as it is liberating. I spent so much of my youth trying to escape my body, dissociating constantly. I believe it is important to see my body, to view it as neither something disgusting nor something extraordinary–to simply exist in it. I do this to stay grounded. I do this in an attempt to reclaim the joy I have been deprived of by society’s expectations.

Early in my transition, my dad, struggling to understand feelings I was describing to him, told me he didn’t believe I was experiencing gender dysphoria. Instead, he suggested that I must hate my body because of my weight. I responded that if I really hated my body, I wouldn’t try to change it for the better, I would choose to destroy it with drugs or food binges or self harm. I have taken part in my fair share of this destruction, but I truly believe that one must love themself and their body in order to transition. It is an act of profound self love, an undertaking requiring superhuman self awareness and dedication.

It must be noted that not all trans people elect to undergo hormone therapy or medical transition at all. Many fat people also have no desire to lose weight. This enrages the skinny and the cisgender, as they cannot fathom someone being happy as they are, when they are fat or trans. Popular media narratives nearly exclusively portray fat and trans people as self-hating because that is how society believes we feel about ourselves. To choose not to undergo medical transition does not make someone less trans. To choose not to lose weight does not make someone less deserving of love and respect. Society broadly disagrees.

Self love can be difficult when society tells you your body is not worth celebrating. To celebrate it anyway is a radical act. People do not like when fat folks and trans folks love themselves because it means that their hateful messaging has not stuck. It means that the person they hate has a confidence they cannot imagine possessing themselves. To love myself in spite of it all is necessary to my survival. I have spent too long hating myself, and I do not want to any longer. I will love my body as an act of resistance. I will celebrate other fat and trans bodies. I only hope that others can find the will to do so as well. Someday, maybe, it won’t be so defiant after all.

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