Sometimes it's better to light a flamethrower than curse the darkness

I got a text from the gender clinic a while ago saying "You are due a mandatory in person annual review appointment," so that's what I'm going to this morning.

I asked D to come with me, which he kindly has taken off work for, and on the bus in to town he said "So what do I need to know about this appointment?" I said I had very little idea myself and read out the text: mandatory, in person, review.

I did this on the phone last year, but all I remember is that that's when I was first told that I'm too fat to get top surgery. I think otherwise I'm very straightforward: I take my T, I don't forget, my GP is good at prescribing it, I'm not too unhappy with any of the side effects. Last year I could say I was doing counseling from them and I was told I was getting near the top of the voice coaching waiting list (though, another year on, I've still heard nothing about that...)

I told D "I think it's just, like, a meds review but for the whole real, not just meds."

"A boy review," he said.

I grinned. "Yeah!" I rested my head on his shoulder and asked "How is your boy?"

"Pretty good," he smiled. "Could do with more sleep."

So yeah, I'm off for my boy review.

Turns out that my counselor also hates BMI, she called it racist and colonialist as soon as I brought it up, something I was doing only gently and warily, expecting to have to fight. But no! (Also it's a great sign to have a counselor who will (correctly!) use a word like colonialist unprompted!)

It saved me a lot of time in explaining how my week had gone.

I've tried talking therapies many many times and this is the first time I've had someone understand how fatness and disability interact with gender for me.

It is such a relief.

She asked me at the end how I feel about my body now, after my hard work to unlearn diet culture and find exercise that really does bring me joy.

I didn't really know how to answer. I've survived most of my life in this body by not poking around for feelings about it.

And I'm just terrible at knowing what my feelings about anything are lately anyway. D and I usually bump in to each other by mid-morning and he always asks me how I am, how my day's going. Often I have nothing better for him than a shrug. I don't want to be rude or ungrateful for his interest in me. But I just don't know what to say.

This afternoon, mother_bones and I went to a local fat-positive clothes swap.

It was a really positive experience. We got rid of a lot of stuff we don't wear -- too-femme things in both cases, as well as stuff we just don't wear, doesn't fit right, all the usual stuff.

People were nice, trying stuff on and complimenting each other. It didn't seem like people buying stuff to resell online or alter to sell to thin people, both of which are concerns at these events. It was great to see a variety of gender presentations and races and a lot of visibly disabled people (MB had rollator envy of someone) and the event was wet out in a reasonably accessible way.

I was really impressed to see an event with explicit covid protections.

COVID-19 HARM REDUCTION: To minimise potential spread of covid-19 and protect clinically vulnerable folks in our community, we ask ALL attendees to wear a mask at the swap. Spare masks will be available on the door! We also encourage everyone to consider additional harm reduction practices before the event, for instance by testing before attending, and obviously not attending if you have any covid-19 symptoms.

The venue can't open most of their windows but the ones that could be open were and there was a big air filter, looked like a dehumidifier, labeled something like "Covid Box, must be on while an event is happening" so that's good too.

It was amazing to be in an environment where there were clothes you could be interested in, pick up (they were all laid out on tables) and go "...no actually this is too big for me" and put it back for someone for whom it will be the right size. We're just not used to the physical presence of clothes that are too big.

It was even more amazing to see people pick up stuff we'd brought and look delighted by it. MB had a lot of really striking items that they were so happy to see bringing delight to others: they even saw someone struggling with the corset they'd brought and went over to help the person get it on.

MB came home with a very sedate four new items of clothing, I had stacks of things: two hoodies, a denim jacket, a few nice shirts for when I have to dress up for work... I am feeling very accomplished (and slightly worried as to where I'm going to put them all! I was trying to get rid of stuff!).

They'll do another one in September so I think we'll have some coats and stuff to donate by then!

The butt never represents itself. This is how Heather Radke's book Butts: A Backstory begins.

I found out about it from reading 'an interview where the author explains this: "You can’t see your own butt, you are always seeing it through reflection, photography, or other people’s gaze. We don’t have a proper word for our butts, only euphemisms, which is unique to our butts."

She ultimately settles on "butt" as the term she's going to use in her book after discussing other options (buttocks, ass, etc.) and deeming them all inadequate: too vulgar, too childish, too sexual, or something. She also has to make it clear that she's talking about "the cheeks, not the hole."

She says in the interview:

I realized that, unlike breasts, for example, where the biological function is so deeply related to the symbolic meaning (maternity, femininity, etc.), butts really don’t have much inherent biological meaning. And yet their symbolic meaning is so complex and layered. They are deeply tied up with notions of race, femininity, and even hard work (think of the phrases like “work your butt off”). But those associations are ones we have projected onto the butt, and they are always changing."

She writes extensively about Sarah Baartman, an indigenous African woman who was brought to Europe (and given the only name we know her by) by European men who wanted to make money from exhibiting her to European audiences obsessed with big butts and her butt specifically. Radke says

Baartman is a very important figure in women’s studies, African diaspora studies, and the history of science, and so there are a lot of secondary sources about her. I also thought a lot about how to represent her on the page. I wanted to make it clear how difficult her life was, but didn’t want to flatten her story, or participate in another kind of exploitation of her life by making her story seem too salacious.

And I think she did an okay job of it. I think she does good generally in addressing race - later, regarding Miley Cyrus popularizing twerking after appropriating it from Black queers, and Kim Kardashian's rumored butt implants.

I was impressed enough with those topics that I was slightly disappointed that Radke re-visited her white-USian-woman thoughts about buying jeans that fit at the end. Having put in effort to extend her curiosity beyond all the messages that an anti-fat misogynist white-supremacist patriarchy has fed her about her body for the course of the book doesn't leave her immune to their continued influence I suppose, any more than my awareness of the racist sexist ableist history of anti-fatness makes me any more comfortable with the way I look after I've gained weight in the last year or so.

But then, at the end of the interview when asked what other body parts deserve the same treatment, Radke says

Bellies would be great! I do think you could really do a deep-dive on anything and you’d likely uncover a similar set of questions about race, gender, fashion, class, and control. Breasts are sort of the obvious one, but I think I’d be more interested in arm flab, necks (a la Nora Ephron), thighs, or maybe even eyebrows? I’m sure women from different backgrounds and of different ages might have other ideas to offer.

I think any part of the body that carries a whiff of shame would be a fruitful study, because shame often suggests hidden, unexplored feelings and histories. We don’t always know where shame comes from, even though we feel it potently. Exploring that shame doesn’t exactly free you, but I do think it offers a deeper understanding and maybe even a greater sense of control. Realizing that the shame we have about our bodies comes from history and culture — that it is, essentially, a human construction and not a biological one — can offer a bit of freedom even if we still all feel bad when we go into a dressing room and try on pants.

Tuesday night I found myself wondering Does "casual dress code" for this work thing mean I can turn up in a hoodie and corduroys? This is how I realized that I don't actually have any work-appropriate sweaters.

Starting my transition during lockdowns and shielding, and working either from home or for other trans people, means I'm only slowly and haphazardly masculinizing my wardrobe; there are definitely still important gaps in it!

(For the record, the room the work event was in was warm enough that I didn't need a hoodie or a sweater, and wearing a t-shirt instead of a button-down shirt put me in a minority but not disastrously so.)

Walking back to the tube station after that work event, though, when I got rained on so hard it gave me a little anxiety attack (my eyes stung and hurt so much from the rain that I couldn't see at all, which is scary when out in public, never mind in a part of London I'd never been to before)... I also realized I needed a proper winter coat.

I've been wearing a Doctor Who one that I inherited from mother_bones, who'd been gifted if and didn't wear it. She said its like David Tennant's coat which makes sense because I'm forever getting compliments on how it looks but it's absolutely useless: it doesn't have outer pockets, it didn't even have buttons until I asked her to add some, but even then the buttonholes are in such ridiculous places so it didn't even keep me dry... I just need a new coat.

Today, I booked a trans-friendly session at a gym for tomorrow morning! I haven't been back to the gym since before the pandemic started, but before that I had gotten a lot out of going to yoga classes and swimming with friends and messing around on the gym machines without much of an idea what I was doing.

The combination of not feeling as good about swimming during covid, those friends having gotten accustomed to going swimming elsewhere without me, not being sure what happened to my gym membership, not being sure of what kind of exercise would be good for me or how to do it, feeling like the gym I went to had never been great about accessibility and now it's further away to walk to, and gender stuff have made quite the obstacle to going back to the gym. I've never been able to manage it.

But last weekend a friend said he'd been to this. A small session (good for CO2 numbers, hopefully) with a personal trainer (good for not knowing what to do, hopefully better for accessibility as well) that's only for trans people (so my boring gender thoughts about myself should be much less of a problem) seems so perfect in almost every way.

There are only two downsides: first that it is so trans-specific that I can't bring diffrentcolours with me as a combination carer/fellow person who has similar hurdles to exercise. But he has very kindly said he'll drive me there tomorrow anyway, as the other downside is that it's held in a part of the city that's awkward for me to get to on my own. Anyway I always prefer not going alone to someplace that's brand new anyway. And for a thing that, ridiculously, feels so momentous, it's probably also good to have him in particular with me in case of extra Feelings, because being overwhelmed never ends well for me.

Only once I'd jumped through the hoops to ask for an account, have it approved, and register for this session at the last minute did it occur to me, belatedly, that I do not have the appropriate clothes for this at all. And I don't mean appropriate in the sense of like "will I look fat in this" or "does this match." I mean I don't have any gym shorts any more and you can't go to the gym in your underwear, heh. Luckily, D has also found a few options of things he can lend me so I should be fine for tomorrow, and I guess I have to add "gym shorts" to the list of clothes that I need to buy!

It's so important that it was specifically an eating disorder helpline that tried to replace staff with AI.

We're hearing about this as a labor issue and that's valid, but we shouldn't overlook it as a fat liberation issue.

It matters that it's eating disorders because, as we know, AI just parrots back whatever we feed it. And almost everything we've filled the internet with on the subject of eating disorders is anti-fat, unhealthy, counterproductive, or all of the above.

So of course that's what the AI spat out: the dominant narrative we need to challenge. That organizations like NEDA exist to challenge. The U.S. wouldn't need them as a source of information and support like it does if not for the fact that people have all kinds of misconceptions and unhelpful ideas about eating disorders.

(Here is a good Maintenance Phase episode (with transcript) about eating disorders, for anyone who wants something bucking the trends on this subject.)

mother_bones

That ‘a’ on the end doesn’t seem to line up with the person in the boat with him; the connotation of feminine beauty just doesn’t resonate. And then, he has an a-ha moment. “You’re Lindo!” he exclaims, masculinizing the noun in Spanish. And he’s right.

When he explains that meaning takes on nuance with the masculinized ending, reflecting more of a beautiful essence rather than physical beauty, it seems even more right. I like the way it messes with constructions of beauty and gender.

Lindo. Yes, I am Lindo. There’s continuity there, a specificity I recognize. I can still be the beautiful human my parents dreamed of; I can still be my history, me. Just not the feminized version, because I was never a girl. I was never Linda, not really. But Lindo? Lindo, I recognize. This new name — that’s not new at all, just slightly, rightly different — feels like home to me.

Did you know...

Fitness can help to build relationships!

A 5K race, yoga class or a workout at the gym may not seem like a romantic outing, but a growing group of experts agree that couples who exercise together can not only stave off the extra pounds that are often linked to marriage, but they can strengthen their relationship and possibly live happily ever after.

So get in and book now, as it seems the couple who exercises together stays together...and if you're single you never know who you might meet giving you a helping hand over our giant inflatable wall 😉