‘I Still Feel the Need to Apologise for My Body’: How Experimenting with Gender Has Taught Me the Universal Nature of Fatphobia

By Q Cummins

I am ten years old and feeling self-conscious at a public swimming pool. The stench of chlorine, once comforting, feels claustrophobic. Previously, I always had a passion for swimming, but today I am listening to the boys in my class make fun of another girl for having leg hair. It is at this moment that I am suddenly aware that specific parts of my body are to be judged and ranked by those around me. While not particularly linked to size, this is the earliest experience I can remember of realising a woman's body is the property of their peers.

Growing up, the assumption that one had to be skinny to be ‘pretty’ was always both implicit and explicit in nature. We joke about the term ‘skinny legend’, but in the 2000s all the legends were, indeed, skinny. From the chic celebrities of the Disney Channel to the trending pop superstars, it was in to be thin. And the 2010s diet culture took no prisoners.

The few fat (or plus-sized) characters found in any 2000s media are the butt of every joke; their weight is seen as a self-imposed reason for their ‘unattractive nature’. They are the funny sidekick or, if lucky, the recipient of a magical makeover transformation. This bias even extends to the working world, as illustrated in the Economist’s article The Economics of Thinness, which outlines how being thin is seen as a necessity for career-driven women to achieve the success they aim for in the workplace. According to their research, girls as young as six recognise an expectation to be skinny from society. This belief turns to financial incentive later in life with the benefits of being thin becoming comparable to a university education for women.

For me, that’s where this story sort of ends. I turn sixteen and discover gender nonconformity. Only this discovery, while inwardly very affirming, doesn’t really change how I am outwardly perceived. That is, both feminine and fat. This made my sense of self-perception all the more complicated. For a moment, I felt free. Unfettered by the restraints of the gender binary and the dysphoria of never being ‘woman’ enough to truly identify with my physicality.

And then I learnt about skinny-twinklike-androgyny.

As a community, we say over and over again that nonbinary people don’t owe you androgyny. But often as a community, the gender nonconformity we choose to look up to presents itself in the same body type again and again⁠: skinny, white and somewhat masculine. It is true that the LGBTQIA+ community – the trans community specifically – is not and cannot be a monolith. There is no one type of person who can ever represent such a diverse collective. But when the trending body type begins to feel indistinguishable, the damage it can do to your already marginalised identity can feel soul crushing. 

You begin to view yourself as inconvenient and even incorrect for how you choose to present yourself. Transition body goals and weight loss start to blur together, making it difficult to see where one ends and the other begins. On a regular basis, it becomes easy to find yourself accidentally giving in to self-destructive behaviours such as body checking or disordered eating in the hopes that all your body issues will solve themselves in one easy solution.

I am not the first queer writer to acknowledge how complicated and confusing it gets trying to navigate gender identity and expression in a world that already dislikes the body you’re born with. Nor the difficulty in determining what is escapism and what is dysphoria. I doubt I will be the last.

Finally, there is the land that I have not travelled: fatphobia and masculinity. I can’t claim to be the expert, having never been a man myself, but to me the progression here seems clear. While women are encouraged to get skinny to be attractive, men are taught to go to the gym.

This can be an asset of course – gaining muscle and strength is a positive. But when, once again, this metric begins to assign value to the person themselves it becomes an issue. Again, we fixate on the bodies of strangers and begin to determine our worth by comparison. Like models or celebrities, fitness influencers walk the line between being aspirational and demoralising. All these images, and these influences, have only gotten worse with social media. While there are more sources of information on body positivity and acceptance out there, there are ten times as many toxic influences.

This leaves me with the question: where are we now?

Personally, I am taking it one day at a time. Societally, I think we have to de-objectify our bodies. Of course, there will always be people who are more attractive than others. Human nature is inherent and unavoidable.

There is this horrible, inherent sense of shame that comes with internalised fatphobia regardless of gender. A feeling of being devalued into less of a person for not being able to meet an often impossible standard. A feeling that is felt even by those who fail to qualify as actually ‘plus-sized’ in nature. While it impacts us all differently depending on social status and gender, and is contextualised within other (typically Eurocentric) standards of beauty, the pressure it puts on our self-worth is never positive.

Even right now, having just written this article on how fatphobia brings us down and damages people’s sense of identity, I still feel the urge to apologise for my body. The need to almost justify why I continue to live the way I do. The truth is, I don’t owe anyone an apology for being here, or for making my voice heard.

And the sooner people of all genders and sexualities decide to try to accept themselves regardless of size, the closer we can get to complete trans (and cis) liberation.