As a trans person, much of my existence has been spent thinking about mine and other people’s bodies. Growing up I had a pretty clear cut idea of what it meant to be a woman and what it meant to be a man. This idea was shaped largely by my conservative Christian upbringing. Even before I started my medical transition, it was apparent to me that I was built larger than most of the AFAB* people I surrounded myself with. My shoulders were broader, my chest larger, my limbs longer, and many things that I felt weren’t “womanly” enough. I spent so much of my youth trying to correct these things as if that would magically fix all of my problems. This sent me into a life long battle with my relationship towards not only my body, but also my relationship towards food. At twelve, I started to lose a lot of weight and I started counting all the calories I would eat in a day. It’s as if the numbers went down, then so did the things that made me seem more “manly”. This was around the time that I started to realize I was transgender. Turns out that eating less than 500 calories a day wouldn’t solve my body dysmorphia or my gender dysphoria. As time went on, I tried to correct these things even more. I wore dresses and makeup, I grew out my hair, and I started to act more “feminine”. After about 3 years of that, I realized how much these behaviors had made me grow to hate myself. I was not only starting to be unhealthy mentally and physically, but I was full of more self hatred than when I started. Looking back now, 4 years after I came out as transgender and accepted these parts of myself, I realize how harmful these behaviors really were. The thing about that is, I still have these thoughts almost daily. I’m in a position now where I can shut them down, but it’s still strange to me how these gendered behaviors and ideals can still coexist with my existence as a trans man. I know that trying to act more feminine won’t erase my transness, but sometimes I still wish I tried harder. I live my life now, knowing that the gender binary is a colonial ideal that really doesn’t do much but harm the individuals in our society but that doesn’t stop me from thinking about them. I love my transness and the transness of those close to me, so why do these gendered ideas still live in my head from time to time?
There’s a struggle at the very heart of my experience as a trans person. The struggle of trying to navigate a society that heavily reinforces the gender binary in ways that most cis people don’t even think about, while also trying to do away with this outdated notion. A prevailing notion on how one does gender is through their performance. Our appearance & the way we use our body signify to others what gender we are. There is nothing in one’s very nature that makes her a girl, it is how she’s been taught a girl looks & behaves that determines her performance as such. I’ve discussed gender in the abstract, but how does it apply to me? How do I experience gender? Well, I am a demigirl, an identity within the non-binary umbrella where I am a girl, but also partially outside the gender binary. Despite this, in circumstances where I have to interact with mostly cishet people, I desire, but do not achieve, to present as femme as possible, to only be seen as a girl, as I don’t trust the general society to grasp that nuance. If someone even for a fraction of a second thinks that I’m a guy, it’ll create gender dysphoria. So if I’m basically trying to present as a girl, this in a way could be perpetuating the gender binary, by erasing the non-binary aspect of my identity in my presentation. But then how does one present as non-binary? There is a misconception that non-binary inherently means androgynous, because you are neither a boy nor a girl, you must not lean towards looking like either. This just creates a gender trinary, which I feel like is only an improvement from the gender binary in superficial ways. It allows for the expansion of gender in so far as it doesn’t mess with the existing structure too much. In other words, as long as it doesn’t challenge the patriarchy. But then, how do I do my part in transforming society such that the general notions of gender match how diverse it actually is? The only satisfactory answer I’ve been able to come up with is for others to be educated about the nuances of gender. After all, I don’t feel that same pressure in queer, especially trans, spaces. In those circumstances I know I’m around people who have the same or similar enough experience & knowledge of gender that I don’t feel obligated to live up to gendered pressures that are thrust upon me. When I’d go visit my ex-boyfriend, or my ex-girlfriend before that, who are both trans, I knew it wouldn’t matter if I didn’t feel up to looking as femme as I could manage, as they’d still see me as the gender I am. So through my experience with other trans people I know it is possible to live in a society that doesn’t require strict adherence to gendered stereotypes. But I can’t really give a presentation on gender to every passerby on the street, so all I can really do is wait, & until then, hope I’m seen as a girl.
trigger warnings: body dysmorphia, suicide, mentions of disordered eating, illness
If you remember what your body looks like, I think you’re one of the lucky ones. If you don’t, then I’m not so glad this is what we have in common. Coming from an older West Indian family, my body was always a discussion. No matter how many soccer practices I showed up to, salads I ate, nor how well I did in P.E. class, whenever an aunt approached me it was always “You’ve gotten bigger!” Even throughout my adulthood my body has gotten bigger. I know I’m big, but I wish they knew that I didn’t need to be reminded every second of my life.
I think it’s important to note that I wasn’t always fat, but I still struggled with food and dieting at a young age. Having to deal with cholesterol issues during elementary school was the start of my long, relentless relationship with food. I remember sitting in the doctor’s office with my uncle, his eyes glazed over, listening to every word my pediatrician said. My relationship with food not only originates in this moment, but also with my family’s history of heart disease, diabetes, and many other debilitating diseases. By the time I reached high school, my uncle had a coronary angioplasty, stent insertion, triple bypass heart surgery, and several other surgeries for various kinds of cancer. He never wanted me to suffer like he did.
For as long as I can remember, my uncle micro-managed everything that graced my plate. There were even times we fought at the dinner table so he could see whatever takeout I’d brought home. The stress of bringing home any form of food that he would scrutinize started to transfer into other aspects of my life. In middle school I discovered how uncomfortable it made me feel to eat in public spaces. In high school I even went as far as to become the library aide so I could escape the daunting task of consuming food in the adolescent-filled cafeteria and tried my best to retreat back to the library every lunch break. The library was my safe haven, a place of structure for the moments where I felt the most vulnerable. This is still a habit I have today, I always look for security.
It wasn’t until my senior year of high school that I started my first romantic relationship. He was beautiful, smart, and even had a piercing on one ear that was the jackpot of my teenage girl fantasies. Being with him was the first time someone told me I was pretty. For someone that had only dreamed of having a boyfriend, that meant the world to me. I naively thought that feeling would last forever. As the pandemic raged on, and quarantine forced us into our isolated nests, there became an evident strain on our relationship. Still, we continued to stay with each other. I never noticed when his demeanor changed or that I couldn’t fit into half of my jeans anymore, or even that I was getting bigger than him. I made a huge mistake. You know that horrible mistake people make when they get lost in a relationship because they already have constant bodily validation? Yeah, that one. I gained the “happy weight”, I let myself go. People hate happy weight because being fat makes you feel empty and alone after a relationship. Nobody thinks that you’re attractive anymore and it feels like now there’s this huge responsibility that you have to get back to when you were skinnier. I fucked up.
Coming out of that relationship I became extremely depressed. I moved back in with my family, back to a space I never felt secure in. Endless nights spent scrolling through Tinder, a space where your body is always being perceived, felt completely invalidating. I was a completely different person. And I didn’t feel that way because I had loved and learned valuable lessons about navigating relationships, but it was because I was fat. Everytime I looked into the mirror, a devil appeared on my shoulder pointing out every flaw on my now monstrous body. It’s like my ego had turned against me.
I didn’t want to live in my body anymore. I thought I was nothing without the comfort of another person telling me I was good enough. I can’t say that I never feel that way today, but I’ve worked on it. I’m not about to go on a spiel about how much it matters to love yourself, nor about how self-love is a journey and not a destination… but would love really be worth it if it meant that I had to be skinny, athletic, or fit any of the aesthetic qualities guys on dating apps wanted? Probably not. But I want to be better, because I know that the moments in between these feelings of doubt and despair are much more important than these superficial views of my body. Though, how I never saw myself changing is still a phenomena to me.
In the end, I’m still trying to upward spiral out of this feeling called body dysmorphia.
As a bioinformatics student working mostly with AI, I find myself thinking a lot about non-human thinking systems. It makes a lot of sense in a mind/body dualism school of thought to take a brain and put it into a computer. Actual research into the field of machine intelligence has found that, while neuromorphic AI (AI designed based on models of the human brain) is the place where the best progress has been made, models of the brain are only about a tenth as capable as an equally complex biological network. Additionally the constraints of these systems don’t behave in a way consistent with that of our subjective experience as thinking systems. The one most relevant to the conversation around phenomenology is that of the input requirements for neural networks. Even “generative” neural networks like StyleGANN (https://thispersondoesnotexist.com) use an input of random numbers generated by a computer to give an output. For a thinking human this tends to go against one’s general impression of how their own thought processes work, however phenomenology points out that we are constantly receiving input both from our bodies/senses, as well as in the form of the recursive input of our own focus.
Another thought I have had is whether or not animals have a sense of mind-body dualism. This is actually something that has been studied experimentally! The experiment generates involves a control of placing the animal in front of another member of its species and watching its reaction(s) followed by placing the animal in front of a mirror and watching its reactions. Some animals see their reflections and interpret them as another animal of the same species, unable to distinguish between reflections of the self and other individuals. Most animals just generally ignore their reflections. especially adults who have seen their own reflections in water or glass. Some animals show initial confusion followed by an understanding that the animal in the mirror is the body that is attached to the stream of thought in their head. Most of these animals will remember that experience too and will no longer show confusion in front of the mirror, showing that they have some persistent sense of self. It’s all fascinating and while I would love to write more about it I have to run this in since it’s getting late.
For the entirety of my life up until college I was living with the view that how society saw me didn’t matter, that I could reach my goals by acting and looking however I wanted. I was naturally skinny and with my tall build I looked like a noodle. My social skills were severely underdeveloped, I wore clothes that didn’t help my appearance, I only showered when I felt like it; for a time my hair looked like I went to the barber and asked for the lamest looking cut they could think of. My first semester living on campus I decided to change that. I started going to the gym. I made a friend there, and we started going to the RAC everyday at 7:00 in the morning. I liked the progress that I saw from working out, and my newfound confidence helped me make friends in my dorm. We went shopping together to buy clothes that weren’t hand-me-downs and three sizes too big on me, and eventually I found that my lame old self that I pitied was gone.
This drastic change in my life has altered the way I view society. Society today has taught us that we don’t need to change ourselves because we are perfect the way we are, but that is simply untrue. Unless you are your best self you should always be changing and bettering yourself in everyway possible; that is evolution. Now whenever I see someone defend their lazy actions it irritates me that they believe that they think the choices they are making are correct. “Oh, I have a fast metabolism, I can’t gain weight!” – eat more, “I don’t have enough time to workout.” – cut out the time wasters from your day; these are statements from people that I regularly see do the absolute minimum to take care of themselves, and prioritize indulging in media instead of being productive. They’re unenergized, they’re not social, and they wonder why they are depressed. They remind me of who I used to be before I started working out, and I truly believe that everyone would be an infinitely better version of themselves if they started to “Go Jim”.
In our society, we are often taught and encouraged to see the mind and body as two different entities, separate from each other. In this mind and body split, the mind is usually the part of us that is more important. We are conditioned to choose things that relate to the mind over things that relate to the body. For example, we are supposed to come to school/work when we are not feeling well, because our minds are prioritized in those settings. With schoolwork, we are supposed to “grind,” and may ultimately be forced to pull all-nighters to complete an assignment, or study for a test. For our bodies, when it comes to “body projects,” we only involve and focus the body (and when the journey of these body projects gets rough or hard, we are supposed to put aside our complaints). Overall, it’s very apparent that in society we are taught that the mind and body are separate things, even though both are simultaneously a part of us, and supposed to work together.
But how far can the idea of this mind and body split be pushed onto us?
As I understand it, the concept of embodiment seeks to move away from the Cartesian mind-body dualism, which posits that our minds and our physical bodies are distinct entities, and towards the idea that we are our bodies. We experience, know, and perceive the world through our bodies, and in return we are experienced and perceived by others through the lens of our bodies. An important factor in our body experience and the way our bodies are perceived is gender. Do I have a gender, or am I my gender? Do I have a body, or am I my body?
I looked at myself as an ally for all my life but, looking back now, I put on the mask of a helper and fully convinced myself that I was making a difference by following the cause, but I never really acted for the better of it. In college I became an affiliate of the Center for Women in Technology, an organization at UMBC fighting for equality for all. CWIT opened my eyes to the issues that plague today’s society and how I could assist in the fight for equality. I am surprised that a course like my first-year experience for CWIT is not mandatory for everyone. I feel like a simple course like this being worked into all high school curriculum would make a world of difference in the visibility of today’s issues and gather more support for the cause. Coming out of high school, I knew these problems existed, but they were not in the front of my focus because I am a cis white male. I did not have to experience the pain that comes with most of them, however I did secondhand experience them through my mom and stepmother.
So all my life I’ve lived with this one question: “What are you?” Whether it came from people I didn’t even know, or it came from my friends, they all had the same question. And I understand to some degree. I am pretty ethnically ambiguous looking and sometimes I straighten my hair which further confuses people. It still doesn’t make it okay though.
In the TV and film industry, there are various ways in which women are not seen or treated as equals. It can be as simple and commonly known as the lacking amount of pay a woman receives for a role, and as deep as it starting with the character in the script. Stereotypes and gender roles are everywhere, and are engrained in our minds by the media we consume. Take a moment to think about the long term amount of male dominant sexual themes in TV and film. It is seen as okay for a man to explore his sexual urges and fantasies. It is also okay to show a man pleasing himself and reaching climax, sometimes even showing the messy aftermath. But women? Forget about it. Unless satire, I don’t know of any movies where they are portraying a woman sensually. It wasn’t until recent years that I’ve seen female roles that get to indulge in their sexual desires. A few examples; “50 Shades of Grey” (although it portrays male dominance), and Netflix’s “365 Days” (also male dominated, and based on manipulation and abuse that turns into “love”, yikes). I believe the reason for this mostly ties back to stereotypes. Religion is also a factor at times, but that is a whole different side of the story for another day. A man and a woman can have the same “body count” and one would be a “god” while the other “used up” and dirty. Men that are sexual can be praised for it, while if women are sexual they are “slutty”. Unless women are being dirty on a man’s terms, of course. Then, it’s a hot, kinky medium and she’s a freak! I hope for a day where I can see more media where stereotypes are shattered. I understand that they will likely never be fully rid of, but I am looking forward to see the growth in each generation to come.
Unruly Bodies 