Alternate Title: Dear Society: You’re responsible for 90% of my body and self image issues please cease and desist

Hey, this post will talk pretty extensively about things like fatphobia and weight. If this discomforts you id recommend reading a different blog post.

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So, I’ve gained weight. Not really like- a little bit but a pretty sizable amount. It’s been hard to really muster the courage to even talk about something like this but then I read this comic a little while back: https://x.com/deathamaranth/status/1750329108737806783?s=46 . It resonated with me in a way no other comic about weight/body issues has due to being very similar to my experience and feelings on my experience and coming to term with the fact that I'm simply just fat now. And I kind of wanted to try and explore that topic and my relationship with my body and weight.

The thing that, unknown to me till recently, was the likely cause for my weight gain was the fact that I have PCOS. If you’ve read my Inter-Questioning blog post you’d know that at the time I was looking into if I had PCOS and while I haven’t made a follow up to that post (yet, maybe, idk) It was confirmed through testing my hormones that I have PCOS. If you do even a basic level of research on PCOS you’ll know one of the most common symptoms is weight gain/obesity. Upon hearing that diagnosis all the things I had experienced over the course of the past year made a lot of sense, especially regarding large amounts of weight gained that made me constantly feel self conscious about my body.

I’ve never really been “skinny”, I had always basically just been at an average weight for most of my life. I’ve never been super athletic but I also have never been very sedentary either. Prior to the year of my diagnosis (2023) the most experience I had in my life with weight gain was during lockdown but this wasn’t really anything too significant to me (I went from like 140 to 160 pounds). But once I was out of lockdown this began to drop down to around 150 pounds once I was back at school. PCOS kind of hit me out of nowhere in my life and when I noticed I started to pretty quickly gain a lot of weight it made me feel so lost and confused about myself. I went from 150 to 185 pounds within like a year and I had genuinely no clue how or why and it led to me assessing my really complicated relationship I have with my body and my weight.

I know for a fact I’ve dealt with a lot of internalized fatphobia for most of my life, not towards others but always in the ways I had seen myself. It never really affected me too hard but I could tell it impacted a lot of my actions even in small ways. I’ve never had an ED but I can tell I would sometimes fall into eating very disorderly at times when I felt insecure about my body or felt like I might have been gaining weight. I think being trans played a lot into my feelings about my body when I was first understanding my trans identity as a 13-14 year old. All the trans men I was seeing or who were shown to me as people to look up to or be euphoric from where always skinny, most of the time plus sized trans people were never displayed in the spaces I was in in such a positive light. It made me really self conscious about myself even though deep down I’ve never cared about my weight, were it not for the idea of what other people would think or see it as. I think the combination of trans spaces like that and the general social expectations of women being placed on me from an young age to “be pretty” have had a toll on the ways my internal rhetoric shaped my discussion surrounding my body.

During this time it was pretty much a retreading of these kinds of feelings. I tried a lot to try and justify myself by thinking with a lot of the same internalized feelings I had before to try and figure this out, things like “but I’m not eating really unhealthy” “but I’m decently active” “but I haven’t changed my routine”. I wanted to find a solution to “why” it was happening but in reality none of the things I was telling to myself really mattered. I shouldn’t have to justify my weight to myself, no one should have to feel a need to justify being overweight. You shouldn’t have to be “healthy” to be allowed to just be fat.

I spent a lot of this time in private trying to unlearn a lot of the things I internalized about weight during this time. It’s really eye opening to see the kinds of things that are just socially accepted to be said or felt about people who are overweight once you yourself are actually fat. I feel like id be treading a lot of the same ground most people do when they talk about weight if I were to just touch on the obvious negatives and socially accepted fatphobia (things like pretending to be concerned about a persons weight, telling people simply just eat healthy/work out if they don’t like their weight, comments about looking better if they just lost some weight) but I want to talk about a lot of the sudo-progressive attempts at not being fatphobic. People still seem so hung up on the word fat itself, it’s been something that’s even hard for me to place as a label on myself because of fear surrounding the whole “no you’re not fat! You’re just chubby/soft/big boned” but like, you can say fat too. It’s not a dirty word, I shouldn’t have to be ashamed to just call myself that when it’s not in a derogatory way. If it’s ok to be fat it should be ok to say I’m fat too. I think the thing that’s really irked me especially in online spaces (looking at you furry community.) is when people draw accurate fat bodies and someone feels the need to say shit like “is this a fetish?”, “oh I just know you’re into this” , “why are you drawing fetish art?”. It genuinely makes me blood boil, like no bitch some people are straight up just fat and that’s fine. This obsession with trying to “uncover” an artists “hidden fetish” is so fucking stupid especially when these are literally just bodies, it’s not like they’re posting inflation porn that’s just a fat body sir. It’s genuinely made me nervous to even share the update I have to Cade’s design that accurately reflects my current body because he visibly looks heavier than past versions of his design. Literally stop treating drawings of our bodies like it’s a fetish just because you saw inflation/fat fetish art once on deviantart; if people who draw buff as hell furries can get away with that than there should be no reason we get demonized for drawing our bodies.

I kinda went on a tangent there but my point still stands. We’re never seen for just being people who also happen to be fat, we’re always seen as “something else”. It makes it hard to just, exist. At the end of all of this, when I finally started to loose a lot of my internalized feelings I had towards myself I came to the conclusion that I just don’t really care about my weight. I don’t really care if I’m skinny, I don’t really care if I’m fat, I don’t really care if I’m just something in between. Those feelings about my body aren’t really how I feel about myself, it’s how I’ve been taught to feel. That skinny is good, fat is bad. That there’s no reason a person would be ok with being fat. That if you’re fat you’re clearly doing something wrong. But none of that’s really true, it’s just what we’re taught to believe and I’ve had enough feeling like I have to demonize myself and my body and hide the fact that I’m fat, and that’s fine. Some people are just fat and that’s ok, they don’t need to justify themselves to be allowed to be fat. I shouldn’t have to justify it to be ok with the fact that I’m fat.

I’ve slowly been coming to terms with it all. It’s been helpful to see other people who look like me, especially other transmasc people, seeing art or characters that have my body type, seeing positivity surrounding it all. Giving my sonas my body type and being unapologetic about it all. It’s been good to see people starting to unlearn some of their own internalized fatphobia or move away from bold generalizations about people just drawing fat people. It’s made me feel a bit better about myself and my body. I think after the PCOS diagnosis I’ve really just accepted the fact that I’m just going to be fat and that it’s not really something I have to change if I just don’t feel bothered by it and I’m not. In the end I’ve slowly been trying to come around to my features, the rounded jawline, softer larger/wider frame, my stretch marks, it’s all me. I think it’s nice to remind myself that it’s ok to just be me.