How do I love my trans friends through their internalized fatphobia?

I got this lovely question in my Tumblr ask box recently, from a trans masc who has recovered from body dysmorphia and learned to embrace their own body enough to find our current cultural moment of thin-worship quite disturbing. Unfortunately, many of their trans friends aren’t quite there yet, and seem to be caving under the pressure and hating themselves for their ‘failure’ to live up to beauty ideals. They want to know how they can support their trans friends through all of this internalized body-loathing without losing their own progress or abandoning their politics:

I think there are a couple of questions nested within one another here.

The first is how you can handle the deeply fatphobic cultural moment we are in, which is deeply triggering to anybody with an eating disorder, dysmorphia, or dysphoria related to their own body, and which has really bled into how a lot of people speak about themselves and their choices around health and eating.

This issue is the most practical one to address. I think you can and probably should separate your own body politics from what you expect of the people around you, while making sure to still take care of yourself. You can do this by appreciating the politically evolved position you are lucky to be in, showing a little respect for the internal hell that many of your friends are going through, and by setting boundaries on what aspects of fatphobia and gender dysphoria you are willing to talk about, so that you’re not constantly having to wade through your friends’ self-hating brain soup.

For years you were dragged through the gender dysphoric, fatphobic cultural ringer, it seems, and you’ve come out the other side having made peace with yourself. You see how the pressure to be thin keeps so many transgender people weak and hidden away, and you’ve suffered from having once felt similarly. All you want to do is spare your friends from the dysmorphia that prevented you from seeing your own body clearly…but you also had a few forces on your side that made unlearning this stuff easier.

You never developed an eating disorder. You never had to deal with the full force of cultural fatphobia, because you are thin. And unlike many of the self-loathing friends that you are speaking about, you are not trans femme, and so for you, transitioning has meant getting further away from the terrible demands that society makes of women and their bodies.

I say this not to minimize your suffering, but to acknowledge that you got to unlearn body-shame on easy mode, relatively speaking. Letting go of the fear that you were ‘fat’ did not have to cost you much, because you never were fat in the first place, and relatively fewer people would have taken issue with you or your gender even if you were.

Keeping all this in mind, you are lucky to be at a level of self-acceptance and political awareness that it might take your trans femme friends a lot longer to arrive at. You simply cannot get everyone else to be on the same page as you, and for many people, eventually moving into a more fat liberatory perspective is a lengthy process.

I know that for me, I had to attempt to lose weight and fail at it enough times that I was ready to give up on the fantasy that changing how I looked would fix how people treated me. I also had to self-educate a ton on so-called *besity paradox and set point theory and learn that being fat is frequently quite healthy and always very difficult & dangerous to change. I had to surround myself with lots of fat people and glorified fat imagery, have sex with a lot of fat people that I found attractive and make sure to treat them well, stand up for my fat friends when they were excluded, embark on a physically uncomfortable and years-long process of refeeding myself, and get actually comfortable with my gender presentation through a combination of hormones, fashion, and surgery.

And, oh yeah, even after I did all of that I still relapsed in my eating disorder quite a few times, including the last couple years, when I felt quite despondent about how ‘masculine’ and bulky T made me. Then I had to transition into a curvier, more feminine (but still androgynous) shape that I genuinely liked, so that seeing my body getting bigger was finally something I could celebrate.

If it took all that effort for me to overcome bodily self-loathing as a trans masculine person who has always been thin, you can imagine how much effort it might take for some trans women, particularly ones who are fat, and are being told constantly that they are not trying hard enough to the ideal type of woman.

Your friends have a whole long, painful journey of transitioning amidst transmisogyny and fatphobia ahead of them. Many of them will eventually realize that trying to make themselves smaller will not spare them, and that in fact they need the trans fats and the seed oils that will make their breasts perch like two fresh pears glistening in the sunlight, in the moonlight. In the meantime, they might say and do a lot of self-hating stuff that is also really triggering and fatphobic, and it can be really emotionally hard to deal with.

Ultimately, telling a beloved friend that you completely disagree with every aspect of how they think and are living their lives is gonna be alienating and put them on the defensive. What you can do instead is love your friends through their internalized transphobia, and not put up with any bullshit that hurts you or the fat people around you

It sounds like you already understand that you can’t change your friends’ opinions and habits if they aren’t already looking to change, and that you have a lot of compassion for where they are. I think that’s great. That will allow you to take some needed psychological distance when they are going on and on about how desperately they’d like to be thinner and get on GLP1s. But you are also allowed to set some of your own boundaries.

You might want, for example, to tell your friends that you don’t want to hear talk about weight loss when you are hanging out together. Don’t shame them, just tell them that you personally find it upsetting and unhelpful to your own healing and that it doesn’t line up with what you believe in.

If you’re hanging out in a crowd of these friends and they start getting into upsetting body talk, ask them to stop, and if they continue, see yourself out. It doesn’t need to be combative, but it can still be firm.

If your friends get defensive and tell you that they need to be thinking this way about their bodies because passing under conventional cis-feminine body standards is important to them or will help keep them safe, you can simply validate that they have a lot of reasons to be feeling the way that they do, say you would never dream of telling them what to do with their own bodies, then reiterate that talk of intentional weight loss is just not good for you and not something you want to be a part of.

They are free to continue chatting about it, posting about it, aspiring toward it all they like. You can accept them as they are and remain humble about the fact that you don’t know what it’s like to be them. There are so many ways in which trans masculine and trans feminine experiences do parallel one another — I especially feel this as an effeminate fag-girl-thing on estrogen — but there are also paths we TMEs never get to walk. Sometimes knowing that you don’t know something really helps.

If you hear your friends being judgmental toward other people’s bodies, you can tell them that it’s unhelpful and hurtful and that you don’t think that it’s right. This is the area where you can be a little bit more forceful. Don’t scold, but do not tolerate cruelty. If you hear these friends expressing disgust about body fat or toward trans people who they feel have fat in any of the “wrong” places, be emphatic about finding those people good, attractive, worthy, deserving of respect, or whatever feels true for you.

As long as you can emotionally regulate your own responses to this stuff when it happens, it should actually be pretty easy to keep your friends’ feelings and your own separate. If you find yourself feeling triggered, step away and calm yourself. If you are offended by something that one of them has said, remember that they are not talking about you or aiming to hurt you, and that any ignorant or body-hating comments that they make come from their own pain.

You can also set boundaries by muting your friends’ social media accounts so you don’t have to see stuff that rankles you. You don’t need to see those fatphobic posts! You can unfollow them! You can spend less time online. When people are caught up in the waves of self-hatred, they have a tendency to Post Through It, and you are under no obligation to bear witness.

Additionally, you will want to take care of your own emotional well-being by consuming a lot of fat positive and liberationist writing, social media accounts, videos, etc, and making sure that you cultivate friendships with people who do not think this way. It will be a lot easier to tolerate the ignorance and internalized baggage of some of your friends if you have others you can lean on for support. Speak about your body image struggles with your therapist, or a support group, find fat-positive trans communities online, or put out feelers for body dysmorphia or eating disorder survivors in your area so that you don’t feel so alone.

The other aspect of your question is really about how to politically resist these kinds of fatphobic social forces while still holding your friends and your community kindly.

I think the way that you do that is by continuing to talk about how distressed you are by these things. Post about it, speak about it, attend fat liberatory events, glorify fatness, challenge people when you see them discriminating against plus-sized people, point it out when you notice that a space is exclusionary because it lacks large enough clothing sizes, or only has chairs with narrow arm rests, or has tables that are bolted to the floor.

Keep being vulnerable about how terribly the culture’s fatphobia hurt you, even if some of your friends do not fully get it. You might be making more of an impact than you know. Change is slow, and people often find it very difficult to face that their actions are hurting others. So even if a buddy of yours immediately follows up on your heartfelt confession of body dysmorphia by posting a long rant about wanting to look ‘snatched’ to their story posts, keep talking about the toll these norms have taken on you anyway.

It sounds like you have a pretty good handle on your own feelings and triggers, so you have the ability to be a positive, emotionally brave influence here. Share the science on body size not being easily changeable, learn about the dangerous effects of GLP1s for weight loss and talk about it, point out systematic fatphobia, share lots of photos of hot fat trans people, celebrate fatness on yourself and your friends who are more self-accepting, post outfits from fat fashion blogs, and when your friends are ignorant on the subject, try to be understanding about their own hang-ups and unyielding in your defense of others.

I know that we are in a very bleak-feeling cultural moment right now, but it will not help you to make every tiny interaction or upsetting moment into something larger and more symbolic than it is. You cannot single-handedly reverse this cultural course, but you can be unmoving in your own beliefs, and attract people who are similarly minded.

You can be a beacon of acceptance and liberation to those around you. And that means loving your friends exactly where they are at, and allowing them to do with their bodies what they wish. When your friends do start unlearning some of their internalized transphobia and fatphobia, they will know that they can turn to you, and if you are patient, they will feel good asking you for support when that time comes.

Good luck!

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