What you have to look like to be a transwoman

When I was like, eight years old, my parents brought home a Wii Balance Board and a copy of the game Wii Fit. They had what I think was a pretty typical relationship with health and fitness. My mother was always kind of interested in yoga and since we owned a Wii it probably made sense to buy one. They encouraged me to play it too. The game, after all, was marketed to the whole family.

The Wii Balance Board had pressure sensors that tracked your balance while you played fitness games. It could also measure your weight. At the beginning of every session (which the game encouraged you to do every day), it'd measure and keep track of your weight as you worked towards your goals. Pretty normal so far.

As an eight year old I hadn't ever really been exposed to fitness culture. I didn't have any "weight goals" and it's not really clear what that ought to mean for someone who hadn't hit puberty yet. All I had was the persistent messaging in media that fat people are intrinsically less "good" than thin people for vague, health-related reasons. I don't remember my weight ever having a serious effect on my life. Not until I started playing Wii Fit, anyway.

Apparently, based on my age, height and weight, I had a BMI the game considered "obese." To mark the occasion Wii Fit would show a little animation of your body rapidly inflating and then play a demeaning jingle.

You were supposed to do this every day.

And I did, for several months.

I tried to spend an hour on the balance board daily. Around the same time, I started using the MyFitnessPal Calorie tracker, aiming to limit my intake to 1200 Calories a day (Calorie needs vary quite a bit between people but needless to say, this is vastly below the amount of food needed for a growing child). This went on until one day when my parents were trying to get me to leave the house. I'd convinced myself that in order to lose weight I needed to get to net-zero caloric intake¹, and so I'd spent most of the day exercising on the balance board. I'd begged them to let me keep going but eventually they just turned off the Wii. I started crying. I wasn't allowed to play Wii Fit anymore. A very wise decision on their part.

Of course, that wasn't the end of my fitness journey. When I was in middle school I joined the cross country team, and for the longest time running was my exercise of choice. This isn't to cast judgment on runners, but I think most people will know what I mean when I say running, and cardio more generally, is the exercise conventional wisdom tells you to do if you're in the business of losing weight. Not everyone's in it to lose or maintain weight, but a lot of people are. Some people genuinely enjoy the experience of running. Others (myself included) manage to convince themselves that's what they're in it for, when in reality it's mostly just the prospect of losing weight.

Besides squats and other exercises that promise to give you a bigger butt, cardio is also often the exercise of choice of transwomen looking to develop a more feminine figure. It's often implicit or explicit that thinness is basically a prerequisite for passing as a women. Transwomen further down their own path to transition will often counsel newcomers, caveating this to say it's is a "sad but true" reality women face. That to be fat is to be less woman.

I think this is a good example of a broader phenomenon in fitness culture that I'm inclined to call a sociogenic psychosis. Importantly, it's a form of psychosis that's socially acceptable, maybe even kind of required. I'm hesitant to abuse medical terms for these things but I do think I have spent most of my life delusional about my weight, and that I've long had delusional perceptions about my body.

In the case of transwomen, it's the idea that to become a woman is essentially to become a sort of twink. A thin, scrawny man. That the twinkish body is the canvas upon which femininity is created. It's as though fat women don't exist, or that they somehow look less like women than thin women do. This, I think, is a delusion. Looking at it plainly, I can't think of a time I've ever looked at a fat woman and thought she looked like a man, or even looked less like a woman than a thin woman. Unlike transwomen who transgress the conventional, patriarchal notion of what it means to be a women, there is an entirely, socially coherent notion of women who are fat.² It's also never occurred to me that a transwoman looks more or less feminine specifically because of their weight.

More generally, I think about all the times I've gotten annoyed at people for making self-deprecating comments about their weight, when I've always seen them as being less fat than I am. Of course, fatness is a spectrum between BMI Too Thin.mp3 to BMI Very Fat.mp3, but comments like that always felt loaded with judgments not only about themselves but also about others. They betray a way in which you view the world, that you are inadequate or morally incorrect for reasons you don't really understand and that fail to hold up to scrutiny. Reasons you cling to nonetheless.

If you think you're fat, at 130 lbs and 1200 Calories a day, what do you think of me?

I've probably run for most of my life at this point. I ran all through middle school. I joined the cross country team in high school and I got kind of good at it. Not like, crazy good, but I participated in some provincial competitions. I never won anything, but I did meet some of the people who did.

In my hometown there was a pair of girls who were crazy good at running. They always placed first and second in the regional competition, typically clocking in at a significantly lower time than the fastest runner in the men's division. I admired them quite a bit for it. My coach told me that to train, they ran for at least an hour every day, six days a week.

He suggested we adopt a similarly intense schedule. Five days a week, each day with a variable duration. One day a week we'd go on a long run. The idea was that each week you could do the whole run without stopping, you'd add two minutes: 1 going out, 1 going back. This would allow you to gradually build up stamina. Spending upwards of five hours a week just running, not including prep, warm up and cool down, is incredibly demanding. Not only physically, but also in that there is a finite number of hours in a day you need to allocate to the things you care about.

But, I kept doing it all through the eleventh and twelfth grades. When the lockdown hit I kept going, wearing a cheap surgical mask as I ran. I was obviously going through a lot at the time what with the being closeted among other things, and I think the empty-headed feeling you get after running in the dead of Canadian winter helped a bit. Each week, the number crept up. The longest I remember going was an hour out and an hour back; two hours total.

Then… I stopped. And then I started again. It happened quite often. You have a bad day, something comes up, and it gets hard to get back in the swing of it. You work up the courage to try again. After a while it gets hard to schedule around it. Exercise can help with school work to a point—not so much when you have to plan most of your day around it. When I got to university it got much harder to plan runs because I never abandoned the notion that to be healthy is to spend over an hour straight running every single day.

The thinnest I think I've ever looked was in those last two years of high school when I was running four to six hours a week. For a long time, even well into my transition, it's weird to think that I looked back on those old images of myself with a bit of envy. Envy for a body that was small, frail, masculine and constantly in pain.

Part of what I think made it so hard to develop a healthier relationship with my health was that I never knew how. Not one that mandates eating only five hundred Calories of broccoli every day. While I've long known intuitively that diet culture was largely bunk, the only story of "being healthy" I ever had was one of eating less and spending an ever increasing amount of your time on the trails.

Around a year ago now, Paris Marx interviewed author Casey Johnston about digital detoxes on Tech Won't Save Us:

Johnston had just published her memoir "A Physical Education", which she pitched as, well, the thing I'd spent years looking for: a perspective on health that abandons diet culture's delusional perceptions about weight loss:

Her thing is weightlifting. She sort of soft launches strength training as a way to fix your relationship with your body. Admittedly I wasn't very convinced by the idea at first, and I earnestly believed that in reading this book I could go back to doing cardio, but like, for the correct reasons this time. Needless to say that didn't pan out, and now I go to the gym three times a week (something I'd NEVER have imagined myself doing a year ago). I think I saw parallels between her story and my own.

Whether or not strength training sounds like something you'd be interested in, if you also see a bit of yourself in this story and want to learn what it means to be healthy without destroying your body five days a week for ill-defined reasons, see if you can find a copy of this book at your library. I'm not sure if I've ever read a book that so profoundly impacted the way I think about my body, short of maybe Gender Trouble.

Footnotes

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