Content Warning: In depth discussion of eating disorders, and self harming behaviors
People love to tell you to love yourself. I don’t believe this to be necessary. One shouldn’t be required to love one’s body. However, in the interest of one’s long-term health, one should apply their energies toward not actively hating oneself or their body. This stance is generally called body neutrality. This can mean a lot of things to a lot of people. A neutral stance towards your body could mean:
1. Focusing less on food/calories:
Depending on your particular mental health situation, taking some time off of focusing on one’s food intake can be beneficial. I have struggled with both weight and food control issues for my entire life. I have had symptoms of an eating disorder since I was about 5 years old. Food consumed my life. So, I decided that I needed to do something radically different. I told myself I wouldn’t weigh myself, count calories, or focus on the perceived “quality” of my diet for a period of time. I think I said 1 month initially. This did nothing for my weight, but it has changed my relationship to my food habits.
I have found that after not focusing on my diet for what turned into a few months, I have been able to reduce occurrences of obsessive thoughts around food. When these thoughts do crop up, I am better able to acknowledge them and let them go. This is radically different than the days long rabbit hole of obsession and control that I used to fall down. I have also found that I am better able to psychologically recover from the number on the scale. My brain used to obsess over that number every time I put a piece of food in my mouth, but now I have done a lot of work, and can more readily let those thoughts pass without much distress on the extremely rare occasion I do get on a scale.
But don’t get it twisted, body neutrality is not a “cure”. I will be in recovery from an eating disorder for the rest of my life, and thus will have to maintain daily practices that keep me mentally healthy. This includes not tracking my food or weighing myself, probably ever again. I have tried to resume these practices several times since taking my first break from them. Every time I try, I find my brain falls back into similar, if slightly less intense, obsessive thought patterns. I have sworn off both of these “healthy” behaviors in the interest of healing, and this healing does not have to include learning to love my body.
2. Body neutrality can help in identifying and reducing harmful behavior patterns:
It wasn’t until I took a hard look at all of the ways in which my eating disorders were affecting my life that I realized I have an issue with body checking. Which can manifest in many ways, but for me, comes in the form of pulling, pinching, squeezing, pressing on, or punching parts of my body that I see as undesirable, sometimes to the point of pain or bruising. For example, every time I looked in the mirror to brush my teeth my eyes lasered in on the pockets of fat and skin that have collected around my hips. For years, I would grab and squeeze and pull at this part of my body all while my head was calling my body the worst things. It wasn’t until I consciously decided to call these thoughts out that I realized how messed up they were. So what if that’s what your hips look like right now? They looked different in the past, and will look even more different in the future. Nothing is forever, so why obsess? For me, body checking is a habit that my brain has convinced me does something good. It doesn’t. It stems from severe childhood trauma that I have yet to process. I only know this because I finally took a step back from the mirror, and the scale, and the calorie counter.
3. Using certain Buddhist meditation techniques can support body neutrality:
I improve my ability to more fully inhabit my body by practicing breath control and passive observance of my thoughts. Breath control is simply focusing on your breathing and only your breathing. I usually try to breathe in a specific pattern such as 5 seconds in – 5 sec hold – 5 sec out – 5 sec hold. This is known in the military as “box breathing” and I have found that alternating this pattern with some regular, controlled in – out breaths can help when my nervous system is fried.
Passive observance of thoughts has been more challenging to implement than breath control techniques. Passive observance is exactly what it sounds like. While sitting quietly one simply tries to fully bring their conscious attention to nothing but the present moment. But at the same time, one should not try to control any thoughts that may arise. One should simply observe that one is having a thought or feeling and return their attention to the present. This means not exploring any lines of inquiry or delving deeper into any feeling that one may be having. Instead, you simply let them exist around you like water around a boulder. On the first few attempts, passive observance can be incredibly difficult to maintain for more than a few minutes at a time. But with practice you will likely see an improvement in your ability to feel present in your body, without positive or negative judgement, which is known as body neutrality.
This practice can also help introduce your brain to the concept that not every thought or feeling deserves a reaction. Simply remembering this can help a nervous system that has been primed by trauma to remain hypervigilant, and thus always ready to produce some kind of reaction.
Nothing presented here is new, or my original idea. Each one of the above is simply a technique or tip that helps me with my personal mental wellness. And don’t take this article to mean that I have an infallible recipe that guarantees this wellness. I grapple with insecurity, doubt, and downright hurtful thoughts on the daily. I don’t like my current weight, but I am working on not actively hating myself for that. Body neutrality has helped me learn to let good enough be good enough. And I guess that will have to be good enough!
All I know is love. Every feeling I have is based in love. I know I’m a romantic, but I cannot imagine making any decision that isn’t based in the timeless, endlessly-facted emotion referred to, in English, simply as love. The Ancient Greeks used at least eight distinct words for different brands of love, from the love of the self (philautia) to the withstanding love between long-term partners (pragma). Sanskrit famously collects 96 individual words to characterise the nuances of love, including erotic love (काम kama), maternal love for a child (स्नेह sneha), and the love between friends (सौहार्दम् sauhardam). In Arabic, there are eleven stages of love describing the initial attraction to another person (الْهَوَى al-hawa) through the heights of passion (اللعَاج sha’af) to the insanity of an obsessive love (الْهُيُوْمُhuyum).
My deep fascination with love as a concept can probably be described similarly to the Greek agape, a universal, unconditional love known in Christianity as God’s love for all humans, which, according to Encyclopedia Britannica, “necessarily extends to the love of one’s fellow humans.” I am so deeply affected by the emotions of other people. This could be the outcome of any number of things: Childhood trauma, being especially empathic, or just another symptom of underlying autism. But perhaps I just love and care for everybody I welcome into my heart so deeply that I adopt their feelings as my own. To understand, compassionately, the truth of the struggle they are going through, or to lighten their load, perhaps.
“Society says that love is one way and very black and white, but we all know that love is a bustling highway and bursting with all vivid colors…. We are all different with different beliefs and a different story to us all, but we are connected through that and our love for each other draws us closer.”
Cece mcdonald, trans activist
I fall a little bit in love with so many people I encounter throughout my day to day life. That love never entirely fades, like the ghost of erased pencil markings in a book, or a faint scar. Forgotten until observed. Reflected upon. Past friendships and lovers I no longer speak to still hold a space in my heart reserved always for them. I feel it would be insincere of me to dismiss the care and intimacy we once shared, as if all the private confessions we made meant nothing, as if I didn’t once feel at home in their arms. Love may change, but it does not disappear.
“Love is unending and cannot be avoided.”
cece mcdonald, trans activist
In recent years I have taken cautious (and occasionally fumbling) steps into the world of polyamory — romantically loving more than one person at once — and it has been both a profound and painful experience, at times. Nothing quite prepares you for the level of self-reflection this practice of love inherently elicits. What does it mean to love, really? What is love practically? How do people experience different kinds of love? How do we experience it ourselves? How can we make others feel the same? To discover, accept, and actively practice an expression of love outside the norm of our present society feels radical not only because I am acting against what is expected of me, but also because I am left with no choice but to turn inward, to explore new forms of self-love, and to unpack the darker corners of my feelings that endanger love for myself and for those around me. Jealousy, fear of rejection, sexual uncertainty, isolation from community. We grow into these shadow feelings, trying to shape the love we find to be the love we expect.
Of course, love is never what we expect. It never plays out like in the ninety-minutes of a romantic comedy or a family drama. Love doesn’t stop growing at a certain point. There are no goalposts for love. It is messy, eternal, fierce, and confronting. Love inspires us to be better people, to create a better world. Love inspires art, determination, transition — in all its forms. Love has made poetry spill from my pen, sweet nothings gush from my lips, fire course through my veins, and tears spill over cheeks that hurt from smiling. Love, for self and community, is where I found the strength to begin my transition at only seventeen, in a conservative country town, knowing no other trans people. Love is where my mother planted the seeds of freedom and identity after an abusive first marriage — she and her new wife now stand as pillars of my belief in love.
I don’t pretend love is always easy and beautiful. Love and hurt have such a close connection in our society, which values the individual, the isolated. We are forced to gamble with our hearts with no guarantee or understanding that exposing our vulnerabilities to the world has its consequences, its effects on other lives. Some of the occasions I’ve been most aware of how big and uncontrollable my heart can be, has been when it aches the most.
Love has sealed my lips in fear of hurting another, and kept them closed when another’s love caused harm. I have been so afraid of losing love that I have sabotaged it before it could have the chance to destroy me. Is love, therefore, something to be feared? Something to step lightly around the edges, never diving in too deep lest we can no longer clamber back out to the safety of emotional distance? I don’t believe so.
We are constantly surrounded by love, constantly striving for it. My political worldview aligns with the international socialist movement, as this is the truest form of humanism I think there is, and because I want to create a world that is open for us to express ourselves truly, to be vulnerable and be loved for it. A world in which those living in hardship, oppressed economically and socially, are welcomed with open arms no matter where they place their feet, where we can achieve our dreams and feel the integral part we play in the lives of others. I want this world to exist simply because people deserve love and community. A German proverb states that “love is above King or Kaiser, lord or laws.” The arbitrary distinctions that are drawn up to separate us, to make us fear one another, breaks my heart. But love and solidarity can be found everywhere. It takes a fight to expand our capacity for love, to keep it glowing and alive, to share that light with others, no matter how different to us they may be. In the words of Che Guevara himself: “At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love… We must strive every day so that this love of living humanity will be transformed into actual deeds, into acts that serve as examples, as a moving force.”
My heart is constantly overflowing with love. I know I love many — not just my two beautiful partners, but family, friends, classmates and supervisors, my doctor who prescribes my hormone therapy and the friendly pharmacist who dispenses it to me, the hospitality workers that keep me nourished, and every pair of hands before them who have built such a beautifully interconnected world. I can feel the love brimming inside me, but like anyone else, I am sometimes at a loss for how to harness and express all of that burning emotion. The best I can do is be kind to those who cross my path, do what I can to be there for my loved ones, and fight like hell for the world I believe in, that future predicated on love for all. Love, like revolution, is not easy, but it is necessary.
Wear your heart on your sleeve. Call your parents, your siblings, your chosen family. Hold your lover a little tighter. Hug your friends a little longer. Read a romance novel and squeal in delight when the heroes finally kiss. Join an action for an environmentally stable future. Stand up for your rights and the rights of other oppressed and exploited communities. Stand up for your own feelings when someone hurts you, strengthen that relationship. Love yourself. Tend to your needs and boundaries. Care for yourself the way you would care for others. Love is endless, in all of us. Share it as broadly as possible. Leave pieces of it wherever you go, you won’t run out. Find it in everything you see and do, in everyone you meet.
Object Names: M16, Eagle Nebula, NGC 6611 Image Type: Astronomical Credit: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)
I love that there are so many trans artists out there. The act of creation lends itself naturally to the trans experience. Not because we “invent” new identities out of thin air, but because the act of transforming one’s thinking about oneself necessitates some amount of creativity. Anyone that has made art for any amount of time can understand that art simply cannot exist in a vacuum. Every part of the process is influenced by innumerable factors, from the artist’s personal perspective, to the logistical limitations of the medium that one chooses for the piece.
Transition feels much the same. You can do your best to put your transness into a vacuum in your mind. You can try to isolate the feelings in an attempt to study and understand them, but this only works for so long. Eventually, many trans people (not all, but many), feel the need to bring these feelings into the world, and into the consciousnesses of the people around them. Art and the act of creation can facilitate this quite readily.
“To be an artist in the largest sense is to be fully awake to the totality of life as we encounter it, porous to it and absorbent of it, moved by it and moved to translate those inner quickenings into what we make.”
Maria popova
The Act of Creation Can Open the Door to Self-Exploration
Self-exploration through the act of creation was the impetus for creating this site as it exists now. Originally, this blog was going to be a “trans focused” business and financial blog. I know, even I’m laughing. I started writing generic business focused content with a “trans spin”, but that well of creativity soon ran dry. The content I was creating ended up being just another business blog, which I think we can all agree, the world really doesn’t need. And then it took a particularly bad day, but I had something of an epiphany.
On this bad day, I was so down, and dysphoric that I literally just typed the phrase “trans joy” into Google. This was around the time that Elliot Page posted that picture of his first time swimming in nothing but board shorts out by a pool. It seemed like every single media publication seized this photo and just plastered it around the internet as “the epitome of trans joy”. No shade to Elliot at all, he was just feeling himself and wanted to share that. What I had a problem with was that I needed something to which I could relate. A photo of an impossibly smooth-skinned, straight sized, white guy who was well into his transition and post top surgery was not something that inspired any particular joy in me, a trans man who will never be able to take his shirt off even after top surgery. I looked further afield than Google, but ultimately I was left bereft of a single substantive, relatable instance of trans joy that I could point to. I decided I would write myself into some trans joy, the fruits of which then became one of the cornerstones of this site.
Once I started writing about my relationship to transness, I was hooked. I realized this simple act of creation could be a key to understanding what I was going through. Just getting started with writing again reinvigorated my love of other forms of art, especially art made by other trans people.
Creation Can Inspire Connection with a Community
I am autistic. I do not generally enjoy much company, and I struggle with making friends. But, once I dove headfirst into creating I found that there were plenty of other people who felt similarly. There are so many neurodivergent trans people online, and online communication can be a bit easier for many people, myself included.
Beyond the practical aspects of connection, there is a spiritual aspect to the act of creation. Creative work can bring with it a sense of control when every other aspect of life feels turbulent. When I started writing again, it took a good long while but eventually, I felt like I had a handle on some part of my life, because I knew what I was writing and when. I was writing things that inspired me spiritually, and piqued my intellectual curiosity. It was this foundation of renewal and strength that allowed me to finally feel like I had the energy and space to reach out to other people. I have made a couple new connections with people that I am very glad to have met. These relationships are in their early days, but even if I never hear from any of these people again, I am very glad that my writing was able to facilitate these introductions.
Your World Expands When You Engage in Creativity
Samuel Jackson The Dawn of Creation, 1830s
I credit my art with some of the biggest instances of personal growth I’ve been through. My first memory of intentionally creating artwork that was more than a crayon drawing was the first short story I ever wrote. One evening, eight year old me was bored and alone in my room, as usual. So, I sat down, pulled out a pen and paper, and wrote a short, slightly rambling story about an anthropomorphized cat who was himself an author. (I distinctly remember that this humanoid cat used he/him pronouns.)
This first call to the act of creation was the spark of passion which I still hold for art in most of its mediums. The next school year my teacher started giving free art lessons after school, during which she gave us a solid foundation on the history of Western art, and also gave me the chance to try drawing with pastels, and painting with acrylics for the first time. My teacher asked if she could submit some of my drawings to a contest at the county fair, in which I managed to get my first ever award. I was not an athletic child, and until that point had not won or even placed in any sort of competition. But with art, I was able to get my first ever “Second Place” ribbon.
The summer vacation following that school year was the first one my sibling and me didn’t spend with our father, so my mother had to arrange for a babysitter. This sitter was already slated to volunteer at some art classes at the community center, so my mother just told her to bring me along. This class also provided me the opportunity for many firsts. I worked with clay for the first time, and I think I still have the two little mouse figurines I made. I learned even more about art history, this time including art from cultures outside of Western Europe. While this was definitely not the first time I encountered art outside of the Western corner of the art world, this was the first time I studied anything other than Western art in a semi-academic context.
This class broadened my view of the art world, certainly, but it also gave me one of my first opportunities at independence. Because my sitter was a volunteer, she was busy at the community center both before and after the class, so I had a good amount of time to myself. My sibling decided they were old enough to stay home alone, so I was truly independent. Sometimes, I even had a little bit of pocket money because my mother would occasionally give me whole dollar for a snack. These are some of the few good memories I have of this time in my life, and it is not lost on me that art was always at the center of them.
Let’s fast forward to this past year. I started writing again, but I also started looking for other creatives to connect with. Once I started drawing through lines between the content I was consuming and the experiences of the people with whom I was connecting, I realized that my understanding of the world was more limited than I thought.
What Radicalized Me? The Act of Creation
Button, Votes for Women, Women’s Political Union. PL*242991.017.
This title is a bit of an oversimplification, but the heart of it holds true. The act of creation is not the sole reason I am a radical leftist, but art has opened my eyes to the breadth and variety of “the trans experience”. Meaning, there is no singular “trans experience”. There simply couldn’t be. Trans people are present in every culture, tradition, family type, and race on this earth. Anyone, anywhere, at any point in time could be transgender or otherwise gender nonconforming.
If we accept the truth of this fact, we understand that trans art is one of the few actions that has the capacity to be a truly universal part of being trans. Every human has the potential to make art, and channel their personal experiences through an artistic medium. I also like to believe that every person has the capacity to appreciate beauty in some form. When we allow the creative works of others into our consciousness, we can open opportunities for connecting to experiences that are vastly different from our own. A white person, like myself, can never understand what it is to move through this world being coded as Black, but engaging with the creative works of Black artists is one of the many avenues people have to gain insight into what that artist has to say about their experiences.
The same can be said for one’s gender. Someone who has questions about themselves may do well to engage with the perspectives of people at all stages of their transition. This is one of the only viable remedies to the sometimes violent transphobia that many of us have been force fed. When I first went public with my transness (meaning I told my girlfriend), I was stuck on trying to figure out why I struggled so much with my gender as a kid. Among other things, a big reason I didn’t bother to address my feelings is because for a long time, I didn’t think I “qualified” as a trans man because back then, I wasn’t comfortable asserting myself to others as a man.
Of course, I now know I was terribly off base with this line of thinking. This is a textbook example of internalized transphobia. Art and engaging with the creative works of a variety of people, especially nonbinary people, was the main factor in changing my thinking. I now know that I am not obligated to insist that I’m a man, even though I do currently describe myself and wish to be described this way. I know that I am allowed to just exist as myself, in whatever way makes me the most comfortable and safe, because I have now seen many people who exist this way.
Once I accepted this ability to exist as a possibility for myself, it suddenly became very important to me that I help ensure all trans people have this possibility. This means that in order to make the world a safe, and healthy place for any trans person, we need to take into account the experiences of all trans people without expecting the most oppressed among us to teach the least oppressed among us how to do this. It is on white trans people who identify with the white cultural conceptualizations of gender (who some people call “binary trans people”) to do the leg work of expanding our own perspectives. In my opinion, engaging with art and in mutual aid actions are two of the most important and impactful means of making this world a better place for everyone.
Trying the Act of Creation Yourself
So, I cannot say that art, itself, radicalized me. However, I can say that it has been the biggest facilitator of personal, political, and intellectual growth in my life to date. Given this reality, I strongly encourage you to engage further with the creative works of others. Here are some examples of actions you can take to start this process:
Follow the social media accounts of artists from all different backgrounds, races, and economic statuses. There’s a big, wide world out there. We can’t all afford to physically explore it, so the next best thing is to actually read and engage with art and creations from people who lead different lives from ourselves.
Create something yourself. Find a medium that you’re curious about and are able to access. Social media works well for exploring the ins and outs of different mediums. Heck, even making pretty slime can be an artistic act.
Engage in mutual aid. There are a ton of ways you can do this. If you are white and financially capable of doing so, I highly encourage you to educate yourself further on the matter of reparations, and give a portion of your income (1-2% per month) directly to BIPOC, or to a local mutual aid organization that supports these populations. But don’t get it twisted, monetary donations are not the only way to engage in mutual aid. Start a local carpool, offer to buy food for a neighbor, offer to text someone who is visiting with family that is difficult for them, or look into the myriad other ways to provide (and accept) mutual aid.Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
“As my friend Julian puts it, only half winkingly: “God blessed me by making me transsexual for the same reason God made wheat but not bread and fruit but not wine, so that humanity might share in the act of creation.”
