Cross-post: My Trans Fat Story

Just so you know ahead of time, I’m not referring to the naughty substance.

I’m referring to the naughty identity. I am a gender-bending small fat person.

All my life I have loved being a girl, but always felt incomplete. Inside of me is not just a girl, but a boy. I longed to be tall, big, strong, and to live my life as a man at various points in my life. When I was little and my friends and I were playing house, I gladly played the father. As a teenager, I started singing and discovered that I have a contralto voice. I am capable of singing male parts as low as the top range of Bass I and as high as the bottom range of Soprano I. My sister used to love to tell me I was built like a lumberjack. When I began to grow breasts, it caused me depression and anxiety and I used to stand in front of the mirror and claw at them. At night, I would wear the smallest bras as tight as I could in the hope that they would stop growing.

Finally, at 14 I began gender-bending and I discovered that I can make myself look and act very much like a man, such that people actually mistake me for one on the street or do not recognize me if they know me. I was raised in a small conservative town, so I wasn’t in good company and even people who ordinarily are in favor of gay and lesbian inclusion or people expressing themselves in general did not like me as a man.* To say the least, my parents absolutely hated it.

Hated it.

Hated it.

Did I mention that my parents hated that their daughter was androgynous? And that people, oh my good golly gosh, KNEW about it?

They thought I was depressed and that there was something wrong with me or how they raised me. They would talk about me in hushed tones when they thought I couldn’t hear. You know, that wicked aggravating hushed tone parents use when they have no clue what they’re doing or talking about, but they need to have a good story to tell or something to start with so they can “be strong.”

It got worse as I got taller, more muscular, and, yes, fatter. Every shoe size up was another step away from the feminine ideal I had been taught to aspire to. I grew so fast one year that I developed a scoliotic deformity and a limp, and my mother was so ashamed that she did not want to take me to the doctor and simply told me to stand up straight. Aside from being unattractive in itself and being mildly crippling, it shifts your proportions and can make you appear fatter than you are.

To make a long story short, I am now a proud gender-bender. I live most of my life as a casually-dressed woman, but I can also be androgynous, feminine, sporty feminine, hyperfeminine, as well as formally and sporty masculine. These are all categories I made up to describe the different gender presentations I can adopt. My father now proudly takes me shopping for men’s clothes and my mother is grudgingly accepting my tomboy side (sporty masculine).

The best news of all is that while my size and shape once caused me grief, it is now a magnificent addition to my gender-bending lifestyle. I cannot speak for gender-benders who are larger or smaller than me, but being my size — a small fat person — I have found my body endlessly adaptable.

Some of the assets of my size are:

• Larger curves to work with when applicable to wearing corsets, form-fitting clothes, and lingerie
• The ability to alter size perception downward (i.e., by wearing black or pinstripes for a leaner look or binding to minimize breast size)
• Height and muscularity for masculine roles (I am very muscular)
• Height can be useful in supermodel-type roles
• Having large feet makes me look good in men’s dress shoes, feminine dress boots, and chunky heels
• Scoliosis and altered body proportions make it super easy to imitate male gait and assume a “tough” posture
• Because my hair is long, I can wear it feminine (long) or masculine (short or tucked under a wig).

For the record, I am not saying that only women can have long hair or that women with little feet can’t wear chunky heels. I am just saying that for the roles I adopt, my physical features happen to be well-adapted to the clothes I seek for those roles. Everyone presents differently when they go gender-bending.

The only downside is shopping for clothes. I have no problem in the men’s department, except that I’m not used to their sizing scheme. Shopping for cute women’s clothes can be harder because I am sized out of many of the best-looking clothes, partly because of height and weight, but also proportions. Believe it or not, the absolute best place to buy clothes is in costume shops or department stores around Halloween, especially if you are a flamboyant gender-bender.

People often crossdress for Halloween to emulate favorite characters, so it’s not uncommon to find one-size-fits-all costumes for both genders. For those of you who are not flamboyant, or who are not in the mood to be flamboyant at the moment, I would still recommend buying clothes around Halloween because you can mix and match, take things apart or put them together, for something less aggressive. I have SO many clothes that double as Halloween costumes and you could never tell the difference.

I still have trouble cross-dressing in public, but being open about it and using my body, my voice, and all my features to my advantage makes it feel natural to me. Knowing where to find other cross-dressers helps, and alternative sexual communities are usually much more accepting of different bodies and abilities than the vanilla sex scene.

Everyone in FA has done it, struggled about exercising the right to be you, and every day, it becomes easier to just be me.

How did you be you today? Any other GBs in the house?

*I would think that people who support gays, lesbians, and transgender people would accept androgynous people and crossdressers, but I guess some people are NIMBY types. They are all for it if they don’t know you personally.