Icon from a picrew by grgikau. Call me Tir or Julian. 37. He/They. Queer. Twitter: @tirlaeyn. ao3: tirlaeyn. 18+ Only. Star Trek. Sandman. IwtV. OMFD. Definitionless in this Strict Atmosphere.
Hey I don’t know who might need to hear this but you don’t need to lose weight to transition. You don’t need to lose weight to pass. Don’t feel obligated to meet those beauty standards, they were fucked from the start.
Signed, a fat trans gal
Well this post blew up a little bit while I was asleep didn’t it?
Looking through all the emotional responses people have had I really do think we as a community need to work towards elevating plus sized voices within the trans community. A lot of representation for a very long time has just been exclusively or near exclusively thin bodies, which does warp ones view of the entire trans experience and transitioning.
Also to everyone who left a comment saying you needed to hear this I’m glad I could add some positivity to your days and I hope you all reach your transition goals regardless of what shape your body is. <3
To all the fat trans people, and fat nonbinary people, and fat every-flavor-of-“thanks-but-no-thanks-on-that-assigned-gender” people who follow me: you are exactly as much [insert your correct state of gender here] right now, in the real-life body you own, as you would be if that body were [insert amount] smaller. Gender is not found in the empty space around you.
“Gender is not found in the empty space around you.”
Real talk girls get asked this question repeatedly from the age of about seven. It’s also phrased as “if you could change one thing about your appearance, what would it be?”
Nope gosh dang it I have more to say. Why are girls expected to answer this question like it’s “what’s your favorite color” or something innocuous? Why is this even remotely okay? This is in quizzes, girl’s diaries + activity books, magazines, party games, and school reflections. How is that okay? Why are girls expected to have an answer to this question? Why is it supposed to be normal to decide that you hate a part of your body? Why are we teaching children this?
Honestly, nothing made me angrier than when I learned that you are supposed to gain weight during female puberty.
You’re supposed to get thick around the middle, you’re supposed to get baby fat. You’re developing tits, which are basically just fat, you’re developing wider hips, which require more fat— it’s literally just how female puberty works, you get fat around the middle in your early teens and and then your body moves that fat later on to the places it needs to go.
You’re supposed to develop curves. “Curvy” isn’t just “a nice word for fat” like I genuinely thought in my teens, it’s literally just how your body is meant to be shaped. Afab people naturally store more fat.
(For the record, there’s nothing wrong with being actually fat either, and some people’s bodies are just meant to be shaped that way. Being fat doesn’t necessarily mean you’re unhealthy. Just in general, fat isn’t inherently bad.)
Faces as well. Like not just for afab people, but people’s faces are naturally rounder in their teens and early twenties, and naturally change and gain definition later on. Like this is why “baby-faced” is a thing— young people’s faces look different.
(The reason the young people on TV don’t look like that, fyi, is because most of the young people on TV are played by 30 year old actors.)
Nobody ever told me this growing up. I used to do fucking exercises in front of the mirror as a teen to try and make my face thinner, because I was so self-conscious about my cheeks being chubby and my face being round, and then years later I found out that that was fucking normal, that that’s just what young people’s faces fucking look like…
I’ve posted about this before, but genuinely, we need better education about puberty in schools. Like conversations like this always centre on sex ed specifically, and obviously that’s important, but honestly it would have saved me so much heartache growing up if somebody had sat me down and told me exactly what was going to happen to my body, rather than just sticking to the basic ‘pubes, periods and tits’ talk that seems to be all schools actually want to cover.
Real talk it’s actually very gratifying to write Julian being utterly, hopelessly, horny for Garak and not getting why anyone who likes men wouldn’t be
The point here is not that Garak is unattractive and Julian has a skewed perception BTW its about the fact that Garak has multiple traits that render him unattractive to the average Star Trek audience (which is also true of Julian- there’s a reason Siddig didnt consider himself handsome at the time DS9 was filmed and its because Americans have no fucking taste. Which is also why I don’t think ‘Julian gets no puss’ jokes are funny). Garak is pretty and sexy and as a character exists in a time when middle aged fat effeminate men are not considered sexual beings by the general public, much less as desirable. The desirability of effeminate men is very much predicated on their thinness and youth, among other things.
This is a post about queer desire and the gratification of being able to depict aspects of oneself as desirable when you’ve spent your whole life being subtly told that one thing or another will permanently place being desired outside your reach.
would anyone be interested in a post of all the in-canon references to stedeâs body image issues?
Alright then, here we go. I know some of these might be a bit of a reach, but theyâre just what I saw and felt from the dialogue and way the scenes were shot.
It seems that people making comments on Stedeâs body is the background noise to his life. He experiences it way more than any other character, which is strange because he is a pretty straight-sized dude, and the fact that characters who are visibly fat and much larger than Stede donât experience this suggests there is more to it than lazy fatphobic writing. I think that the way he holds and presents himself, very much peacocking with his clothes, hair and possessions, demonstrates that he is not confident about his appearance, and inadvertently advertises it to others that it is an emotional weakness of his, which they then use when they want to hurt or humiliate him.
Even if Stede is not reflecting on his own body, other characters bring it up for him. For example, when Buttons is telling him about the planned mutiny, he uses the phrase âsoft-belliedâ to demonstrate weakness of will, and actually looks Stedeâs body up and down as he says it. I know that calling a pirate âsoft-belliedâ refers to his personality, not his body, and has the same sort of meaning as âyellow-belliedâ or âlily-liveredâ, but the fact that Buttons does look at Stedeâs body when he says it suggests he is using it literally as well as figuratively.
The significance of a characterâs gaze is also relevant in this shot, where Stede is unsuccessfully trying to engage in the conversation about the horses with Mary and their children.
She keeps clear eye contact with Stede when she says âpigâ, even though she is speaking to Alma and isnât trying to include Stede in the conversation. I am not saying that Mary is calling Stede a pig here, but as Stede is the character who we see the early narrative through, we see how he perceives the world around him, and here he feels that she is calling him a pig. He could understand her to be referring to his body and appearance, or that she is calling him pig-headed, stubborn in his will to go to sea and his refusal/inability to behave how she thinks he should as a husband. It feels relevant to Stede that this eye contact is made, and removes his power in the conversation by taking him back to his childhood experience of bullying, even if that wasnât Maryâs intention.
Other men, mainly the British navy and the children he grew up with, bully Stede by mocking his body and his effeminacy, which go hand-in-hand: these men see physical softness as effeminate, and effeminacy as weakness.
Itâs unclear whether this officer truly believed Stede was a woman, but seeing as Nigel Badminton was able to identify him as Stede, a man, immediately, it is likely that this is a cruel joke mocking how Stede presents himself.
This exchange is fascinating. Nigel is, of course, a bully and an abuser. Bullies identify weaknesses in their victims and exploit them. I seriously doubt that Nigel genuinely misremembers Stede as being a fat child. I think he knows that Stede was a small, slim child, and, observing that Stede is now an average, kinda-soft-around-the-edges adult, heâs carrying out a bizarre sort of gaslighting where heâs saying, âno, I remember better than you and you were always fatâ to trigger insecurity in Stede. And it works: the fact that Stede says âI thought I was slenderâ as opposed to a self-certain âI was slenderâ or âI wasnât fatâ shows that he is doubting his own memory of his body, like how body dysmorphia makes someone unsure of what their body really looks like.
And Stede has clearly internalised this bullying, in the same the way he has absorbed the ideas that he is pathetic, weak, and cowardly. When he is plagued by Nigelâs âghostâ, i.e. his own self-doubt, the fixation on being called fat is there.
He does try to fight these thoughts, arguing back that he isnât fat, but the Nigel voice continues and it is clear from Stedeâs body language, facial expression and vocal outburst of âenough!â that it upsets him. In his therapy session with the Tribe Elder, the Elder confirms that the ghost is entirely Stede himself.
This does in most part of course refer to his guilt at leaving his family, but the fact remains that in the scene on the beach, Stede repeatedly calls himself fat as a means to hurt himself.
My next piece of evidence ties body image issues to food issues.Â
It is quite clearly Stedeâs fault that 50 oranges were used to make a cake. Stede gave an order as Captain and Roach followed it. Generally, Stede is very good at taking accountability, for example saying âI deserve thatâ when Jim calls him the worst pirate captain in history, apologising when he gets cross with the crew during the rehearsal for the fuckery, and saying he deserves the firing squad for having done the wrong things and hurt people. But in this instance he is unable to take the blame and sticks with blaming Roach. I think the idea of being called greedy or excessive when it comes to food is something Stede is afraid of as it would draw attention to his perceived flaws in his body.
When Calico Jack meets Stede, the first things he comments on (bullies about)Â are Stedeâs size and his effeminacy.
Even Ed, who is clearly deep in his feelings for Stede at this point and presumably finds Stede physically attractive, laughs along and feels no need to reassure Stede that heâs not âbigâ, even though he does reassure him that heâs not a girl. Stedeâs face in the last screengrab there says it all. He is hurt but he is so used to this sort of bullying that he just tries to shrug it off and doesnât stand up for himself, allowing Jack and Ed to continue their behaviour.
When Ed leaves The Revenge and Stede watches him through the telescope, Stede immediately brings Edâs âchoosingâ of Jack over him down to physical appearance, not to personality, Jack and Edâs complicated history, or anything else. He asks for reassurance but Oluwande, being hungover and sleep-deprived, gives a very non-committal answer. Now that Stede knows that Jack and Ed have been sexual with one another, he not only compares himself to Jack in terms of how âcoolâ or how fun to be around he is, but also in how sexually attractive his body is to Ed.
I donât have any sort of natural conclusion to this post. Of course I have no way of knowing if any of these things were deliberate, but I feel that at least some of them certainly were. Our Flag Means Death is a well-written, complex show with excellent symbolism, and I donât believe that this show would point random fatphobia at its main, straight-size character with no deeper meaning.
In conclusion,
and Stede deserves to be confident in his body and his abilities, and I hope you found this interesting to read!
