My Gender Bender
Image: Unsplash
Like the experience of many during this pandemic, my sedentary lockdown lifestyle made space for well, more of me. I gained weight and often needed to buy new clothes every season. As the summer of 2020 approached, I bought new shorts; yet, in just a year’s time, I found myself needing to size up yet again. Though in a year’s time, it is expected that a body may change, as the seasons changed, it felt as though I had no one to blame but myself. As the shelf life of my clothes became shorter and shorter, I would think, how could I let myself become so big? Why was I not taking care of myself in a way where I did not grow and grow and grow? I no longer enjoyed wearing tight clothing as I felt it only further accentuated the weight I had gained. Once proud of my curves, I began to hide them.
As a woman, and especially as a South Asian woman, my body has indicated much more than just the space I take up. Society has used my body to measure my intelligence, my desirability, my potential as a wife. The ways that my body supposedly speaks to these many different facets of myself, that it has never once signed up to represent, is symptomatic of fatphobia -- targeted specifically towards women. However, is it really fatphobia if, for example, my weight went to my breasts and bum? Would the same things be assumed about me? Would I be more desirable if my weight distribution was considered more attractive?
I had come to the conclusion that in order to escape the fatphobic hellscape of my mind, that I would simply hide my body instead. In this way, I fooled myself into thinking that my body did not take up as much space as it did, because where it ended and the excess fabric began was blurred. This way, I would slow down the process of growing out of my clothing and getting ready in the morning would not take all of the day’s energy for me to do. I began to wear button-ups to hide my neck, and baggier pants to hide my hips. But what I did not realize is how at home I would feel in clothing that did not create a silhouette I thought myself impossible to fit into. Once I began dressing more masculinely, I felt a sense of confidence that I had never felt in clothes that fit me like this.
However, this led to quite the gender bender. Did this mean I wasn’t femme? Maybe I wasn’t a woman? Should I change my pronouns, my name? I began to feel as though my entire identity was crumbling around me. The rare times I did dress feminine, I felt like a fraud. It felt like I had hung up my femininity with the clothing that matched it. However, I realized that this need to pick between masculinity and femininity is colonialism repeating itself. South Asians, especially Hindus, have gender expression as fluid as the blood that courses through our veins. This rigid gender binary is a white man’s construction. Why feel indebted to it if it isn’t what feels right?
“But what I did not realize is how at home I would feel in clothing that did not create a silhouette I thought myself impossible to fit into. Once I began dressing more masculinely, I felt a sense of confidence that I had never felt in clothes that fit me like this. ”
Since then, I have explored my masculinity with kindness to myself. That there is no need to define myself by terms that don’t fit me. Like outgrown clothes, I trashed them. Though this realization came through a very traumatizing lens, it is not to say that masculinity was an escape from fatphobia. Fatphobia is rampant, regardless of gender. However, I am glad that this dark place brought me to light. Who would have thought that my gender bender would have brought me here?
