People are naturally curious. Myself—I embrace curiosity. It drives me, keeps me asking questions. Keeps me interested in being on the planet. I want to know more about myself, my place in the universe, all the strange and new phenomena and possibilities and experiences that this life has to offer.
I am also curious about people—the choices they make and why they make them, why some folks enjoy silence, why some of us get goosebumps from music and others do not, why some of us are energized by large crowds and others (myself included) find them oppressive, what drives some of us to hoard resources while others are content to share, what is behind things like charisma that people find so enticing, how people find the right things to say or do in certain social situations, how some of us seem to accumulate drama, or negative energy, or chains of uninterrupted success…
And of course I am curious about bodies, shapes, sizes, colors, scars, abilities—what it would be like to inhabit someone else’s skin. To be a brain in a vat, or a brain in another body. To be born somewhere else, to be someone else. I reflect on my body when it was able to launch into a twelve mile hike without concern, when I could run without falling over, when I could walk for miles without breaking a sweat—I find it hard to remember what it was like to have such a body, other than that I inhabited it without thought to its limits and that thoughtlessness was a freedom that I did not appreciate nearly enough. To have energy, to love differently, to have different tides that are pulled in different ways.
But here’s the thing. In all this wondering about variations of bodies and motivations and whatnot, I never wonder why people “choose to not be normal.” Whatever that means!
However, I do wonder about those among us who wish to enforce adherence to (social) norms for bodies, who feel entitled to judge bodies that don’t fit their notion of propriety or wholesomeness, who think that people shouldn’t be messy or varied or should at least hide all of that in “polite” company. Polite company is boring in its obsession with other people and how they ought to be controlled. Micromanagement of any sort is oppressive.
I’m burying the lede a bit. Perhaps I should have started by airing the grievance that led to this reflection.
I had breast cancer and have been in treatment for nearly a year. I have the genetics for it, and started preventive therapies several years ago, beginning with a hysterectomy and continuing with close monitoring of my breasts until I reached a certain age, weary of the sword of Damocles hanging over my head, and decided to have another prophylactic surgery to remove my breasts. But fate or the universe or the hand of a sadistic god intervened, and cancer was discovered during my final pre-surgical scans. Ah, well.
At that point, I’d already given an inordinate amount of thought to plans for my chest after breast amputation. I knew that I didn’t want reconstruction with foreign objects or my own flesh. Too many surgeries, too much long-term risk, and breasts weren’t that important to my sense of self-worth or well-being anyway.
I’ve never, not in the nearly 51 years I have been on this planet, given a single, solitary crap about being feminine or “behaving like a girl”—again, whatever that means. Despite my feminism, I have never felt strongly about wanting to be female, embracing my womanhood, or seeking the divine yoni. I have wondered a bit about my utter lack of concern at sacrificing nearly every part of my woman-body, mainly because many if not most of the women in my cancer groups have this concern. But the choices I have made are right for me—they feel right, they do not cause me discomfort, and they do not cause harm to anyone else.
I am eternally thankful that I was the one to make these choices, and that someone else didn’t decide that I needed prosthetic breasts and force me to suffer against my will to meet an arbitrary social standard.
So, yeah. “All bodies are cool,” eh? Seems uncontroversial enough—a pithy statement of positivity and acceptance. But clearly, to many folks, all bodies are not cool and therefore should be subject to social and governmental regulation.
In fact, some folks seem to believe that some bodies are dangerous. Now, this statement seems ridiculous on its face. But it’s a statement that many folks agree with—implicitly or explicitly. But whose bodies are dangerous? And from which bodies do we need protection?
These bodies?
- Bodies that can get pregnant
- Bodies that do not follow “the rules” for bodies
You may be able to see the problem here, especially if you have a body with a uterus or a body that in some way “misbehaves.” But if not, let’s consider further.
Now that I have a kid, I find myself occasionally referencing the old adult canard of “I don’t care what X does, and honestly, you shouldn’t either (unless what X is doing causes harm).” I add my own addendum to that, namely, “You are responsible for yourself. X is responsible for themself.” I also give the kid guidelines—do no harm, lead with kindness, be respectful, don’t punch down, be helpful, be a good friend. This applies to all sorts of situations that my kid might find himself in, and puts the onus on him to make the right choice for himself at the moment.
We literally talk about this stuff all the time.
Sometimes these conversations are fun, and sometimes they are tiring, and sometimes I am dismissed with a “thanks for the life-lesson, Mom” and an eye roll. But the takeaway is consistent, I hope—you are responsible for your own actions, your behaviors, your body and its relationships to the world.
But what if someone else’s body is different? What if they cannot see, or cannot walk, what if they are missing a limb, what if their eyes are a different shape, what if their skin is a different color, what if they are fat, or thin, or cannot run fast? Are all those bodies cool, too? Yes! Humans aren’t all the same and bodies are not machines, thank goodness.
But what about the people who can’t control their bodies? What about autistic bodies, or bodies with anger management issues, aging bodies, bodies that have been traumatized, bodies that need to stim, bodies with tics, or bodies with illnesses? Yep, all cool.
Your body is distinct from other bodies, in that it is the tangible boundary for your personal space. Other bodies may be more challenging, both for the folks that have them and the folks who are in community with them, and we can acknowledge that. Some bodies require more patience, more kindness. Some bodies might be scary at first because they are so different from our own bodies. But ultimately, they’re just bodies.
A body at rest cannot hurt us. All bodies are cool.
Except…
When is a body not cool? When it’s trying to kill you, maybe? Perhaps you have cancer, or your body isn’t growing a baby well, or the mix of chemicals in your body is causing pain or depression. Maybe your body has reached maximum viral load, or is producing too much of one hormone and not another. Maybe your body has hit a wall—figuratively or literally—and requires adjustments and accommodations to move forward, to continue living or (hopefully) flourishing.
My body is cool. I’ve had a lifetime to acclimate to this notion, and still have to adjust my expectations and goals for my body. Right now, my stomach is bloated from cancer treatments and—let’s be honest—my sweet tooth. I don’t have breasts anymore, because they tried to kill me. I don’t have a uterus or ovaries, because it was likely that they’d try to kill me, too. Because my cancer was fed by estrogen, I take hormone blockers and calcium supplements. I wear a neck fan and carry a bandanna to help mitigate daily barrages of hot flashes.
I also have a great deal of unexplained pain in my body from another un-cancer-related condition, so I choose to take medications and supplements to ease it, stretch my sore muscles and joints, go for a walk, sit on a heating pad, use an ice pack, or hide in a dark room and cry. All of these are choices which hurt no one—although they may disappoint you if I have to cancel our plans to meet for lunch or whatever.
I chose to have a kid at 41 with my body, when I was stable enough to provide a good life for a theoretical kid, and while my body was healthy enough to support that decision. For years before that, I adamantly chose not to have kids. During those years, I made choices for my body that aligned with and supported that decision, and I do not regret those choices. Once I decided that having a kid was a live option for me, I made choices for my body that would help it support a pregnancy. I chose a natural birth so I could experience the full realm of my body’s capabilities. Honestly, this is just autonomy 101—self-determination, self-direction, self-actualization.
As mentioned previously, I have never embraced conducting my body in feminine ways —whatever those are! Gender signifiers change over time and across cultures, and in my time and culture this has meant things like avoiding the color pink, not wearing high heels, and not keeping my mouth shut. I have tried to like dresses, but when I wear them, I feel wrong, like I’m performing a role for which I haven’t yet memorized the lines. Performing femininity literally causes me anxiety. I am at ease with having very short hair. I have a long stride, and I bounce when I walk. I talk with my hands. I am forceful intellectually, excellent at argument and logic, excited by wrangling with ideas. I’m not a big hugger.
Is my body still cool, after all these years, and after all these adjustments? Yes. I don’t mind the absence of my body’s lady parts. I haven’t experienced dysmorphia following either my hysterectomy or my mastectomy—only relief. On the other hand, having large breasts did bother me, and did cause me some feelings of dysmorphia. When I woke up after my hysterectomy, I was relieved to be finished with my period. When I woke up after my mastectomy, I was relieved to be flat—and not just because my tumor was gone. I’d always wanted a more androgynous body, and not having breasts felt right. I certainly did not feel like less of a woman (whatever that means!).
To be honest, I’m not thrilled about being fat. But it doesn’t cause me the same discomfort that having large breasts did. It’s a different sort of feeling—the discomfort of having too much body versus the discomfort of having the wrong sort of body. The discomfort of not having a fit body, or having a body that doesn’t constantly get in my way and remind me of my limitations. Alas, I admit to a certain nostalgia for having a body that didn’t get in my way.
Many women have a great deal of dysmorphia following mastectomy and make different choices regarding reconstructive surgeries. That is fine! Their choices to retain bodily female signifiers—to have gender affirming surgeries—do not harm me. A fellow cancer survivor might look down at her flat chest and feel like less of a woman, and who am I to tell her how she ought to feel? Mastectomy is an amputation. It is a significant loss. Each individual in this situation is welcome to her own reaction, her own assessment of risks and rewards.
However, there are a lot of very vocal, hostile, and controlling people who do not agree with me. More than a handful of women in my “we chose to go flat” cancer survivor groups have encountered outright hostility from other women because of the treatment choices they made. Why? Because “we” (looking at you, America) have made it ok to comment on and try to police bodies that we feel are out of control. Not just our own—but other people’s bodies!
These women in my cancer community have been scrutinized in public bathrooms, in women-only spaces, because they do not have traditionally feminine bodies. More than one has been asked if she was transgender. More than one has been treated horribly based on assumptions that she was transgender. More than one has received threats.
To be clear. This is not the fault of transgender people.
Transgender folks are also trying to live in such a way that their bodies don’t kill them. My rather mild dysphoria at having had large breasts was nothing compared to the daily dysphoria that a transgender person has at having the wrong sort of body altogether. Now add to that—public humiliation, having to plan ahead to avoid public humiliation, having the sort of dysphoria that outweighs the fear of your fellow humans who want to control your body, to make your choices to lessen your dysphoria illegal. It’s an anxiety bomb waiting to go off.
When I was in middle school, I was bullied by other girls for not appearing feminine enough. I was told that I wasn’t a girl, I was physically shoved out of the bathroom, and I was teased for being gay—simply because I was gender-nonconforming. At the time, NO ONE told me that it was ok to not want to be feminine, or that if in fact I were gay that would turn out fine, too—that my body was cool and my choices about my body were cool, that the people who were teasing me would be grandparents by the time I had my kid and that they were living the high points of their lives before they even turned twenty. And to put it lightly, I struggled.
My mother, who is a very feminine woman, tried her best to provide help and support by taking me to get a haircut that would help me fit in better with the other girls and generally helping me with my appearance. But it didn’t help, and in fact probably made my experience worse. It added to the overall awkwardness of having a body that was going through puberty, a body that had become the focus of my peers in a negative way, and that made me feel like a giant, walking sore thumb.
It would’ve been beneficial for my own emotional development to go through puberty on my own terms, to be accepted for who I was. To wear jeans and baseball hats and have straight hair and dirt on my knees and not be treated like a freak. To live in a community with people who really believed that all bodies were cool. To live in a community where my choices weren’t limited from the outset because I was a girl on her way to becoming a woman. To not have to adhere to a norm, or anyone’s expectations, to not have my body policed by or commented upon by other people.
Only now can I look back and laugh about the girls who told me I wasn’t really a girl because I didn’t want to dress like a girl or behave like a girl—whatever that means! I can and do laugh about the guys in high school who told me I should be more feminine and wear more dresses, or the guy in college who told my roommate that I would get more dates if I were more feminine (have mercy!), or the adults who vocalized their assumptions about my sexuality based solely on my distaste for shaving my legs and armpits.
There is literally nothing about a person’s physical appearance that gives anyone the right to make assumptions or declarations about their gender, sexuality, health, etc. If someone chooses to make these things your business, they will tell you. If you are genuinely curious, you can always ask for their pronouns or ask them out on a date. But let’s do move beyond trying to police people’s bodies, shall we?
None of the choices I have made with my body affect any of you readers, not one bit.
None of the choices I have made with my body give any of you readers the right to criticize me or even to question the choices I have made.
None of the choices outlined or touched upon in this wordy little exercise are harmful to others. Full stop.
The truth is that human bodies are incredibly complex—neither static nor fixed, but fluid and ever-changing. You never step into the same person twice, I always say. Interactions between human bodies and their environments only add further complexity. And some folks’ bodies may even contain multitudes. I mean, some of y’all don’t even understand epigenetics, or things like microchimerism and prenatal androgen effects, and it shows.
Some advice—if you’re lucky enough to have a body that is currently behaving itself, please do not make assumptions about people whose bodies do not meet your standards for good behavior. And if you’re unfortunate enough to face bad news about the body you were born with, please find and embrace the things and people that give you hope and that encourage transformation and growth. There are many ways to move forward in this single, solitary life.
In short, because my body is here, I am also here. And that’s pretty cool. After all, I get to be thinking, feeling star stuff for a few short years! As my body goes, so I go. If my body needs input, opinions, or advice from anyone else, I will ask for it. Otherwise, unless my body is actively causing you harm, please enjoy having me around for a few more years, and I will attempt to return the favor.
Cheers!
Crabaghast! 