My boyfriend Toby has shared some feelings on his gender identity on tumblr. He raises the issue of being a transman but having some typically feminine interests:

I’ve never felt happier and calmer about my identity since I realised that’s all bullshit, and I can be a man regardless of how “feminine” I am. I’d never say that a cis man is not a man just because he liked those “girly” things as a kid, or he isn’t into sports, or he has long hair, or whatever else. So why was I invalidating my male identity based on that stuff? Why can’t I be a man, regardless of my behaviour? Should I have to be extra masculine, more than a cis man, to “prove” I’m male?

I'm still in "OMG my boyfriend is so awesome <3 <3 <3" mode, but I thought his piece was genuinely mature and well thought out. Since we first talked about his trans feelings, I've learned a lot about gender. I've made assumptions in the past and thought in terms of gender binary. This is helping me grow and see that the variety of people. 


I feel Toby has had many important epiphanies about gender, and this is certainly one of them. So proud of you baby. :* 

Mike & Molly - Where It Fails

I haven't done this in a while, but I feel like blogging about this show. So you know, I will. Here we go. *plunges*

I wanted to like the new CBS comedy Mike & Molly. It's about fat people, and it has two actors I really like, the adorable Melissa McCarthy and Swoozie Kurtz. Here, however, they have nothing to work with. The premise is that a fat cop and fat school teacher who meet at an Overeaters Anonymous meeting - start dating. Well, it has "fat people" and "dating" in the same show. That's a plus. On the other hand, the show also takes for granted that fat people=overeaters. Almost all of the jokes are based on fat, so it seems to assume fat = hilarious too. Sigh. 

This is not a hateful show. It's well meaning and tries to be kind, and it didn't trigger any of my issues. But if you're going to make a show specifically about fat people, it would be nice to see something a little more... well, revolutionary? This is the kind of show that scratches on the very shallow surface of fat acceptance, but falls short because so many things should be addressed, and most of them went completely undiscussed here.

The first episode circles around fat jokes, sassy Black friends, brainless sisters who get high. It's not very ambitious as far as sitcoms go. Mike meets Molly, Mike tries to ask her out, but then he breaks a table and injures his pinky, and there's commotion. And then they meet again and he chickens out again. And then, as he comes to investigate a robbery at Molly's house, he finally asks her out. End of episode 1. In episode two, we have Mike and Molly's first date. Mike shops at the Big&Tall store, cue more fat jokes. Molly tries on some clothes, fat jokes again. Then Molly, who's sneezing constantly, takes too much cough syrup and is completely high for their date. Her mother makes fun of Mike's new sweater, about twenty times. Molly yells at the waiter that they may be fat but don't make any assumptions that they're "dessert people". Then she orders a creme brulee. At the end of the date, it's a bit sweeter and they obviously like each other. But really, after a long episode of fat jokes, who's still watching? 

So in the end, it is just a sitcom, and it commits the gravest crime of sitcoms: it's not funny. At all. I didn't laugh once, and I laugh easily.The laugh track, of course, couldn't stop cracking up. Most of the jokes are puns - about being fat, at that - and this kind of humor rarely works. I'm a little confused; if they can't write a funny joke, why not make it a drama? Or a dramedy like Gilmore Girls - no laugh track, witty banter, warm moments, ordinary people?

The good thing is, they have obviously tried to dust up some of the clichés. The Black sidekick is the slim one. (Albeit still sassy and talkative.) The fat people are aware of their weight and talk openly about it. There's no scene with a fat girl overeating as her thin friends look on with disgust. In fact, there's a scene where the fat girl watches her thin mother and sister eat, and they tell her to indulge.

Let's stop there. They. Tell her. To indulge. And her mother says she's not fat, just big-boned, it's in the genes.

This was the point where I realized I'm not in the target group. I would have killed to have that mother. My mother made me feel bad for my weight throughout my childhood. (And I wasn't even overweight, let alone fat.) Even if she's chubby and my father's fat, she wouldn't admit it's in the genes. Even if a doctor once told her it is. It's all about eating and/or exercise, and it's my fault. 

Now, I'm trying very hard to not make this about my own Mommy issues. But Molly's Mom on the show is made to look like an old-fashioned idiot who knows nothing about fat. Molly shoots her down with "Bones don't jiggle, Ma", and gripes about not getting enough support. It's obvious that we're supposed to think Molly's the enlightened one, realizing it's all about her own effort. Meanwhile, her pothead sister and carefree Mom eating the cake are being ignorant and irresponsible.

Suddenly, this sounds familiar: women eating and being scolded for being bad examples. The eating one is oblivious/ignorant, the one on the treadmill is the smart one. It's just that they have the fat girl on the treadmill this time. Therein lies one problem with the show: a simple role reversal isn't enough. You need to question the underlying values. Maybe I'm asking too much of a sitcom, but still.

There isn't even enough role reversal going on. It's like they looked at a list of fat clichés - Black fat sidekick - and turned it into a slightly turned-around version - Black THIN sidekick. Fat woman can't be desirable - fat woman is the object of attraction. The fat guy, however, is still shy and socially awkward. And it's up to him to ask her out because he's the man. Of course, there's a flurry of issues here - why doesn't the thin sidekick get interested in the fat girl too, why are Mike and Molly both single to begin with, why is Molly living with her mother and sister, why does she dress in incredibly drab clothes..? All of these things scream "fat cliché" to me. 

The scene I found the most offensive: in episode one, Mike starts to overeat because he's so depressed! Oh, dear! Of course, he does this in a public place where everyone can see him. The thin sidekick shows up to take away his food - "a suicide with meatball bullets" - because he already lost three and a half pounds and has to keep it down. Mike says, "Big deal, my farts weigh three and a half pounds." Which is so self-loathing that it doesn't register as funny to me. It's true though, three and a half pounds is not much, you can gain and lose that much from eating/digesting one heavy meal. And if he has overeating issues, it shouldn't be about how many pounds he loses; it should be about dealing with the underlying issues. This isn't The Biggest Loser. 

So the show has, at the very least, a problematic attitude on fat. It's your own fault, it's something you have to work on, it makes you depressed, it means you have food issues. You can still have a decent job and a love life, but you can't forget for a second that you are fat. It's not very funny to me. In fact, it's kind of depressing. I think I'll stick to Roseanne. 

Diet Shows And Why I Hate Them.

I can't watch diet or exercise shows. It seems they're becoming more and more common. Dieting and lifestyle changes are taking over TV, like they took over magazines at some point. It bugs me. I'm not necessarily against the diet mentality being discussed, but I hate when it becomes the dominant, or even the only, viewpoint out there.

You Are What You Eat is a fat-shaming show. The idea is that an overweight person's diet is scrutinized, and often mocked, by a horrified nutritionist. There are fridge raids, there is jiggling fat on camera. There are snarky, "funny" comments about various foods. The underlying idea is that a relatively normal diet is HORRIBLY DANGEROUS and you have to be stopped NOW if you're eating too many fats, carbs or salts compared to the recommended daily amounts. There's no chance to talk back and disagree with the nutritionist.

I know some people learn healthy eating through the show, but the method is pure scare tactics. And - I'm gonna say this - I don't think learning to eat healthy is a positive goal per se, if it comes with a lowered self esteem and public shaming. Mental health over physical, always.

The Biggest Loser is a particularly odious case, because it puts fat people in a boot camp where they're forced to have too much exercise. It's a competition over who loses the  most, so the idea is to crash diet, be publicly weighed, and then possibly lose over the gain of 1 pound. It violates against all the rules we've learned about healthy dieting: not dieting too fast, not overexercising, not starving yourself, etc. I can imagine most contestants don't keep the weight off. No matter how high their motivation, who can keep up with a boot camp mentality their whole lives?

There was one diet show I was able to watch, a British one called Freaky Eaters. Despite the title, I found it to be fairly positive, and watched several episodes on Youtube. The idea of the show is not to lose weight or eat in any predefined way. Rather, they delve into the psychological reasons behind the eating (usually these are people who only eat one kind of food: potatoes, white bread, nothing but meat, etc.). They also have a doctor who checks for any physical damage done by the diet. Usually, it's not scare tactics. But I stopped watching when, in one episode, a woman with a candy-binging problem was told, "Your BMI is higher than it should be, it's 27." Um, but that's only two points above "normalweight", and according to many studies it's the slightly overweight who are healthiest... She was then told she is at a high risk for diabetes, "and once you get diabetes, it's never cured, you have it for your whole life." (I'm paraphrasing because I can't stand to see it again.) Who doesn't know this? And yet some people have diabetes and manage to live a fairly normal life. It's not a death sentence.

This angered me, and I haven't seen the show since. It just seemed so hypocritical. It seemed like they were saying, "You have no real health problems at present, but if your BMI is over 25, YOU CERTAINLY WILL. This gives me the right to talk to you like a child, even if you're here to fix your problems." There's a risk of overclosing on a show like this; this is someone who already wants to change and is willing to do something, so there's no need to shame them. Not that there ever is, but you lose all "tough love" credibility when nagging or scaring people enters the picture.

Who watches these shows? Who goes on them? I imagine the people on the shows are often desperate to change, either because of the social pressure to be slim and healthy, or because their lifestyles genuinely make them feel bad. But how much are they truly helped, and what percentage of the viewers is in fact enjoying the humiliation? I've heard people talk about these shows in tones of amazement and judgement: "Can you imagine, that guy was eating five bags of chips a DAY", or, "She said she doesn't eat a lot, but of course when they opened her fridge, they found all this junk..."

The worst part is, I sometimes think in the same way. I haven't watched any episodes of You Are What You Eat, but I have read articles on several episodes. Seeing a table spread with someone's weekly diet can give me a positive jolt: "Ah, I eat a lot better than that!" It gives you a sense of relief, but I'd say the relief is false; it's not based on being OK the way you are and making your own choices. It's more like an underlying idea that eating healthy is a contest where you've just won. You've proven yourself to be normal and acceptable, not a big bad fatty. The person on the show should be ashamed of how they eat, and you're right to eat the way you do. This goes against everything I believe about eating and health. Is this the very feeling people are seeking when they set out to watch a diet show?

What worries me about this trend is that shows like this present only the least healthy-living fat people, setting them up against a strict slim expert. The effect is much the same as in the clichéd comic trope of  "angry doctor stares at fat patient standing on scale". The experts have to nag at stubborn fatties. It's funny to shame fat people. It's shocking to see how fatties live. We're problem people in need of an intervention, and the reason for the fat can always be located and removed easily by valiant experts. This is, of course, not a realistic image of all fat people. It has nothing to do with what the studies say, and it might in fact change nothing.

One thing is for sure: this type of TV reinforces stereotypes about fat people and food. And that's just not healthy.

Comments Policy

All comments are screened. This serves several purposes:
-no spam gets in
-I notice and read every comment as they come
-no trolls get through
It's nothing personal, and I can't pre-approve any user's comments. In the days of Fatly Yours, I deleted maybe 5 % of all comments.

I live in Finland, so take that into account; you may have to wait up to 12 hours to see your comment up here. If it takes longer, it may be a Blogger glitch. Feel free to re-post your comment.

A comment will be deleted if:
-it's clearly aggressive
-it's clearly spam
-it's condescending and aggressive beneath a calm surface ("I respect your views, but don't you know fat kills xxx Americans a year, and everybody knows that science says...", or "Everyone can be what they want, but a transman is NOT a real man, no matter what they say...") This rule is mainly so that I don't start a big flamewar with any commenter. I think I did that a few times during Fatly Yours, and it was of no use to anyone.

-you wrote it only because I dared criticize your favorite TV show/comic, and it doesn't really offer anything for the discussion. (This includes "lighten up, it's meant to be funny!!!") If you have an argument/analysis that goes against mine, I'd love to hear it though.

-Anything like "I love how you delete comments that disagree with yours". My blog, my rules. Deleting has a lot more to do with the tone than the content.

If you don't like fat people, gays, transpeople, etc. ...
You can still comment here, BUT I don't want to hear a long diatribe against people like me and/or my boyfriend. Ask me questions, challenge me, sure. But hate on me? No. I don't have energy for that.

Any questions about the comments policy or anything else: deniselleDOTswanATgmailDOTcom.

Comeback?

OK, so I'm probably ready to relaunch after almost two years. I have been, and still am, suffering from depression, which made blogging and thinking very hard for a while. I think I'm ready to return to sporadic fat-related posts, as well as gay/gender topics. (I put a question mark in the title, just in case I'm not ready. But if I publish this post, it's a good sign.)

During these two years, I've thought a lot about stuff. When I started this blog, I thought I'd write about a fat, lesbian Christian who finds her value despite, or because of, being those things. That identification has, to some extent, changed.

The fat part is still very much there, and my views on Fat Acceptance are mostly the same. The change I've made in this area is thinking less about my weight and fat politics in general. I haven't been reading FA blogs much, and I haven't been discussing the topic in forums. I felt I needed to come away from the culture a bit and focus on other things. I find it's been helpful for finding my own thoughts and feelings. I believe my FA writing has improved, because I'm no longer as angry as I was some years ago.(This is not to say that anger is a part of the FA culture per se; it was just my own problem.) I'm not angry with non-FA fat people, and I'm not angry with thin people, or dieters, or super-healthy eaters, or vegetarians/vegans, like I used to be. People who have a limiting lifestyle no longer pose a threat to me, emotionally speaking. I've also tried to grow more tolerant of fat people who haven't questioned their internalized fat phobia. I still groan and moan at TV stereotypes of fat people and will probably write about this again soon. In my eating, I try to grow into an acceptance of all foods as part of a varied diet. I don't like to think in terms of "good" or "bad", or "everyday" and "sometimes" foods. I try to eat all nutrients, but without limiting anything. I mainly just want to be free and focus on other things in my life. It's working fairly well, although I still struggle with guilt. My anti-diet stance is still there. That is, I don't judge others who diet, but I'm not interested in trying it myself. I just don't think it works, looking at the evidence.

As for the lesbian part: I'm currently identifying more as a bisexual. My girlfriend opened up about his transgender feelings some months ago, and I'm calling him Toby and he, because if he identifies as a man, then he is. In that sense, we're in a heterosexual relationship now. It depends on how you look at gender. This is an area I'm quite curious and fascinated by: how do we define gender, and who defines it? Can we completely break away from the idea of man/woman? I hope we can. I'm cisgender myself (i.e. I identify as female and have female genitalia). My boyfriend's revelation came as a delightful surprise. I'm not sure why. All I know is, I want to be with him and no one else; if he is transgender, that just gives me a chance to widen my thinking in that respect. I'm NOT fully knowledgeable in the topic, however, and might still feel shy about blogging from a transgender perspective. I try to be very sensitive to the fact that I'm not transgendered, and therefore can't understand everything.

I'm not sure about the Christian bit right now. I've thought a lot about God, and I still believe in his existence and my bond with him, but I'm not entirely sure if Jesus is the son of God who died for my sins etc. I had never really doubted this in my whole life, and I'm curious to see if I'll go back to full-blown Christianity or stay somewhere on the sidelines, believing some of it and not the rest. I may or may not write about religious/spiritual things in this blog, I'm not sure.

So that's my identity right now, and the perspective through which I will blog.

I apologize in advance if I don't follow anyone else's blog, or post anywhere else, or respond to comments, or whatever. It's not because I think I'm the center of FA and everyone else is unimportant, or because your comments ticked me off. It's because sometimes, due to the depression, I have trouble following complex political discussions. But I'm here, and I do value your comments. Comments are screened; if yours comes up, I read and approved of it. I will put up a comments policy soon.