ah yes, the Yearning

desire and changing your body shape for fun and profit

This may be a mildly gnarly read for you if you don’t want to read about fatphobia, diet culture, dysphoria, transphobia, or the general existential horror of piloting a body in this economy.

Photo by Adam Przeniewski on Unsplash

I was talking to a friend of mine the other day about top surgery. “So have you decided it’s something you want?” they said. “I know last time we talked, you weren’t sure.”

I explained that I’d recently found a binder that worked for me; that since I’d been able to bind, I’d found myself wanting to bind more and more often, and wishing that I didn’t need to put on an objectively still pretty uncomfortable garment to achieve the effect. If only there were some way I could have it, like, all the time? Getting a little bit of what I wanted had opened the floodgates, releasing desires I hadn’t been allowing space before.

“Ah, yes,” said my friend, on hearing this. “The Yearning. That will happen.”

*

I have a vivid memory of being twelve years old, sitting in maths drawing graphs. They were not part of the lesson: each graph was labelled with a body part. One for stomach, one for thighs, one for waist. I wanted to track circumference over time, but more than that; I wanted the graphs to take on a force of their own, driving the relevant measurements down, not just documenting them. I had decided the shape I wanted to see: a smooth downward line. So that my body, too, could be a smooth line. It didn’t work, of course: my graphs were so neat, but my body never has been. Every time I have ever tried to restrict the food I put in it, my body has responded with panic, with immediately demanding that I give it more to compensate for ever having tried to deprive it. I now know that this is normal, that bodies quite naturally do not want to be put into starvation mode. But I spent a lot of time not knowing, willing things to be different. This too was yearning.

Why is it different? Why is my desire not to have tits different from my adolescent desire to be thin? I have worked very hard to eradicate the latter desire, so much that it took me a long time to admit the former. In the context of accepting my size, I have spent much of the past decade slowly and carefully teaching myself that my body is good, exactly as it is. That I do not need to postpone my life for a possible future body. That there is no moral wrong in fatness; there is simply body size, and then there is health, and then there is attractiveness, and these things can be completely separate. I had - I have - more or less succeeded. I don’t look in the mirror and call myself names any more. I don’t look at my stomach and will it to shrink and flatten. If teenagers yell “you’re fat!” at me on the street, I look at them with genuine concern and ask them if they’re doing okay - it really spooks them - then get on with my day. I don’t have graphs any more.

So what to do, then, with this desire that has been building slowly over the past few years, for my torso to have a different shape? Not smaller, not thinner, but different? When it first started to glimmer faintly, I suppressed it totally, terrified of disturbing the self-acceptance that I’d worked so hard to build. I had a couple of attempts trying out binders, but each time I tried one and found it horribly uncomfortable, I was almost relieved to be able to give up. Oh no, binding’s not for me, I would say. There’s a certain comfort in closing off a path completely, especially if you’ve a suspicion it might lead you further than you think. For a couple of years I simply didn’t wear a bra in order to pretend my chest didn’t exist. But then, early this year, I tried on a donated binder, and it was tolerable. Binders are and will remain basically uncomfortable garments, but this one didn’t immediately incapacitate with me with discomfort.

I immediately started trying to wear it far too much. I gave myself nausea and panic attacks (both side-effects - watch out, folks). I did something I’d been avoiding for years and actually measured myself, realised the donated one I’d tried was two sizes too small, and ordered some in the correct size. Now I wear one of the correctly-sized ones most days. It feels good. I feel good. I can’t wear it all the time, though, or my body - as described, famously non-compliant - gets upset with me. Summer’s coming, too, and I don’t think heat will help. I found myself entirely innocently having the thought, gosh, if only there was a way to get the effect of a binder but, like, all the time, and without having to wear anything. Indeed, if only.

There’s a passage from Torrey Peters’ Detransition, Baby that has stayed with me since I read it. Reese, the protagonist - whose choices we are not always supposed to endorse, but who is clearly the novel’s main voice - is reflecting on her friend Amy'’s desire for a nose job. She has a theory about the way trans people (trans women specifically) form desires about surgeries:

Quirks of desire […] sequenced themselves according to an alchemist’s mixture of beauty standards, consumerism, and self-loathing. […] Reese maintained that foreheads drive trans women insane precisely because there is a surgery to alter it. The surgery created the dysphoria even as the dysphoria created a need for surgery. To know that surgery is out there, but that you can’t yet have it, even as you stare in the mirror and want to die, means that the temptation of want will forever taunt you. Large hands, though? Yes, they suck, but short of lopping off your fingers, no surgeon has yet to devise a procedure to shrink them, so most of the women Reese knew just learned ways to minimize them and get over it, as Reese did herself. The instant that some surgeon invented a hand-shrinking procedure, though, Reese knew she would rather die than have that surgery denied to her.

The passage is provocative, presumably intentionally so, because it passes alarmingly close to some arguments you will see from transphobes. The idea that a trans person’s desire for gender-affirming care is anything other than pure, essential, springing organically into the mind untainted by knowledge of the world, is often used by transphobes as a way to delegitimise those desires, to present them as not just illegitimate but harmful and dangerous. The teens only want top surgery because their mates are getting it; you only want hormones because Big Pharma says you need them. Of course, these arguments can be thoroughly debunked, but they have had a powerful impact on how the public sees trans people, and on how some of us see ourselves. Many of us have become used to questioning our own desires intensely through the eyes of a transphobic interrogator. Is this desire really mine, or did it come from somewhere else - and therefore, is it real?

These conditions make it difficult to talk about the reality: that of course, none of us form our desires in a vacuum. Of course we find out about possibilities for our own lives from others. Of course we seek community from people who want the same things we do. Of course these two facts are interconnected. Of course, as Peters describes, knowing that something is possible allows you to desire it. And desire for something you cannot yet have is very close to dissatisfaction with what you do have. The surgery creates the dysphoria as the dysphoria creates a need for surgery. The important thing here is the reciprocity, the messiness, the way these things feed into each other.

Like Peters’ passage, which skirts close to things transphobes say about us, there is a danger in talking about desires for thinness alongside a desire for gender-affirming surgery. It’s often used as a delegitimising tactic, specifically by TERFs, who claim that young girls (by which they mean young transmasculine and non-binary people) are compelled to have mastectomies because of the pressures of misogyny and impossible body standards; you will sometimes see them claim that eating disorders and dysphoria are of a piece, and should be treated similarly. So it’s dangerous territory to approach. And yet I find myself needing to talk about it: I find myself unwilling to cede the discursive space to people who hate us. I want to tease apart why those desires are similar and different. I know that they are different, but I want to know why.

I suppose, in wanting that, I am looking for validation. I look back on twelve year old me making a graph of the circumferences of various body parts and I feel angry that I was made to feel that way. That desire I felt then, that aspiration to be thin - it harmed me. I can outline the social forces that created it - misogyny, fatphobia - and I think they’re bad. I want to know that this desire is not the same.

I will list some differences, for the record. They mostly boil down to the fact that there’s not really an equivalent of fatphobia for the phenomenon of having tits:

1. The medical establishment does not give its doctors erroneous information that leads them to think tits are synonymous with poor health.

2. There is no cultural consensus that tits are unattractive. It is generally socially accepted - to the point of cliché - that tits are desirable.

3. There are no multi-billion dollar global industries profiting from me feeling bad about having tits (yes, there are surgeons, but Big Mastectomy is really not comparable to the diet or fashion industries).

4. Getting rid of my tits is much more likely to actually work than a diet.

Where does this get me? I suppose I have made a case for this desire; I have pleaded it in the Court of Good and Valid Desires. What now? Who exactly am I waiting for, to come along and bang a gavel and say that I’m allowed to want what I want? And if they did, what would I gain?

Perhaps I would gain a sense that the next five years of waiting will be worth it. Unfortunately, there’s no way to know. There is, in fact, no way to guarantee that our desires will lead to happiness. No way to guarantee a choice is right. That’s where all the transphobic arguments about ‘irreversible damage’ fall down - we are all doing irreversible things to ourselves all the time. Every single moment of our lives is irreversible. When I was twelve I thought I wanted to be thin, and now I think I don’t want tits, and I can analyse each desire and what shapes it, but I can’t verify each one as right and true - they were each what the version of me in the world wanted at the time, for reasons good or bad. That’s not to be morally neutral about it - I still think it’s bad that twelve year old me thought that way, and I wouldn’t wish it on any twelve year old in my care. It’s just all far more complex and entangled than sorting our desires into ‘noble, authentic and individual’ versus ‘false, confected and influenced by others’. It’s terrifying to think that we can want things that might, in the future, turn out to be bad for us; terrifying to think that desire fluctuates according to what and who surrounds us. It is also unfortunately, mortifyingly true, and we can only care for each other if we can admit it.