Genesis: Breasts Throughout my Genders 

As I freeze half to death in the little basement plastered with charcoal drawings of nude men and women I call home, I prepare an article that will answer the question on the lips of all the six year olds I deem fascists for even asking “mom, why does that lady look like that?” That’s right, dear reader, this article is the final answer, the ultimate and absolute truth about why fat transgender sluts exist, and why we “look like that”.

I am not someone who had much of a Queer coming of age—there has never been a cisheterosexual Louane, there will hopefully never be one; he sounds awful. My effeminacy and fatness were tangible, I was not thought to be straight, I was not thought to be thin. I remember being eight or nine, obviously ‘creative’, and being told “don’t you want to be thin so you can find a significant other to be with?”

It always fascinated me how my upbringing did not outwardly make mention of homosexuality, but always made a good liberal point to not gender my future spouse, an awkwardly tolerant attempt to evoke that I did not need to be with a woman, without naming gayness as a fact of life. What fascinates me even more is the conditionality placed on breaching what is Natural—going against the thin, straight world as it was presented to me in Catholic school, learning about the Garden of Eden and Noah’s Ark – violating the quintessence of humanity.

Really, what I was told was that one’s deviance from one facet of this natural quintessence was conditional to one’s conformance to the other. I could deviate from the natural ideal of straightness, if I conformed to the natural ideal of thinness. At this point and for the rest of my life, nature, and deviance from it, was a negotiation.

Within this protosocial and biblical nature I do not exist as I do today. For people like me, who are not depicted in the Garden of Eden, being natural today is not about total disguise, but rather threading a line—appearing just adjacent enough to the Platonic essence of humanity to be treated half-decently.

My whole life, I’ve had breasts. Before I transitioned, I hated them. I was an irritatingly gay twelve-year-old, but I dressed like a budding trans boy with no access to a binder, with a posture straight from a chiropractor’s nightmares. I dressed obnoxiously baggy, all in black, and did everything to keep my breasts—an undeniable sign of my fatness—hidden.

What made me suddenly love having breasts once I transitioned? Why is it that, even before estrogen made my breasts bloom beyond their initial A-cup, thinking of myself as a woman made having breasts enjoyable? It seems, in my negotiations with nature, that forgoing maleness made this part of my body less dissonant with my social status—my breasts were no longer a failure at manhood. 

My experiences of negotiating with nature have been at the very least incoherent. I’ve been engaged in a constant struggle, trying to untangle my body and the demands placed upon it into something that makes sense, starting off with one foot inside of Noah’s Ark and another outside, and ending up playing an elaborate game of Twister with the two male lions Noah had accidentally placed on board (who also, fun fact, threw the first brick at Stonewall!)

A Straight Gay Boy and Ideal Natur

My coming-of-age, had I any, was about my body—taking control over my physical vessel, the tangible expressions of my inner self. Identification, applying certain social roles to my inner self, necessarily led me to modifying my body. 

The construction of my self-perception started along the fatphobic and anti-Queer imageries that permeate culture. In trying to make my youth’s male homosexuality fit into the naturalized model of beauty, of successful genders, effortless femininity and masculinity, I came to find the last 2010s’ take on a beautiful and natural homosexuality. Where my attempts at makeup and ‘creative’ tone of voice were decried as ‘unnatural for a boy’, I soon discovered that by meeting every criteria of what was ‘natural for a boy’ except for one (being heterosexuality), certain fictional gay boys were able to have a positive and celebrated experience of homosexuality.

I avidly consumed any media I could find that portrayed beautiful, natural homosexuality—no effeminate boys, fat boys, boys with deep skin tones. My own homosexuality came to be expressed through Yaoi boys and characters from the Swedish show Skam who were ostensibly straight. Sure, they kissed boys and had archetypal dramatic coming outs, but they were unquestionably men. There is a certain homosexuality, a certain effeminacy that makes one ‘s social standing as male questionable, that makes one socially ostracized from other boys, that made my female friends refer to our Catholic middle school’s dating field as “boys, girls, and gays”. 

Instilled by Catholic education—of total revocation of anything remotely approaching lust, I came to a new step in my negotiations with nature. Boys in yaoi manga such as Cherries Blossom After Winter and shows like Elite were, in my eyes, an example to shape myself from. A natural homosexuality, a homosexuality between men, effortlessly and unquestionably masculine. At this time of my life, I was involved in online Tumblr art communities, frequently drawing myself in the sort of symbiotic art style that arose from my readings of My Hero Academia and avid rewatchings of Hazbin Hotel trailers. 

Looking at the self portraits I drew at that time (which I have withheld from Arthur readers’ eyes for journalistic ethics reasons) next to photos of myself, I notice a sad, disembodied trait. As if, to have a future that didn’t involve repressing my attraction to men, I felt the need to create and follow a persona, a radical reduction of my actual personality and interests. I retain a lot of this shame today. Truly, my most archetypal feminine gay boy interests still feel as though they hinder my desirability, as if the puppyboys and girls I pursue will suddenly recoil if I make it too apparent that I can recite most of the RuPaul’s Drag Race season nine reunion episode by heart. 

A sentiment I’ve heard echoed by many other fat people is the idea that, as we dissociate our dreams and aspirational self-perceptions from our bodies, we see ourselves as “persons-to-be.” This was my sentiment, particularly as I sought the same kind of dramatic and passionate gay romance that Skam’s Swedish twinks embarked on. In negotiating for a ticket onto Noah’s Ark, my homosexuality was only a possibility insofar as I gave up my gender nonconformity and my fatness.

I would later come across Matt Roger’s comedy skit about A Straight Gay Teen, a riff on Love, Simon that mocked the masculine-twink-discovers-he’s-gay-at-16-and-has-emotional-coming-out-and-boyfriend trope in gay media. It was nice to see this trope, that had so imprisoned my mind as the only way forward for me, be mocked and belittled. Roger’s humor took away a lot of the power that the Love, Simon held over me, and in a sense, allowed me to see that I was sacrificing being myself over something rather silly.

A Straight Gay Teen put a voice to the dissociation between the possible gay future I had pieced together from Yaois and teen romance series and my tangible social existence. A Straight Gay Teen allowed me to recognize how much self-hatred I’d accumulated from obsessing over becoming a masculine twink, and to subsequently fix many of my obsessive-compulsions through a total disengagement with this type of media. Making fun of cookie-cutter masculine twink media was an important way for me to step away from my eating disorder and internalized homophobia, and for that reason, I must remind my reader that the twink from Heartstopper dresses like an elf bar, on top of being a Brit. 

The contrasting ideals of Nature arise in the messaging I received regarding my fatness—that the natural, pure unaltered beauty of the human body was only accessible to me so long as I altered my body for it. Today, I remain fat, with no desire to become anything else. Today, nature calls for me to alter myself with my own hands to attain God-given beauty. These contradictions underlie the tension between fat identity and trans identity—natural beauty simultaneously calling for alteration, and preservation of the body. I was meant to be thin and unambiguously male, that is where my natural beauty lies.

In the offensive stage of my negotiations with nature, I denied this contrast from both ends. Where this ideal called for preservation, I found my individuality in alteration. Where it called for alteration, I found my individuality in preservation. In this sense, contradictory calls to achieve nature, the ideal body fit to board Noah’s Ark, manifest themselves within social reality as yet another beauty standard achieved through artifice – there is nothing truly natural about the ideal of nature.

Fat Sluts Take on Neoliberal Healthcare 

As I suffered through the system of Neoliberal healthcare, seeking to receive basic healthcare as a fat trans person, I came just short of old-timey-gun dueling multiple medical professionals for my bodily autonomy. It would have been really fun to exclaim “we will meet at dawn, gentleman, bring a single musket” at many of the medical professionals I’ve come across in my transition, but unfortunately, some totalitarian Canadian Supreme Court ruling asserts that it is “impossible for two people to consent to trying to kill each other.”

In the absolute, I’ve been fairly lucky in my experiences as a fat person who occasionally requires healthcare services, with relatively few doctors demanding I lose weight every time I consult them for any ailment. I am the exception here, this phenomenon is extremely widespread and directly tied to worse health outcomes for fat people, those same outcomes subsequently being used to fuel the idea that fatness is “inherently unhealthy”, itself enabling doctors to ask any fat person with a cold or a sprained ankle to lose weight. My experience has rarely reached this level of discrimination, but my negotiation with Neoliberal healthcare’s iteration of the nature ideal (anti-Queer and anti-fat, as previously mentioned but also historically eugenicist and White Supremacist) has come through a constant need to give disclaimers—to justify my remaining-fat.

On one of my last visits to my family doctor, when I had just started seeing her without the presence of my parents, I remember having to respond to “weight concerns”. My weight was an “ongoing problem”, one that “was not improving”, and would have “serious consequences” in the future. The only way I found to stop this was to share things I had not walked into the office intending to share. I explained my history with eating disorders, that intentional weight loss was not something I could currently embark on without relapsing, that I was fat not by choice—God forbid—but by obligation, that being thin was impossible for me.

It’s difficult to sacrifice your convictions to negotiate for bodily autonomy in order to be treated seriously in your ailments. It’s hard to feel good, or even okay, about needing to reaffirm the idea that fatness is indeed bad, that I am a “good fat person” because I would never choose to be fat. Why shouldn’t people choose to be fat? How can we argue against a person’s choice to be fat without implying that fatness is a moral wrong, a state of decay that should be avoided at all costs? 

The same goes for transness, once again having to prove the sheer impossibility of living as a man in order to be afforded autonomy over my endocrine system. How can we say that it is wrong to choose to live as trans without implying that transness is a moral wrong, something that should only be afforded to those for whom it is the only way out of suicide? 

In an ideal world, bodily autonomy would never have to go through a Neoliberal medical bureaucracy that requires we justify our deviations from nature, that requires we prove that these perverse embodiments are the only embodiments we can have. Let it be clear that Neoliberal medical bureaucracies are not the only sources of medication out there, but they are, for many medications such as HRT, the only State-legitimated sources, with much propaganda spread towards presenting them as the only safe source for HRT. Not all Neoliberal bureaucracies can be escaped, but the one placed behind HRT is certainly not an absolute, and HRT is accessible outside of the formal medical system by means that need not be repeated here.

Irreversible Damage and Why Fat Transgender Sluts “Look Like That”

A very prominent part of being trans and fat, of building a body for oneself is being seen—being perceived as what we are, being perceived as what we aren’t. From Fascist six-years olds to old ladies from the countryside, my body has become a subject of debate, of offense. A body like mine is always politicized – and the only way I can escape this politicization is to hide it. In this sense, being a fat slut makes being trans even harder for me. 

I remember being told that I was “shoving transness in people’s faces” because I had a voice too deep to pass and breasts. This was a call to hide my body, to give way to speculation rather than tangible flesh. This was a call to give up my power over my social existence, to give up my own ability to create meaning with my skin. 

Building meaning for myself, out of myself is a state of offense, something I’ve heard described as “violating”. Through creating sites of Queer violence and obsessive body-control such as the family (this is expanded upon in Sophie Lewis’ Abolish the Family) the same systems that produce the lowering of trans women, fat women and Black women to inferior subclasses worthy of sexual violation, will then assert that deviant embodiments that go against our subordination are themselves “violations.”

To the eternal question, the one burning at your lips, 6-year old fascist reader, I will say this. Fat transgender sluts look like that because we want our bodies to have meaning. One of the most harrowing things about gender dysphoria, about internalized fatphobia, is the feeling of a body void of significance.

In her Obsessive-Compulsive thought patterns, pre-transition Louane would constantly ask herself why her body was so detached from who she was. Why, if she knew herself to be naturally and beautifully gay, did she look like that? Becoming her own fascist 6-year old, she found disembodiment and dissociation looming in the lack of meaning behind her flesh.

The ideal of nature breaks down once I can feel my body, touch my own skin, see my own shitty tattoos, and know what they mean. When I ask myself how I became a Fat Slut, I come to the conclusion that it is because I chose to be one. Regardless of the true ultimate meaning of my transness, my fatness, my being-a-slut, they are at odds with the ideal of nature, its contrasting demands of reality and ephemera.

Epilogue : Fat Sluts Take on Bordeaux Airport

I walk through Bordeaux Airport, barely holding myself together through the frustration of hours upon hours of formalities to ensure that I don’t do 9/11 on whatever is supposedly worth 9/11ing at Montreal-Trudeau Airport. What enhances the frustration is that, on top of a very tall security guy examining the saline solution I use to keep my piercings from getting infected, I am burning hot. Bodies pressed together running through one of the most complex mazes assembled by man, and my body restrained by three layers of clothing, including an unbelievably tight sports bra.

My passport is marked as male, with my deadname on it. In order to get through this airport, and to my flight, I need to pass as male. I show employees and security officers the fine blue booklet, and they give a very blasé look to the photo of my fourteen year old self, adorned with badly bleached hair and an oversized slit in my eyebrow. To my surprise, the woman points me away, with a stern “madame.” It seems very little effort was given to examining my passport, but it also seems that the baggy, breastless look I’ve given myself has failed. 

Later, two police officers look over my passport at the border crossing. All is in order, and they usher me away. I can’t find my gate, so I end up coming back to ask them for help. The police officers elect to walk me to my gate, standing uncomfortably close to me as we walk. They question me about having a boyfriend, commenting that a girl my age should have one. At this moment, I ask myself, have they not seen my passport? Have they not read the clearly male name on it? Why are cops flirting with me?

This situation would be, for any trans woman, a nightmare scenario. The classic story repeated in trans circles all around the world, of predatory, insistent, and vaguely threatening men following trans women around as they would any woman, and the looming terror at what would happen if they found out that said woman was trans (especially when the men are afforded the impunity for sexual crimes that cops retain.) Thankfully, we are inside an airport, a highly controlled area where it would be difficult for these men to do much to me. Just a casual exercise in male entitlement, I suppose.

I am undergoing a legal sex change. When this legal sex change goes through, the Canadian government will issue me a new birth certificate. This birth certificate will state my birth name as Louane Morin. It will also state my sex at birth as female. When I walk through Bordeaux Airport, I will show the cops a passport that states my gender as female, based on a document that will state I was born female, and immediately named Louane.

In negotiating with nature, in navigating the physical bureaucracy of Bordeaux Airport, I will have to stand and affirm something factually untrue—that I was never born male, never assigned any name other than Louane. My safety rests on asserting that I’ve always been naturally female, naturally Louane. This dissonant force engineering new epistemologies at odds with each other, has forced me to create my own incoherent, and impossible truths.

To navigate this dissonant system, I will continue to create evermore contradictory identities, false truths protecting me from its violence. Will this work? Surely not, but I only hope that my failures will teach other Fat Sluts to build natures more artificial than mine.