In 1994, John Ehrlichman—domestic affairs advisor and top aide to Nixon, as well as a Watergate co-conspirator—told investigative reporter Dan Baum a truth that had long been understood but never really confirmed: the War on Drugs was a legal way to criminalize and abuse Black people. In his report, published in Harper’s Magazine, Baum records Ehrlichman saying:
The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.
In a recording of a conversation between Nixon and Reagan, released by the National Archives in 2019,15 Reagan—who was the governor of California at the time—was quoted saying, “Last night, I tell you, to watch that thing on television as I did . . . To see those—those monkeys from those African countries—damn them, they’re still uncomfortable wearing shoes.” At best, this was a conversation between two anti-Black white men ranting about their hatred of Black people. At worst, this was a collusion of two anti-Black white men—both of whom held social, economic, and political power—who met with the intent to forge a plan that would help them leverage that power over the people and communities for whom they held a lot of hate. It was a success. The war—that was and has been more accurately called a genocide, waged first by Nixon—has been continued by every president that followed him, across party lines.
Following Reagan, Bill Clinton took office. Though he initially campaigned on “treatment over incarceration,” he adopted the drug war policies of his Republican predecessors and further expanded mass incarceration through the implementation of like the 1994 Crime Bill—which included a “Three Strikes” provision. That bill, which was opposed by members of the Congressional Black Caucus, was proposed, co-authored, and signed by current Democratic heavy hitters like Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders. Like with Nixon and Reagan, Clinton helped to target and abuse working-class Black communities through continuing this so-called War on Drugs.
At the core of the War on Drugs is the Black, and at the core of the War on Obesity—even if not as explicitly so—is the Black fat. Black people make up roughly 13 percent of the American population, but about 51 percent of America’s fat population. Obesity is determined by body mass index (BMI), something people have been taught is a direct measure of one’s health. Over two hundred years ago, a Belgian man named Adolphe Quetelet created what we now know as the BMI. Quetelet was not a physician, nor did he study medicine in any capacity; Quetelet was a mathematician and a sociologist, and it was that on which the BMI was created. Quetelet is known for his envisioning of l’homme moyen—an image of what he understood to be “the average man”—which he developed through “the measurement of human features with the deviation plotted around the mean.”16 He began the development with the use of physical features of the human, who—at least as his work suggests—he understood to be cisgender white men. Those features included the chests of Scottish Highland regiment soldiers. After, he moved on to moral and intellectual qualities like suicide, crime, and madness. On Quetelet, Erna Kubergovic writes in the Eugenics Archive:
For Quetelet, the average body presented an ideal beauty; the normal, conceived of average, emerged as an ideal type to be desired. It was Quetelet that formulated the BMI, initially through the measurement of typical weights among French and Scottish conscripts. Instead of labelling the peak of the bell-curve as merely normal, he labelled it “ideal,” with those deviating either “overweight” or “underweight” instead of heavier than average or lighter than average. Thus, while informed by statistics, Quetelet was still working within the medical context of the normal; that is, he envisioned the normal (i.e., typical) as the ideal or something desirable.
What he had created was the standard for male beauty and health, built only with white Europeans in mind and determined by something that measured whole populations and not individuals. By the twentieth century, Quetelet’s work was being used as the basis of, and justification for, eugenics. And though all of his work in that time period was based in anti-Black race science, he was clear that the intent of the BMI was to measure populations to develop statistics. Aubrey Gordon, creator of “Your Fat Friend” and author of What We Don’t Talk about When We Talk about Fat, wrote more on this in an online essay:17
By 1985, the National Institutes of Health had revised their definition of “obesity” to be tied to individual patients’ BMIs. And with that, this perennially imperfect measurement was enshrined in U.S. public policy. In 1998, the National Institutes of Health once again changed their definitions of “overweight” and “obese,” substantially lowering the threshold to be medically considered fat. CNN wrote that “Millions of Americans became ‘fat’ Wednesday—even if they didn’t gain a pound”—as the federal government adopted a controversial method for determining who is considered overweight.
It was that second change, Gordon notes, that gave way to “a new public health panic: the ‘Obesity Epidemic.’” Gordon continues:
By the turn of the millennium, the BMI’s simple arithmetic had become a de rigueur part of doctor visits. Charts depicting startling spikes in Americans’ overall fatness took us by storm, all the while failing to acknowledge the changes in definition that, in large part, contributed to those spikes. At best, this failure in reporting is misleading. At worst, it stokes resentment against bodies that have already borne the blame for so much, and fuels medical mistreatment of fat patients.
As covered in chapters 3 and 4, “health” was created as the antithesis of Blackness; the Black fat was always already removed from the possibility of “good” health—meaning always situated inside/under the label of “bad” health—and was to always and already be the criminal. From the moment white Europeans saw fat Africans, the science that followed was intended to always separate them from the rest. In this way, the BMI—created to maintain whiteness as superior—was always going to harm the Black fat and it is for this reason that Black people make up over half of the fat population and why Black people also have more “health risks” than their white counterparts.
Crack, too, is a “health” failing. The government convinced the public that Black people were the only ones doing hard drugs; that the “crackheads” were rummaging the streets looking to harm anyone who may stand in between them and their “fix”; that addiction was a moral failing rather than a direct result of one’s immediate environment, overrun by poverty, anti-Blackness, and the inability to acquire proper (mental) health care. And it was this that led to punitive, carceral responses to drug addiction rather than methods rooted in harm reduction. Because the Black always already fails in, or is removed from, morality, and as such never has access to care.
The world’s obsession with obesity and being overweight is less about health and is more about the cultural and systemic anti-Blackness as anti-fatness that diet, medical, and media industries profit from. Just like with the War on Drugs and the crack epidemic, major institutions falsified evidence about the effects of fatness or obesity as a way to criminalize and profit off fat people—especially the Black fat. That damage is still being done. The Black fat is not dying from being obese, nor is the Black dying from drug addiction. The Black—the Black fat—is dying because of a medical industrial complex committed to seeing fatness, Blackness, and Black fatness as death; they are dying because of a lack of proper resources—like housing and employment—that would provide them with money, health care, and a place to rest their heads; the Black fat, in particular, is dying because of an inherently anti-Black system of policing that sees
them as the deadly Beast that needs to be put down. This is the Belly of the Beast: removed from care and placed always in the way of harm.
6
Meeting Gender’s End
What has been explored throughout this book is the varying ways in which one’s Blackness and fatness is always in conflict with the World; how, if one is fat and Black, they are always already illegible, animalistic, and unDesirable. This is true, too, and perhaps even more so, when one is also trans. And yet, there is so little research on fat Black trans people. It’s as though we breathe in the bodies of beings that never existed. And, to some extent, we haven’t and we don’t. We have breath in our lungs, but existence, or who does and does not exist, is determined by people unlike us, for whom white supremacy—and more specifically, anti-Blackness—and cisheterosexism remain at the helm. But that makes trans people no less tangible. We can be physically touched, seen, and heard, and still so much about how we navigate through and experience life is so underresearched, undervalued, and dismissed.
Gender, just like health and Desire/ability, is a system forged with the purpose of creating and maintaining a class of subjects designed to be inferior to another. The role of “either” gender is achieved through a continued performance. These roles—and these performances—are implied, but also explicitly named, characteristics and duties one must fulfill to be “man” or “woman.” They are not inherent to us, meaning we are not born as “boys” or as “girls.” In basic sociological terms, we are taught immediately after birth through social institutions like family, media, and school what role we must fulfill if we are to hold on to the gender we are assigned at birth. When we start breaking the rules of those assigned roles, and thus falling outside of gender’s hold, we become “sissies” or “tomboys”—depending on which role you were assigned to fulfill from birth. As Judith Butler states in her book Gender Trouble, our behaviors that are gendered are not innate to us. We learn them, and then we learn to perform them. And this performance is policed and maintained by cisheteronormativity, or the idea that everyone already is—and therefore all things must be seen as—cisgender and heterosexual. In other words, cisheteronormativity is the “law and order” of gender in that it is what determines who is departing from their assigned role and must therefore be punished because of it.
To this point, and to return to Butler, it is not our gender that defines our performance, but rather our performance that is always already defining our gender. In her essay, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory,” Butler refers to gender as an illusion and an “object of belief,” expanding further by noting that “gender reality is performative which means, quite simply, that it is real only to the extent that it is performed.” What “performed” means in this sense is not that one is standing on a stage or pretending to do something for the sake of being lauded, but rather that one is creating the thing by which their life and beinghood is defined through myriad acts and repetitions. So what is gender? It is only what we make it, but what we make it is defined by, in simple terms, the World around us. Hortense Spillers knew this, too, about the Black, in particular, when she wrote “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” In that essay, as we covered earlier in the book, Spillers provides an analysis for what it means for Black subjects to always be “ungendered.” This means that gender is lost to the Black—which more directly means that gender reads differently for our bodies and our Being. Ungendered as monstrosity—it is to suggest that we are removed from gender, that we are misaligned with a normative, “coherent” gender, making us Beasts from birth.
In summation, gender is a performance defined by our commitment to upholding it. And despite the fact that gender was never created for the Black to have access to, in similar ways to health and Desire/ability, Black subjects are socialized to uphold the violence of gender, too, and therefore can reproduce similarly violent gender restrictions. And since this is the case, gender must also be destroyed precisely because it can only ever reproduce cisheterosexist violence. And within that cisheterosexist violence, there will always also be anti-fat violence.
I spoke with seven fat Black trans people—all of whom are either trans men, transmasculine, or nonbinary—for them to tell their own stories because it’s their stories that provide the data we so often lack. I asked each of them the same questions and followed up with some of them for more questioning.
The initial questions read as follows:
What was your journey into your trans ID like as a fat person? Has fatness played a direct role in shaping your gender journey?
Within Black trans/queer spaces, what type of differences do you notice between yourself and thin trans folks with regard to how you’re treated?
More generally, how do you feel anti-fatness shows up in spaces that are predominantly trans?
The first person I spoke with was Jupiter, a nonbinary trans person who uses he/they pronouns. Jupiter had this to say:
Jupiter: “[I] didn’t know there was a word to describe how I felt, you know? Being afab, I rejected my femininity as a whole, and I find myself still doing so from time to time—even though I’m more comfortable about it than I was when I was younger, [and I was assigned] that whole ‘tomboy’ label. I really didn’t start learning about gender identities until high school. A friend of mine, who identified as androgynous at the time, opened that door for me, but I still wasn’t truly confident in labeling myself as trans—let alone as nonbinary—[because I] still didn’t understand. And yeah, I do think my fatness plays a role because I’m still pretty fucked up when it comes to my self-esteem. I find myself ping-ponging between wanting to lose weight, being happy with the way I am, or compromising and feeling like ‘if I just lose a little weight in certain areas I’d be okay’ because I don’t really fit the nonbinary ‘norm’—at least how it has been presented to me. I know not having a flat chest definitely ties into my body issues. Lately when I find myself daydreaming, I’m starting to imagine how I [could look] with a flat chest. That makes me happy, and I know that that’s eventually my end goal. I haven’t even attempted to invest in a binder, though, because I haven’t personally seen any fat trans folx say they’ve found a good one that works; I’m not even sure there even are good binders for us.
“I feel for sure that thin nonbinary/trans folx get more recognition and more opportunity to explore themselves and how they want to express their identity without being invalidated. It’s like there are days where I don’t mind being somewhat ‘female-presenting,’ but at the same time I’m [often] being perceived as a stud [solely] because of my body size—especially my hips. And no matter how baggy my shirt is, I can’t hide my chest. So if I don’t explicitly state that a spade is a spade, niggas gone say ‘oh that’s a diamond over there.’”
I followed up with Jupiter to ask him to say more about his feelings on wanting a flat chest. I wanted to know how he arrived at that, and if he believed that to have a flat chest meant he had to become thin.
Jupiter: “I used to think of having a flat chest and being thin, and thought that it would make me feel good, but I’m getting better with my body image. As such, I definitely still want a flat chest, [but it doesn’t have to be accompanied by a thin body]. I want a flat chest, fat body and all.”
The next person I spoke with was a transmasculine person affectionately referred to as Bearboi, with he/they pronouns.
Bearboi: “Because people link fatness with ugliness, they think [fat folks] transition because we weren’t attractive as ‘women,’ which isn’t true, but because of the ignorance, that is what people think being trans is. Then you add the layer of being fat. I personally think that fat Black transmasc people have it extremely difficult; from the cost of transition to this idea of ‘passing’ being stressed because our chest size is inherently bigger than our smaller counterparts. In fact, I was actua
lly so happy when I got a beard because there are fat cis men so I figured I could pass as one [since I had facial hair].
“To preface this, it is not the desire [for many thin trans men] to actually be ‘thin’; the goal is to be [bulky] and muscular because as a society, we associate strength and muscles with masculinity and ‘manliness.’ So thin transmasculine ppl do have a hard time with body image and their gender being validated because we associate being thin with femininity, and associate femininity with fragility and softness.”
I explained to him that “thinness” isn’t necessarily defined by who is “skinny,” but rather that to be non-fat is to be thin, and as such even this societal commitment to muscularity as what “defines” manhood is still both anti-fat and cissexist. He agreed, and continued discussing weight and gym culture within trans culture:
Bearboi: “HRT is also a big reason for this. We are told that the faster your metabolism is, the faster and better the injections work through the body. If not, it turns into estrogen and you gain weight. So many people work out to get a smaller chest area; the muscles just come with it. The smaller you can get your chest, the less you have to break your ribs wearing a binder—making pre-op more bearable. There’s also the 3 stereotypical bodies people see when it comes to transmasc ppl: thin, bodybuilder, and fat. . . .
“I don’t know if you know, but top surgery for big folk is almost twice as much as it is for the thinner folk. I know someone who was quoted at $15,000 and thinner folk who were quoted at $6,500. I had a consultation at a private practice that quoted me at $9,300, I think. It was because, as they told it, legally they could not perform the surgery in their office due to my size so they would have to use the hospital and it costs more for the anesthesia. They showed me the price breakdown, and I eventually ended up going with someone else who is very familiar with working on fat bodies. There’s a HUGE difference. I know some guys that were botched because their surgeon wasn’t used to working on fat bodies.”
Belly of the Beast Page 8
