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As it happens, cellulite knows no sex or gender, although it’s more common in people assigned female at birth thanks to those pubertal fat deposits. But people assigned male at birth can and do sport cellulite. Yet somehow, you will never see ads for cellulite reducing creams or wraps or “blasters” aimed at men. First of all, men are not tasked with the same exacting adherence to attractiveness 104 FAT standards as women, which is part of what makes those expectations so sexist. But even if they were, we still might not see cellulite-fighting weaponry aimed at men simply because cellulite is considered a female form of fat. We extrapolate social meaning from many aspects of the body. We grow up hearing repeatedly that tall men are born leaders, or at least natural basketball stars. Watch a few Disney movies or read a few fairy tales and you’ll be well indoctrinated in the theory that evil, wicked, cruel people are all ugly, old, or both. Big breasts mean a woman is more feminine and sexually free, while small breasted women are uptight and unfeminine. Muscular, athletic men are more virile than dudes with potbellies. Or so we tend to believe. It’s rare that we say these things out loud, or even articulate them to the point where we could say them aloud if we wished. These tacit beliefs in the meaning of the body are cultural shibboleths, truisms we all seem to know and understand, whether or not we are in agreement. We use them to make sense of the world. In the big picture, this works pretty well much of the time. So long as bodies look roughly the way we expect them to, meaning that the physical characteristics we encounter are more or less as we expect them, we are content that we know where a particular human being fits in our received FIGURE 105 hierarchies of identity. So long as this is true, we are unlikely to pause or question our reflexive assessment of what and who a person is. As with so many things we use to make sense of the world, we observe bodies in passing without really thinking about them, our brains making the connections and associations seemingly on their own, without our conscious involvement. This is, of course, one of the reasons we tend to be so shocked when bodies do not behave or look as we have been conditioned to expect. We go through life seeing mostly what we expect to see, our stream of understanding flowing along at the pace to which we are accustomed. When we encounter something unexpected, our brains have to hit the brakes, sometimes hard and fast, and we lurch erratically, victims of our own inertia. Bodies simply don’t always do what we think they should or look the way we assume they will. Biology is not bound by our selfish desire for convenient ways to know things about other people without having to pay too much attention or, heaven forfend, ask. Mother Nature is a lot more creative than we are. Sometimes people assigned female at birth, like me, have bodies that store their fat on a more male-patterned plan. In my case, it’s due to a fairly common though not well understood biological condition called Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome (PCOS). As the name suggests, 106 FAT the most characteristic sign is ovarian cysts; my own ovaries, which I’ve seen thanks to the generosity of the surgeon who performed my hysterectomy, had regular little rows of cysts that grew all along the outsides in what doctors consider the classic “string of pearls” presentation. The syndrome’s external signs are a lot easier to see. One of the classics is the tendency to accumulate fat in the belly in the way we usually associate with men, rather than the expected fat hips, butt, and thighs we associate with people assigned female at birth. I don’t much mind that I’m shaped like this. To me it’s just one of the ways a body can be. But the same is not true for everyone with PCOS. Some cisgender women with PCOS that I have known find their potbellies depressing and infuriating, feeling like their body fat is actively trying to undermine their femininity. But I also know other people who enjoy this aspect of PCOS bellies. I have known several people assigned female at birth but whose preferred gender expression is masculine of center who find having a big belly an asset in telegraphing masculinity to the world. A big belly is not a big belly is not a big belly, in other words. It may be a blessing or a burden, depending entirely on what sex or gender it is that you wish the world to perceive. People assigned male at birth can experience something analogous, though it’s hips and butts FIGURE 107 and thighs instead of bellies that are the issue. Stereotypically, male-identified people have shoulders that are the same width as their hips or wider, with broader shoulders being associated in the popular imagination with greater masculinity. But bodies exist in all kinds of shapes. Some people assigned male at birth accumulate thick thighs, wide hips, big butts, and sometimes breasts. They might have these instead of the big bellies we expect big dudes to have, or in addition to them. Whichever it is, there’s a high likelihood that the man in question is going to see this fat, and these parts of his body, as a serious crisis. Often men presume that these body shapes are a sign of a medical crisis, though that’s usually not the case. A tendency toward female-pattern fat accumulation might be a signal of lower than typical testosterone, but medically speaking this is only very rarely cause for panic. No, the crisis here is all about gender. Thick thighs and padded hips, in the lexicon of fat, equal “feminine.” Male privilege might rule the world, but it can’t withstand juicy hips and a fat ass. What to do, what to do about this unruly fat, this substance that doesn’t give a damn for your tired old gender norms and biological bell curves? Not much, as it turns out. Despite the many claims made for exercises that target particular “problem areas” and internet clickbait promising that you can do “one 108 FAT stupid thing” to get rid of belly fat, that’s simply not how fat works. Just as you can’t intentionally cause your body to accumulate fat where you want it by, say, rubbing cheesecake on your abdomen, you can’t get rid of it with sit-ups either. When the body metabolizes its own fat, it takes a little bit from all over. What appears to be site-specific fat loss— for instance, noticing that someone’s face or ankles look thinner—is really the consequence of fat loss in areas that didn’t have as much fat deposited in the first place. Where faces are concerned, we also notice change simply because we spend a lot of time looking at them. We are intimately familiar with faces in ways we aren’t with, let’s say, thighs, and so we notice small changes more readily. The truth is that bodies put their fat where their genetic and hormonal marching orders tell them to. It has zero to do with anything we do or don’t do, anything we want or don’t want. Why, then, do we hang so much meaning and so many layers of significance on what bodies do for their own inscrutable reasons? When male-identifying people have curvy hips and thighs or big butts, people often assume they’re gay. Some of my transmasculine friends—people assigned female at birth whose sex and/or gender are now somewhere on the masculine side of the spectrum—regularly curse the curvy, chunky butts or hips that they worry may out them FIGURE 109 as trans. On another side of the gender spectrum, several of my transfeminine friends have been scolded by their doctors, and on a few occasions have even been denied necessary medical treatment, because they gained weight and their bodies happened to deposit fat in their bellies. It may not appear particularly feminine to have a potbelly, but it isn’t exactly as if you can effectively instruct your body to store fat in more gender-affirming locations instead of the places it actually does. Physicians know this full well, and yet these doctors felt that by having fat bellies, my trans women friends were not doing enough to demonstrate that they were genuinely committed to being women. “If you don’t look enough like what I think a woman should look like, I will refuse to give you the care you need to be a woman,” seemed basically to be the gist of it. I wonder, would those doctors say the same to cisgender me on the basis of my belly? Cisgender or trans, we have an equal amount of say in the matter of where our bodies put their fat, after all. My dear friend, the wonderful trans writer and performer S. Bear Bergman, has often commented on the differences in how he’s been treated since he’s been a man. One of my favorites is his comment that now, when he orders a Coke at a restaurant, he actually gets one, not a Diet Coke with a slice of lemon floating accusatorily in it. It was thanks to this comment, and 110 FAT others like it, that it finally dawned on me why I was so upset, back in the 1990s, by that charming masculine soul on my loveseat and their declaration of intent to make a gender transition. My anguish had everything to do with gender, but not really with changing it. What unmoored me was my interviewee’s clear goal to abandon femaleness specifically in order to escape the prejudice they faced as a fat woman. It broke through my own equivocations and the layers of thick skin I’d acquired out of necessity as a fat woman in this culture and rubbed my face firmly in the reality of the gendered humiliation and abuse that fat women deal with every day.