The Fat Studies Reader

15. Part-Time Fatso

139 15 Part-Time Fatso S. Bear Bergman Sometimes I’m Fat, and Sometimes I’m Not I look the same every day. I’m five feet nine inches tall, broad shouldered and white skinned, green eyed with short brown hair, roughly 275 pounds. I dress myself plainly—blue jeans and button-downs, boots or sandals. I wear glasses. All these things are true all the time, and yet even so I am only Fat in the normative, cultural, “Ew, gross, look at it jiggle” sense about a third of the time. Whether I’m fat depends on whether the person or people looking at me believe me to be a man or a woman. After the first reading of the above description, you got a mental picture of me, and it quite likely included a gender. But there are no gendered statements in that paragraph, in much the same way that (while I’m dressed, anyhow) there are no gendered statements on my body. You may be having the same dizzying gender experience that people have when they look at me on the street, in a restaurant, or on an airplane. If you are, then you already know what I’m about to say: whether the world thinks of me as fat depends entirely on how it interprets my gender. I mean, certainly I am not a svelte specimen in any case. I’m broad beamed, and I have a comfortable belly (which I refer to affectionately as “the half-rack,” my little pun on the “six-pack abs” phenomenon), ham-like thighs, and a general XXL-ness about me. Society, however, does not see all fat as being equal. A man can be much, much fatter than a woman and still be viewed as comfortably within the standard deviation ; most department stores carry men’s pants up to a size 42, which is the rough equivalent of a women’s size 24—a size that a woman would have to visit a specialty big-girl store or “Women’s” department to find. Men are comfortable on beaches with their beach-ball bellies hanging over their swimsuit waistbands, bronzing their fat in the sun, whereas my fat women friends struggle to find swimwear that does not feature a skirt. So me, I’m transgendered. It means that the gender I present in the world is not congruent with the sex that I was assigned at birth; in practical terms, I mostly look like a man but have a body that some would consider physiologically female. Even though I don’t identify as a man (I am a butch, which is its own gender), I am taken for a man about two-thirds of the time. And when I am taken for a man, I am not fat. 140 Photos by Coren Rau. Part-Time Fatso 141 As a man, I’m a big dude, but not outside the norm for such things. I am just barely fat enough to shop at what I call The Big Fat Tall Guy Store, and can sometimes find my size in your usual boy-upholstery emporia. Major clothing labels, like Levi Strauss, make nice things in my size, and I am never forced to wear anything that appears to have been manufactured at Mendel the Tentmaker’s House o’ Fashion . (Although those things do exist for men, too. Those terrycloth shirts with the waistbands? Oy.) I can order extra salad dressing or ice cream or anything else in a restaurant and have it arrive without comment; I can eat it in public without anyone taking a bit of notice, even if I am shoving it into my mouth while walking down a crowded street and getting crumbs all over my chest in the process. I can run for a bus or train without anyone making a snide remark. As a big guy, I’m big enough to make miscreants or troublemakers decide to take their hostility elsewhere. As a woman, I am revolting. I am not only unattractively mannish but also grossly fat. The clothes I can fit into at the local big-girl stores tend to fit around the neck and then get bigger as they go downward, which results in a festive butch-in-a-bag look—all the rage nowhere, ever. No matter how clearly I order a Coke in a restaurant I must be on a diet...