You belong in your body. You belong in this world, and we belong together.
You wouldn’t know that by looking at the current state of our world. Consider the astronomical rise in inequality in the United States in income, education, housing, and health care, pushing the middle class into the lower margins, lessening the possibility that anyone other than the über-rich can better themselves financially, and contributing to growing disenfranchisement, alienation, social isolation, and divisiveness. We are increasingly disconnected from ourselves, from each other, and from the world around us.
The fallout is heart wrenching: depression, anxiety, suicide, drug addiction, and violence are all on the rise. Also on the upswing are hate crimes, intimate partner violence, sexual assault, and incarceration.
We can—and must—do better.
The truth is, we don’t need to create connection with each other, or even within ourselves. It is already there. What we need to do is restore the innate connection that has been severed by a prejudicial culture.
Being and belonging are our birthright and our future. Let’s reclaim them.
When we talk about belonging, we’re usually discussing how we relate to other people. We understand loneliness, isolation, and lack of belonging as something that happens between people and in our world, broadly. Loneliness or isolation usually focus on rejection or exclusion by people or systems, being shut out of a group, not fitting in, or being discriminated against by others. All of these things are important and true, but missing from the conversation is the fact that the first place we’re not allowed to be ourselves and belong is in our own bodies. Forced alienation from our physical selves is perhaps the precondition for loneliness and social isolation.
For some of us, disconnection began at a young age. We cried and no one responded by feeding or holding us. Or, we observed violence in our environment. The world—and our security—felt precarious. Not knowing otherwise, we thought the problem was us. We looked at our bodies, with their material needs, their urge for safety, for love and acknowledgement, as inadequate or too much. Our needy bodies betrayed us.
For others, the disconnect came later, when the first signs of our difference started emerging, perhaps as an effeminate boy or a masculine girl, or a kid who doesn’t grow out of their “baby fat.” Society drills into us that our selves and our bodies are unacceptable, and we need to focus on changing. For those with some disadvantaged identities—people with dark skin, folks with disabilities, women—the cultural hostility to their very existence is immediate. It’s the air that all of us breathe. It’s so ubiquitous that it’s nearly invisible.
“Somewhere, on the edge of consciousness,” writes Audre Lorde in Sister Outsider, “there is what I call a mythical norm, which each one of us within our hearts knows ‘that is not me.’ In America, this norm is usually defined as white, thin, male, young, heterosexual, Christian, and financially secure. It is with this mythical norm that the trappings of power reside within this society.”1
Those of us who don’t fit into the “mythical norm”—which is to say, most people, since very few people hold all of those dominant identities in one embodied bundle—are tasked with the impossible, unachievable, lifelong project of hiding who we are. We are coerced and conditioned to endlessly work on our bodies and ourselves to more closely accommodate to this mythical norm. The alternative is to live with the knowledge that our appearance will always and automatically telegraph “wrongness” and limit opportunity. The less we resemble the norm, the more likely we are to suffer the consequences—socially, financially, physically, and more.
It’s hard to convey the all-encompassing brutality that comes with learning over and over—at four, five, twelve, fourteen, and every day of your life—that you do not belong in your body. A lifetime of slow-burning self-immolation is ignited by the realization that your body is an enemy to be coerced, controlled, and transformed into something else—ideally, something not you. Even worse, it’s your job to inflict that ceaseless punishment on yourself. Diet. Straighten your hair. Mask your feelings. Our culture’s violent demands alienate us from our own bodies. We learn, again and again, that we cannot be ourselves. Convinced that our bodies are defective and deviant, we cannot settle into or be at home in our own skin. Those of us outside the mythical norm must dissociate from our bodies and regard them from a forensic distance. Our bodies, many of us get trained to tell ourselves, are not our selves. The body is an external thing, a problem to be solved.
I grappled with this growing sense of defectiveness, of alienation from my own body, across my entire childhood—and I did it without the language to explain what was wrong. A fat kid knows that they are fat and that other people don’t like their fatness. There are words for it. A trans kid often doesn’t even know that trans is a thing. They just think they’re being rejected and punished for something so awful that it’s formless and nameless. In place of words, they cultivate only a growing sense of wrongness. At the time, I didn’t know there was such a thing as being trans, non-binary, genderqueer, or two-spirited, nor did I know there had always been people like me. I wish there had been someone who did have the language and knowledge to sit me down and say, “Kid, there’s nothing wrong with you. You’re just trans. It’s a thing. Here’s what might help you navigate it . . .”
Instead, without language and with negative, forceful messaging coming at me from all angles, I grew to distrust my own body and my own perceptions. I learned not to let my guard down, relax, or be myself—because it was made abundantly clear to me that expressing my true self and my gender identity in my body was absolutely not acceptable. I got rejected and punished for it, over and over. For me, puberty, my teen years, and young adulthood were marked by danger and pain. Not being allowed to belong in your own body is like tap-dancing through landmines every day of your life while trying to make it look like you’re moonwalking.
I must have done an extraordinary job of hiding my pain from those close to me. Nothing proved this better than, as an adult, receiving a text from my brother on the anniversary of our father’s death. “Remembering the good times,” it read, with a photo from my bat mitzvah. I was stunned. I knew he meant it as a well-intentioned, sentimental reminder that we belong to each other. In our family photo he saw a picture-perfect scene of upper-middle-class North American “normalcy” and success—a heterosexual couple and their three kids, all white, slender, seemingly able-bodied, and cisgender. I’m at the center, smiling gamely in my lacy floral dress. What my brother didn’t see was that behind the practiced smile, beneath the designer dress, well-coiffed hair, and professionally applied makeup, was a genderqueer kid in drag. It was excruciating. When I look at this photo, I remember one of the most painful days I had ever experienced in my then thirteen-year life.
A bat mitzvah (and, for boys, a bar mitzvah) is a Jewish coming-of-age ritual. It marks the transition from childhood to adulthood, signifying that a girl is now a woman. For a girl who wants to become a woman, I imagine this is a wonderful, hopeful milestone. For me, however, it was terrifying. I knew things were only going to get worse.
Everything and everyone in the world told me I was a girl. I was never quite so sure. Even in the liberal 1960s, ‘70s, and ‘80s, though, and until recently, there were no other possibilities I could see for myself. This was the source of my acute and enduring anguish. As far as I knew, the world was composed of boys and girls, men and women—and, like the crowd at the emperor’s naked parade, everyone seemed confident that they were one or the other. My parents, for example, thought they had a daughter, a tomboy for sure, but definitely a girl. That hybrid identity—both girlboy and neither—was closer to who I was than anything else. For a while, as a kid and a preteen with a body relatively unmarked by visible signs of gender, I could flourish in that liminal space. As I moved into puberty, however, my body started to change, and so did the way people interacted with me. My bat mitzvah, as the threshold between tomboy and woman, was the dividing line. Crossing the threshold required a survival tactic that would haunt me long after. If it’s possible to mark the start of an eating disorder, that would be the day.
My body was becoming more and more of a problem. It was betraying me by sending signals to the world that I was a woman, when I knew I was not. The unrelenting messages I got about my wrongness meant that I could not exist as I was in my own body. The contrast between the excruciatingly narrow possibilities for gender (man or woman) versus what I knew of myself meant that I could not be me, in this body.
This is a kind of death.
It’s so obvious that it looks ridiculous when I write this, but without a body, you don’t exist. We are not separable from our bodies. We are our bodies, and to make someone feel that they can’t be at home in their body—the source of their life—is a death wish visited upon them. To make matters worse, the way socialization works is that in pursuit of belonging, we get enlisted into committing crimes against ourselves and our own bodies.
Coercion, erasure, marginalization, othering, dehumanization, discrimination, exclusion, and alienation are targeted forms of abuse, violence, and death that are inflicted, largely with impunity, on certain bodies.
Those of us outside the mythical norm become targets. We are under unrelenting pressure to modify our perceived bodily failings. To survive, we have to objectify our own bodies and can’t relax into them. We can’t belong, not even to ourselves.
White supremacy and colonization, for example, make it hard for People of Color to appreciate their bodies. How can you value your body when it stands as your main barrier to opportunity and respect? (Of course, it’s not your body that is the barrier; it is the oppressive culture’s ideas about your body that are the problem, but you may not see that—and it doesn’t matter to your oppressors, anyway.) How do you find value in your body when the way you adorn yourself, whether with a hijab or afro or turban, is scorned and ridiculed? Black people lose jobs for locs and braids. People have to objectify and dissociate themselves from their bodies in an attempt to manage their lives, to create safety, to get jobs, to get through the day without getting murdered—literally, spiritually or otherwise.
The signs of this crisis are everywhere, from decreasing levels of empathy and trust to soaring rates of suicide, depression, loneliness, and mass violence.
Over and over, we learn that we don’t belong in our bodies.
If we have to scan our environments . . .
If we’re at increased risk for rape, violence, and murder . . .
If we can’t trust other people with our true selves . . .
If huge amounts of our energy, cognitive power, and money must be devoted to ameliorating our unacceptable bodies . . .
If our life spans are shortened . . .
If we don’t survive pregnancies or our infants aren’t surviving . . .
If police can shoot us with impunity . . .
If we can’t use the restroom without fear of violence . . .
If we have to diet . . .
This continual vigilance, the constant shaming, the overbearing systemic violence isolates us, keeps us self-interested (not out of a desire to optimize but rather out of desire to survive) and keeps us from forming relationships, groups, and even movements to exert our power. All the while it contributes to a physical stress response that increases our risk for disease, addiction, other self-harm, and even early death. It erects barriers and complications that steal our creativity and drain us of energy for full participation in life.
When you are not allowed to belong in your own body, that is violence. It is oppression and a function of oppression. Body liberation is about taking our bodies back and making ourselves at home in our own skin.
First, we’re not allowed to be ourselves or belong in our bodies. Then, we’re not allowed to take those bodies out into the world.
Consider for a moment a breastfeeding parent who feeds their baby every couple of hours, for as much as forty hours per week. If they’re not welcome to breastfeed in public, that means they must avoid public spaces for the equivalent of a full workweek, every week. They’re going to have to dart in and out, plan and carefully time essential activities, and reduce the amount of time they spend outside their home.
Or consider a person who uses a wheelchair. I’m shocked to see how frequently my friends with disabilities are unable to participate in activities I take for granted. The many restaurants, movie theaters, houses of worship, and retail stores they can’t access. The extra time they need to budget for difficulties with public transportation (Elevator breakdowns! Short boarding windows! Inadequate space!). Not to mention their safety concerns; every person I know with a physical disability has faced interpersonal violence and feels vulnerable to more.
The conventionally accepted medical model of disability focuses on the limitations of the disabled body itself, rather than on the structural barriers, negative attitudes, and societal exclusions these bodies face. That my friend couldn’t enter my house because we couldn’t get his wheelchair up the stairs is a problem that can be solved. His body was never the problem; the structural barrier was.
Accompanying him as he uses “accommodations” like ramps and elevators heightens my sense of our crisis of belonging. As we enter an elevator for the local train, our conversation drops because we need to stop breathing in order to avoid inhaling the stench of urine. I think about the desperation of whoever used the elevator as a bathroom, what might have driven them to use the elevator. By the time we reach street level, I’m acutely aware how each of us—me, my friend who is disabled, that unseen person who peed—has been dehumanized not because of who we are, but because society won’t support our basic needs. People don’t urinate or defecate on city streets because they want to; they do it because they’ve been stripped of other options and their dignity.
Consider too, the ways fat people are excluded from full participation in the world. One example is the downsizing of plane bathrooms. Kimberly Dark, sociologist, author, and storyteller, dramatizes it brilliantly in her performance piece, “Things I Learned from Fat People on the Plane.” Fortunately, she jokes, she’s been doing yoga for thirty years, so she can get one leg up on the wall and pee standing up. Sadly, most people—fat or otherwise—cannot. Those bathrooms weren’t accessible for Dark—and she’s not alone.
Imagine if public restrooms were available only for women. Imagine how challenging—perhaps impossible—it would be for men and people of other genders to have a life and venture out in public.
That’s what trans people face, daily. Now the hotly contested issue is whether trans people should have the right to use the bathroom that represents their true gender. Let’s be clear about what’s really going on. Anti-trans bathroom laws aren’t actually about “privacy” or the risk of sexual assault—they are about trans people’s right to exist in public space. When we can’t use public bathrooms, we can’t spend prolonged time in public. This means we can’t work, go to school, access health care, engage socially . . . We can’t exist out in the world.
Consider, too, the plausibility of the fear that has been raised: the idea that men will disguise themselves as trans women to sneak into women’s bathrooms and sexually assault women. First, remember that sexual assault is illegal, even if trans people are allowed to use bathrooms that correspond to their gender identity. Trans bathroom protections do not legalize harassment, stalking, violence, or sexual assault. Moreover, there’s no evidence that these crimes increase with passage of trans bathroom bills. Media Matters debunked that myth, confirming with experts and officials in twelve states and seventeen school districts that enacted protections for trans people that they had no increase in sex crimes after their policies were implemented.2 Safety should be a primary consideration, which is precisely why these protections are necessary. Research has shown that transgender people are frequently harassed or physically assaulted while trying to use public restrooms. Providing legal protections will go a long way toward ensuring safety for all.3
There’s historical irony in the knowledge that some of the most intense civil rights battles have been fought over the right to pee. The US civil rights movement fought for the end of prohibitions against Black people using “white” bathrooms. The disability rights movement mobilized around access to public bathrooms. And the feminist movement spoke out against employers’ failure to provide enough bathrooms to accommodate women in the workforce.
Consider my struggles at my local gym. Given the binary option of either a men’s or women’s locker room, I feel coerced into misgendering myself and choose the women’s, where I’m frequently subjected to glares, stares, and the occasional obnoxious comment. One time, when I was in that locker room complaining to a friend about the situation, another woman piped up with “But you look like a woman, I don’t get why people would hassle you.” I understood her intent. She was trying to comfort me, to be helpful, but she didn’t see that she was adding to the hurt. I don’t want to look like a woman, to “pass.” I want to be seen.
If public spaces don’t welcome or accommodate your body, it’s because our culture has decided that your body is not supposed to exist there.
First, we’re not allowed to be ourselves or belong in our bodies. Then we’re not allowed to take those bodies out into the world. So how are we supposed to meet each other, know each other, or be ourselves with each other?
Together, the first two barriers (not belonging in our own bodies or in the world) undermine our abilities to belong to each other—in partnerships, families, groups, and communities. I experienced this, intimately, in my own family.
I vividly remember the day my mother bought my bat mitzvah dress.
I awoke in an empty house. My parents and brother were out shopping for suits. (I have an older sister, too, but she was no longer living with us.) Expecting a few hours alone before they returned from their jaunt, I snuck into my brother’s room and found the black velvet suit (this was the ‘70s!) he had worn at his bar mitzvah three years earlier. Hanging next to it was a white tux shirt and black bow tie, unworn since. I coveted all of it. I slipped on the shirt and then the suit. As I adjusted the tie, I imagined what it would feel like walking through the world wearing this suit.
There I was, modeling in front of his mirror, feeling oh-so-right expressing my masculinity, when my mother unexpectedly burst into the room. Busted. She stared in stunned silence for a moment, obviously horrified, and then said, “Straight to your room and take it off this moment, young lady, before your brother and father see you.” She followed me into my room, making sure no one else witnessed my shame, which was clearly her shame as well.
“You’re going to be a woman now,” she said. “No more dressing or acting like a boy. It’s time to grow up.” Later that day, she bundled me into the car to go pick out the frilly dress I was to wear.
My childhood innocence was shattered. I got the message that my authentic expression of gender was inappropriate and shameful. To survive in my family, I would have to hide my masculinity. There was no sanctuary for me, and therefore no belonging, in my own home.
Even during my father’s speech at my bat mitzvah about what a beautiful young woman I was becoming, I wondered: Is he saying this because he means it or is he trying to make it true by saying it? (I still don’t know.) Had he picked up on something about my gender identity that didn’t fall neatly into the category of girl (or boy)? My mother certainly had sussed that out, to our mutual distress. She was intervening, intensively, to try to turn me into a proper woman.
Of all the traits he could have been proud of, my dad chose “beauty,” the one from which I felt most estranged. Femininity was being forced on me. Beauty was a weapon wielded against me rather than a tool I could wield. For me, puberty, the bat mitzvah, and all the humiliating preparations leading up to it, plus the gender training that came right after (a horrendous and traumatizing modeling school experience was next in my mother’s well-meaning attempts to feminize me) were a crushing reinforcement of my alienation.
Not coincidentally, this alienation and lack of belonging—within me and in every social space I occupied—coincided with the beginning of my eating disorder and substance abuse. Which is tragic when you remember that the bat mitzvah ritual is supposed to center on becoming a thinking, participating member of a spiritual and learned community. Instead, it gets tangled into a cult of womanhood and manhood. In my mind, personhood would accomplish the ultimate goal so much better.
Some synagogues are catching on to the power inherent in avoiding this gender binary by adapting the plural term, b’nai mitzvah, as a way to denote a “they” mitzvah.* In these ceremonies, b’nai mitzvah is used as a gender-neutral alternative to either bar mitzvah or bat mitzvah. The traditional prayers are altered, in Hebrew and in English, so that they is used in place of he or she.
It would be wonderful if you could always carry with you the knowledge that you are okay just as you are. But that’s a hard thing to maintain in this culture. Few of us feel as if we really belong, be it in our own bodies or interacting in the world. We don’t all get the love and respect we deserve.
Sometimes we join others in rejecting those parts of ourselves not valued by others. Our complicity in an alienating system may be most painful of all. Many of us not only feel alienated, we feel alone in our alienation. We keep silent about it, which allows it to perpetuate. Ashamed of our feeling of alienation, we treat it as a personal inadequacy, something to hide. Our feelings of unbelonging come to dominate our psyches.
To manage these consequences, we try to manage impressions. We intuit biases to try to defuse them. We modify ourselves. We censor ourselves, watching not just what we say but the tone or accent we say it in. We are forced to hide parts of ourselves, or to perform acceptable versions of ourselves, all in order to fit in and belong. Because when we don’t belong, there is danger—to our physical persons and to our innermost selves.
The tragedy of social and systemic exclusion is that the rejection turned against our bodies manifests as maladies: depression, anxiety, addictions, eating disorders, gastrointestinal disorders, metabolic diseases, and more. Our bodies are punished when the real culprit is not us but our unjust culture.
It’s not we ourselves who are to blame for feeling that we do not belong, but rather the structure under which we live that continually perpetuates violence against us.
I want all of us who feel like outsiders to know that our voices are not only necessary but desperately needed to get us out of this mess we’re in right now.
No matter what cultural messaging may say, we deserve to feel that we belong in our bodies. We are human, we are whole, we are powerful—together and alone.
*The general intent in using the word b’nai is inclusivity. But linguistically speaking, it’s still gendered terminology. B’nai is masculine plural, which in Hebrew (as in most languages that have grammatical gender) covers any group that isn’t all female; all mixed-gender groups, even groups of a thousand women and one man, devolve to masculine form in the plural.