Loving yourself as is. Loving yourself just because you’re enough. Loving your body because it’s your home. Self-love is a feeling, not an idea. It’s your birthright.
Self-love isn’t conditional. We don’t love ourselves because we’ve lost a few pounds. If that were part of the deal, we’d have to withdraw our love when we regain the weight. Instead, self-love is appreciation for the underlying you that persists through the changes. It is unconditionally valuing yourself.
It’s about showing compassion for yourself when you get rejected and devalued—and knowing you’re okay, just right actually, anyway. It’s about showing compassion for yourself when you come up against parts of yourself that you don’t like. It’s about forgiving yourself for the things you’ve done to survive and how that may have wired into habits that don’t serve you as well today.
Self-love is also about allowing ourselves to feel rage at the people and culture that have hurt us, grieving for the loss of a loving relationship with our bodies, and opening to the possibility of connection and belonging.
There’s a myth in the body positivity movement that teaches us that when you’re feeling unwelcome in the world because of your body, self-love is the magic bullet. Unfortunately, there are limits to the self-love prescription—its effectiveness drops off where your self meets others in a society that dehumanizes you in your body. If you feel bad in your body, it’s because our culture has targeted your body for abuse. Self-love alone cannot fix that.
The body positivity movement’s narrow focus means its tools can’t work as predicted—or at all. Yes, we all need self-love to cope with body shaming and to resist internalizing it, yet self-love is not the cure but the response. All the self-love in the world won’t prevent discrimination or systemic oppression. It can’t help others see you for who you are. For marginalized people, and writ large collectively, a self-love focus is the spoonful of sugar that makes the oppression go down.
Consider an incident in my life—a story about the damage body shame can do. Sure, self-love can help me recover from it, but how would self-love have prevented it?
The glass bowl I was washing in the sink slipped from my hands and shattered, sending a shard of glass through the flesh of my ring finger. I knew it was more than a cut. I suspected I’d severed the tendon. Dutifully, I took myself to the hospital emergency room. Nope, the doctor told me, the tendon was intact and the nerve would heal on its own over time. My primary care physician later said the same thing. I wasn’t convinced. I’m a scientist and physiologist, so the structure and function of the body is literally my business. I knew enough to know that my symptoms suggested a torn tendon and that delaying treatment could result in permanent damage, so I asked over and over again to see a specialist, urgently, now.
This is not the story of a doctor examining my sliced-up finger and prescribing weight loss, which is something that happens to fat folks all the time. That experience and others like it—of being profiled and dismissed, based on what status or lack-of-status signals your body is transmitting—is body injustice, and it’s a central focus of the Health at Every Size and body positivity movements. I’m a slim person, however, so that particular example of body injustice is not part of my experience—but if we track my story all the way through the health system and almost to the courtroom, we will indeed see body injustice rear its ugly head.
At some point, I caved and gave up on self-advocacy. If my health care providers are convinced I am wrong, maybe I am. After all, they’re the experts, right?
When I was finally allowed an appointment with a hand specialist, my fear was confirmed. My tendon was torn, and because too much time had passed, it was no longer repairable. As a result, I now suffer persistent pins-and-needles sensation in that finger and can’t bend it, which makes typing a challenge—a not insignificant problem, given that I work as a writer. These were avoidable outcomes with proper diagnosis and timely treatment—both of which I’d rallied for.
I went into mediation with the insurance company to hold them accountable, and it’s in this place, the aftermath of the injury, that the body injustice of our health system and our wider culture presented itself.
It seemed like a straightforward judgment. My concerns and their responses were all expressed in writing, including their own specialist’s determination that a full recovery could have been expected if I had received the timely care that was repeatedly requested and denied to me. But during my deposition, the attorney representing the insurance company asked me about my pending top surgery. If you’re thinking, but wait, there’s no connection between a finger injury and top surgery, you’re right. There’s not.
I live in the San Francisco Bay Area, a politically progressive place where I’ve been “living” my gender identity confidently for decades. I have supportive, progressive-minded friends and colleagues and a workplace where I’m valued, and I am well educated on gender identity. Body acceptance has been my life’s work. I’m considered a leader in the body positivity field. I teach practices that help you relearn the skill of self-acceptance, and in both my previous books I share tools to help you advocate for yourself in institutional and medical settings. Yet I was completely unnerved by this question—and that was its intent. The lawyer cannily invoked the stigma associated with my body and gender identity specifically to undermine my confidence and show the arbitrator that I was “less than.” It was a reminder: You’re trans. Know your place. The intent was to shock me, and thereby shift the power dynamic between us in a case he knew he couldn’t win, and hopefully turn me into a bad witness for myself. The intent, too, was to evoke the assumed prejudice of the arbitrator.
Sadly, it worked to destabilize me. We didn’t even get past the deposition to the arbitration stage. Eliciting my own internalized oppression was enough. A lifetime of stigma and discrimination plus internalized shame and pain flooded me. Angry and unhinged, I started stumbling over my words. My hesitation and sudden inability to explain myself in the deposition made me look like I was confused about the basic facts of my case. Hearing myself speak was like hearing a stranger. I speak from stages for a living and had long considered myself articulate, but suddenly I was having trouble finding words and even focusing. (This is a classic trauma response.)
The settlement the insurance company came back with was far less than I’d anticipated or deserved. It was also far less than my attorney anticipated prior to the deposition.
What does it tell us when a person who has spent decades practicing and teaching people to find their power can be so threatened as to lose the ability to communicate and advocate for themselves? It tells us that shame reinforces inequity. That it can be deployed against us, as both cause and result of social exclusion. It shows us shame’s political and economic effects—which is why the current conversation on body positivity doesn’t quite do it justice or give us the tools for navigating it.
My attorney advised me to take the inadequate settlement. I’d performed so poorly in the deposition, he said, that we had no hope of securing what the case was really worth. And if I refused the offer and proceeded with further legal action, he would not represent me. Anxious just to end the ordeal, I agreed.
Transphobia was winning.
But when I learned that the settlement would come with a nondisclosure (confidentiality) agreement, my response was visceral. I know from my work and personal experience how important testimony is to our ability to heal from stigma and discrimination, and how harmful it can be to keep our abusers’ secrets. Silence allows the shame to grow and the oppression to persist. I knew I needed to be free to tell this story, not just for my own recovery and well-being, but to support others in recognizing the challenges transgender people face. I couldn’t sign off on that.
I went rogue, working outside the mediation system and around the transphobic attorneys. I contacted the hospital’s complaint department to call them out on their transphobia, and we came to a workable compromise. While putting nothing in writing, the hospital increased the settlement offer after I pledged to use the additional money for education on trans issues.
My attorney waived his commission on the additional amount. That was the right thing to do, of course, as he had done nothing to earn the extra dollars, but he doesn’t get a pass. He offered no apology or acknowledgment that he had sold me out in the face of transphobic tactics.
In retrospect, I see that shame had initially immobilized me, which was why the insurance company’s lawyer used it. He weaponized my marginalized status for an economic end. Only once I could curb my shame and recognize that the system was the problem, not me, could I take back my power.
Do stories like this always end in triumph? Absolutely not. Privilege paved the way for me. The insurance company’s fear that I would use my considerable platform for public exposure threatened the system itself. Someone more marginalized, with less social support and confidence and fewer public communication skills or resources, would likely have been stuck.
My challenging the system required resources many don’t have. Privilege supports us in standing up for our values. As another example, I once was asked to keynote a body image conference at a large university. The details were in place and I was just about to sign the contract when the organizer dropped, “By the way, I understand you’re a lesbian. We have a policy of not endorsing gay or lesbian lifestyles, so I need to know that you’re not going to mention that in your talk.” Whoa! Deal breaker. I don’t know if the topic would have come up, but I do know that I come as a full person and couldn’t agree to those terms. I ripped up the contract, abandoning an otherwise lucrative and valuable opportunity.
Had I been less established in my career or less financially secure, I might have swallowed my principles and chosen differently. Poverty and other disadvantage sometimes push people to compromise their values.
This helps us understand that self-love can support us personally but cannot eradicate systemic oppression or the cultural norms that accompany it. It will not help people decode those signals and see other people accurately. I can love myself thoroughly and radically and I will still be misgendered in the world, othered, and disempowered. Self-love doesn’t change the circumstances creating the pain and harm. This means that a focus on self-love, especially for people with dominant identities (like the cisgender white woman privileged by mainstream body positivity) becomes a personal way to cope with systemic oppression without challenging the oppression. In other words, a focus on self-love helps people with otherwise dominant identities individually cope with and maintain the status quo that otherwise benefits them. It doesn’t help all of us band together to change that harmful status quo.
One would think that body positivity proponents, with their keen understanding that fatphobia is a source of injustice, should understand as much as anyone that the body is the site for injustice. Queer bodies. Racialized bodies. Trans bodies. Disabled bodies. Old bodies. All marginalized bodies and identities are a site for injustice.
Body positivity is necessarily about combating oppression and figuring out how to thrive despite it. That’s why I want to see body positivity ideology shift from a dominant story to include all our stories and identities, and why I want us to develop the skills of body autonomy and belonging, to help us heal personally and collectively from systemic discrimination while challenging and dismantling it. Our bodies will remain our bodies; they’re going to continue sending signals about who we are. What needs changing is not our bodies, and it’s more than changing how we feel about them. What needs to change is how the rest of the world receives and interprets those signals they’re sending. Instead of being signals that indicate someone’s status or lack of status and therefore whether a person will be welcomed into belonging and safety, let’s create a context in which all of us belong—with our body autonomy intact, valued, and seen for who we are.
Right now, for the most part, in our body positivity courses, platforms, and communities, we rely on self-love to cope with the injuries that come from being excluded from belonging in our families, workplaces, communities, and nations. Shouldn’t it be our body positivity project, personally and collectively, to create the conditions in which belonging is possible for all bodies?
There’s no room in our social justice movements for only one identity and only one story. We need to hear all the stories and all the solutions in order to heal. We need to see other people who look like us in order to be welcome, and we need to learn skills for creating belonging in order to be able to cope with and change a culture that’s currently hostile to us and to create the alliances necessary to be the best we can be.
That’s why, if we move beyond the dominant narrative in the body positivity community, we’re also going to have to move beyond its primary tool of self-love. Yes, self-love is an important self-reclamation and self-preservation tool. Yes, it has space-making cultural consequences for trans, fat, disabled, and other marginalized bodies. I argue, however, that the need for practicing and reclaiming self-love is a testimony to how far-reaching and all-consuming oppression and body-based injustice truly is. That we need to constantly affirm and reaffirm and strive to love ourselves is itself a reaction to and symptom of systemic rejection. I don’t want us simply to cope with body-based oppression on an individual basis. I want us to eliminate it. To eradicate the rejection, we’ve got to change our social conditioning and the culture around us.
A focus on self-love means that we individualize a collective problem. Predictably, that erases many experiences of body oppression and ends up reinscribing body-based oppression and exclusion in the very community and movement that could be functioning as a model for radical belonging.
We all know by now that individualism doesn’t solve collective problems. This book, though it recognizes the value of self-love, doesn’t stop there. The project of this book—and in our lives—is to move beyond self-love into radical belonging. Individual self-love cannot change the world, but finding ways to belong to one another and offer one another refuge can. It can help shift the ground we stand on until, one day, more bodies are valued and all of us belong.
All the self-love in the world doesn’t prevent other people from othering or trans-shaming or fat-shaming you. And when all you hear is a dominant narrative that doesn’t represent you, the self-love edict can push you even further from finding your soul.
When I was suffering with an eating disorder, my investment in the dominant “healing” narrative only served to further my entrenchment. The commonplace understanding of eating disorders is rooted in the mainstream cis narrative that women want to be thinner because they are taught it’s beautiful and they see that beauty is a woman’s main (or only) path to cultural power. To gain acceptance, therefore, and avoid marginalization, women restrict their food, exercise excessively, take laxatives, or throw up.
But what if the dominant story isn’t your story? What if you have an eating disorder and you’re not a cis woman? What is your eating disorder narrative? And how do you treat it? What if the roots of your story emerge from the realities of race or poverty, disability or age? Why do we only see images of young cis white women when we discuss eating disorders?
As you know, I’m genderqueer. The roots of my eating disorder stemmed from feeling like my body—and how people treated me—did not match my felt sense of gender. My dieting wasn’t about trying to gain currency by achieving the female beauty ideal. What I wanted was a masculinized body that would match who I felt I was. I wanted to do away with the breasts and broad hips that led people to treat me as a woman and stopped me from wearing the clothes I liked. I wanted to look down and see a body that looked like how I imagined myself.
Because the story of where eating disorders come from didn’t align with my experience, neither did the solutions. Based on that misunderstanding, my route to healing was more circuitous, painful, and prolonged than it should have been. Only later in life, when I could better construct my own narrative, did I start to understand the challenges and complexities that blocked my path to embodiment.
I’ve heard a similar story from Gloria Lucas, a community organizer and founder of Nalgona Positivity Pride, a Xicana-Indigenous* body-positive organization that provides intersectional eating disorders education and community-based support. Lucas identifies as a Brown woman. The mainstream eating disorder resources and body positivity movements failed her by ignoring the role of colonization, assimilation, systemic oppression, and racism. Her eating disorder played out amid potent messages that People of Color receive about their bodies, that they’re inferior, dirty, and unattractive. Mainstream eating disorder thought failed to recognize this.
“We have been left with no other option but to create our own opportunities of representation and healing,” Lucas writes, explaining her motivation for founding Nalgona Positivity Pride.
Young, straight, cis, white women are not the only ones who experience eating disorders. They’re not the only ones who suffer from fatphobia and discrimination. Their experiences are not the only experiences in our community. When only one story runs down the center lane, we crowd out nonmainstream narratives and close the route to healing and belonging for the rest of us. Those whose lives do align with the mainstream narrative are also harmed when we limit ourselves to a menu of healing opportunities based on a narrow, tired interpretation of our lives.
All the self-love and self-help in the world will not erase exclusion. It will not prevent other people’s socially conditioned reactions to our bodies and the fact that we’re going to find it everywhere we go. Practicing self-love, internally, will not counteract external biases, prejudices, and even outright bigotry. In other words, loving yourself isn’t an inoculation that prevents discrimination against you or others who look like you. Self-love doesn’t address social conditioning or challenge and change the systems it is borne out of.
Prescribing self-love to an Indigenous woman doesn’t reduce the number of murdered or missing Indigenous women. Practicing self-love doesn’t mean that employers are going to hire a trans person (or that a lawyer won’t trans-shame to get an advantage in a court case about a severed tendon!). Feeling good and lavishing care upon herself doesn’t prevent a fat woman from getting slurs screamed at her in a parking lot. Loving her hair doesn’t prevent a Black student from getting sent home from school for wearing braids or locs.
We’re all navigating other people’s biases against our bodies, and personal self-love, no matter how robust, doesn’t prevent that. It simply helps us recover from the pain of those inevitable experiences.
This is why we need to liberate our bodies. Body liberation is about claiming ownership over our bodies. It doesn’t just release you from having to meet someone else’s ideal of beauty; it’s about trashing the concept of beauty as currency altogether. It’s about stretching beyond the limiting stories that are usually told and dumping the cultural ideas about what makes a body valuable. Sometimes that means allowing our bodies to just be as they are, wearing fatkinis and flaunting our stretch marks. Sometimes, as in the case of some trans people, reclaiming requires changing our bodies, perhaps through surgery and/or hormones, to transition to a body that feels like home, that represents who we are.
The culture may not rise up to celebrate your body and your choices. You don’t personally have the power to make that happen alone or immediately, but collectively, we can build movements that bend the arc of justice in the long term. Your power lies in being able to make choices about how you express yourself regardless of what those choices mean for others.
I make choices about the cultural signifiers of gender that are under my control, like haircuts and clothes and body modification. I accept that others may not see me for who I am and that I can’t control that. It’s my body to inhabit regardless of what it may telegraph to others or how it may influence how I am treated. It’s my challenge to build my resilience so that I can manage misgendering or transphobia, or any of the other ways the cultural construction of my identities can make me a target for stigma, discrimination, marginalization, and invisibility. A large part of that resilience comes from connection and from my participation in the collective struggle for belonging.
Self-love is not enough, but the individual and collective pursuit of body liberation can help us heal and help us grow a new world, where we all belong.
*Whereas Chicana describes a Mexican American woman, Xicana transcends that definition, connecting the person to a recognition of their indigenous identity that is often overlooked by many Mexicans.