PROLOGUE

It’s hard to be yourself and feel belonging in a culture that is hostile to your existence.

Think of someone you love. I’m willing to bet that when you think about the people you cherish, it’s probably your dearest wish that they have access to every tool and opportunity possible to be themselves, be loved, and flourish in a welcoming world.

My parents wanted this for me. They wanted me to be loved and cherished. They wanted me to fit in and flourish.

That’s why they chose to name me Linda. Linda means beautiful, the “a” signifying female—facts I learned at my bat mitzvah, a Jewish ritual that marks the day a girl becomes a woman, at age thirteen. I’ll never forget my father’s speech. He was so proud, he told us, as my mother beamed at his side, of how I was living up to the name they had chosen for me.

Beautiful.

It was a magnificent, tender hope for my life. My success-oriented parents intuited, correctly, that feminine beauty is currency, a success lever in our society, and perhaps even a precondition for success—one that arguably overshadows character development and earned achievements. They believed (and everything in our world and their experience confirmed) that the main tool a girl needs is beauty. My parents’ hearts told them that femininity and feminine beauty would be the keys that unlocked hearts and doors for me. Like all parents with hearts full of love, they wanted that for me.

They wanted everything for me.

Naming me Linda was an aspiration, an invocation and a plan. Not that my parents had any ties to its origins, which are Spanish and Portuguese. Their disdain for Brown people, in fact, made this more an act of cultural appropriation than admiration. Yet, for them, the definition was powerful: I would be beautiful. I would be welcome in the world. I would belong.

There was, however, a flaw in that formula:

I was not a girl.

And femininity? Not my thing.

I had my breasts removed in 2016.

It’s a surgery those of us in the transgender community call “top surgery.” I was fifty-two. Post-surgery, bandages removed, standing in front of a full-length mirror in the surgeon’s office, was the first time I recognized my body as my own, in every way. It looked right. Yes, this is my body.

I remember asking when the swelling would go down. I’ll never forget hearing the doctor say: “That’s not swelling. Those are your pectoral muscles.” I love the symbolism of that moment, that my well-developed (gym-honed) strength, previously hidden behind my breasts, was now exposed. I recognized the reflection as my own in every way. This was my body.

I belong in this body. Finally.

After a lifetime of seeing a stranger in the mirror, this was liberation.

All bodies are perfect as they are. This idea is foundational in the mainstream body positivity movement. The message is, succinctly, “Don’t change your body. Change the culture.”

When I first considered top surgery, I was concerned that people who read my books, heard me speak, or looked to me as a leader in the body positivity movement would feel betrayed. What if they think I am a hypocrite? After all, I’d spent my life campaigning for self-acceptance and body acceptance.

Here I was, apparently, not accepting my body.

That’s not entirely accurate. My personal and professional work in the body positivity movement did help me build up and achieve some measure of body acceptance. Before my surgery, I could “accept” my body as a perfectly fine and even attractive body. I appreciated how my body functioned. I reveled in having all parts of my body touched—even and especially the breasts that looked so foreign to me. Yet, despite the relative state of body positivity I had achieved, there was no mirror that reflected my true self back to me. My body-positive gaze required conceptual gymnastics. Yes, that is indeed a fine body reflected in the mirror. It just isn’t mine.

Given my leadership position in the body positivity community, I worried that other people would find it deeply ironic and even presume me untrustworthy when they learned that I struggled to belong not just among other people, but within my own body. Yet, my struggles, first for body acceptance and later for body liberation and belonging, are actually the source of my insight.* I have had to develop deeply personal tools and strategies—and then practice them, continually—to heal my relationship with my body and our culture. My professional training, my time as a professor, and my lived experience of struggling to belong and be myself are the reasons I can offer tools and resources to help you belong in your body, too.

Body alteration has been liberating for me, letting me feel more at home in my skin. It wasn’t a rejection of my body; it was an alignment of my physical self with my gender. Surgery was part of a freeing transition to body liberation. Now, I am more comfortable in my body, which means I can more often be my authentic self and am more accurately seen by others. All of this leads to greater intimacy and joy. I’ve dismissed the idea, which I used to promote, that we should never seek to change our bodies. I’ve stopped saying, “This is the body you have, embrace it.” Instead, I share a more liberating message: “All bodies deserve respect and care.” Respect and care take on different meaning for each of us.

Too many of us feel alienated from our bodies. This isn’t your personal failing; it means that our culture is failing you. It’s not easy to experience personal body liberation in a culture where so many bodies are actively excluded and subject to stigma and discrimination; where we all face barriers in getting over our preconceptions about bodies and seeing ourselves and others for who they are; where the toxic culture gets inside us and becomes our physically embodied experience, affecting our health and longevity and instilling an unconscious bias that causes us to act against our chosen values.

Not coincidentally, this alienation and lack of belonging—within myself and in every social space I occupied—was the beginning of my eating disorder and substance abuse, fueling a range of maladaptive behaviors that challenge me to this day. Being othered, and the body shame spurred by this separation from others, is not “just” a feeling. Being erased and devalued creates structural and material realities that make it harder to regulate our emotions, and influences our relationships, our health and longevity, our finances, our ability to realize dreams, and ultimately whether or not we will be accepted, loved, or even safe.

Our pain gets internalized, wreaking havoc on our survival system and making us more vulnerable to a range of ills: learning disabilities, depression, anxiety, diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease, cancer, stroke, chronic lung disease, compromised immune systems, digestive disorders, musculoskeletal disorders, liver disease, and early death, as well as sexually transmitted infections, financial stress, poor academic and work performance, and insomnia, to name a few.

It can also show up in an array of behaviors and disorders that help us adapt to difficult situations but don’t serve us well in more favorable circumstances, including hypervigilance, heightened anxiety and suspicion, attention deficit disorder, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, obsessive compulsive disorder, substance abuse, and eating disorders. It can also appear as dysfunctional and maladaptive behavior such as disordered thinking, difficulty concentrating, panic attacks, learned helplessness, self-hatred, hopelessness, depression, or a survival reflex that involves violence.

Oppression, by removing us from belonging, is absorbed into our bodies and is literally killing us.

That’s why my body of work as a scientist, author, professor, speaker, and advocate for body liberation always comes back to the themes of belonging or not belonging.

To justice.

To being seen as an individual rather than a type.

To feeling comfortable in our own skin.

To feeling welcome in our world.

These are the issues I’ve been exploring across the years in my own work, in my communities, and in my books, Health at Every Size: The Surprising Truth about Your Weight and (coauthored with Lucy Aphramor) Body Respect: What Conventional Health Books Get Wrong, Leave Out, or Just Plain Fail to Understand about Weight. Body Respect and Health at Every Size are, at their core, me wrestling with belonging.

So, too, is this book.

*“Nothing about us without us.” These empowering words have fueled the disability rights movement over the years, expressing the conviction of people with disabilities that they know what’s best for themselves. Too often we look to “experts” to define the experiences of groups, ignoring and devaluing the real expertise that comes from lived experience.