Up until a few months ago, I never felt very strong. I was a fat kid who grew into a fat teenager, and now I’m a fat adult.

But face-blindess is a bitch.

Body fat is central to how we perceive gender. So what does that mean if you’re a trans person?

At my Catholic all-girls middle school, I liked to tell people I was Buddhist. It was my feeble attempt at preteen rebellion. I enjoyed interjecting, “Oh yeah? Well, I don’t believe Jesus was real because I’m Buddhist!”

A reader requested a roundtable where Autostraddle’s fat staff talk about how fatness, diet culture, and body positivity, relate to our queerness, identity, and gender. We aim to please, so here we are!

Is it cold to ignore or avoid someone from your past when you cross paths? Maybe! Does it also often feel a whole lot better than engaging? Hell yeah!

“For me, lesbian completely casts aside the idea of men. It puts me and the people I love ahead of the patriarchy. It relieves me of even pretending that I give a shit what any of them have ever thought. It thankfully gives me space to center women (and other people who aren’t men), which is all I’ve ever wanted to do.”

“Apparently INFJs operate more off feeling, and I would say that intuition very much commands my brain/heart ship, so it’s an accurate assessment. How’d this bitch know that I’m soft-spoken though?”

“I loved the Church, and I loved the gospel. I was the kind of Mormon who politely dismissed myself from classrooms when teachers showed R-rated movies. At my first and only high school rager, I texted my mother to pick me up because I felt out of place amidst the drinking and smoking. That was me, Straight-Edge Dera, except apparently I wasn’t so straight.”

Tinder is not a very good place for making friends.

“He gave me “the benefit of the doubt” that traffic was indeed too rough to allow me, a braless 25-year-old nervously driving a station wagon, to shift over.”

“In fact, the strain of hiding my illness would likely have caused me to break down with even more frequency. How would she have coped with those dysphoric, hallucination-ridden breakdowns — and how would I have dealt with her uneducated reactions?”

“Real human change requires space to be honest with yourself, honest with others; a space that doesn’t exist when you’re trapped by necessity behind a fortress of self-protection. As the inmate Poussey in Orange replies when a correctional officer pressures her to speak openly during a group therapy session: “Does it ever occur to you that actually feeling our feelings might make it impossible to survive in here?”

“That being said, I’d like to live in a world someday where people don’t automatically assume my body looks and functions a certain way, that makes room for people like me and my experiences.”

“I hated my body and punished it, and it hated me and punished me back. Is that what happened? That’s the thing about getting sick the way I got sick: nailing it down.”

“When the doctor said that such and such a treatment was linked to health problems later in life, I didn’t even blink. I’ll hit 50 and keel over? Fine, I don’t care, get rid of these fucking pimples.”

I am not crazy; I am simply black, and queer, and butch, and transcultural, and therefore alone.

Intersex and queer identities sometimes match up in ways that we’re familiar with and that conform to our understanding of how these identities are commonly defined. Other times they don’t.

“I paid a dude to knock me unconscious, peel back my face, and cut out chunks of my skull and jaw.”

Hey there, Autostraddlers. I’m Claudia, and I’m intersex.