I Love My LGBT Body

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I Love My LGBT Body

Spreading awareness of body image issues and eating disorders in the LGBT community. Promoting body acceptance and self love.

Spreading awareness of the epidemic of body image issues, eating disorders, and compulsive exercise use in the LGBT community. Show us how you love your LGBT body!

11/16/2017

(Continued) Like most trans women, I was a s*x worker and because of s*x work, I found a whole new body positivity. I decided to get into domination and when I learned that I could sit my big a*s on a man’s face and smother him, I felt a lot better about my body. I left the industry a lot more empowered than I went in. I think people have a lot of stigma around s*x work and can’t imagine that I could go in a weak, chubby girl struggling to find my attractiveness and my profitability and leaving it feeling incredibly empowered and amazing about my body.

11/14/2017

Join us tomorrow (Tuesday) as we participate as panelists in National Eating Disorders Association (NEDA)'s twitter chat for transgender awareness week from 2-3.

11/13/2017

Because I didn't look a certain way when I was younger, I categorized myself as my body being broken and wrong. It was hard growing up. My mom would wake me up and be like, work out! But that’s just because she's thinner. It’s difficult being the chubby one in the house because you’re automatically the non-healthy one. It’s tricky when you’re twelve years old and counting calories. I’ve been every size at this point.

When I was nineteen, I decided I was going to diet and I did it the wrong way. I was super unhealthy and getting really sick and going to doctors and they were like, are you not eating? And I was like, no, but I feel good, I feel happy, people are telling me I’m attractive.

I wasn’t eating anything. I had older friends who were gay with certain body types who told me that’s what everyone wanted and that that’s what I should look like. And then I went to my first Bear Week and that’s when it all changed. I was like, 'Oh my god, there’s this whole group of people who don’t think skinny is what I need to be.' I’ve definitely been on a journey these last couple of years to really just appreciate what I have and the fact that I have it and I’m different and I stand out.

11/03/2017

When I was in high school, I woke up one day and I was just tired of being fat. I started to really experience my trans-ness. And going shopping as a woman was very difficult to find clothes that I feel like accommodated my body. I’d find things that would fit, but I’d wind up looking like my grandmother. It was very difficult. I got into binging, purging, and restricting. I had to be hospitalized. I actually have a tooth that rotted due to the constant purging. Ultimately, I lost 140 pounds. Slowly over the years I started to gain the weight back. I had a really body positive, affirming boyfriend and he didn’t mind going to Carls Jr at 3 AM when mama wanted a hamburger. So here I am, plus size and happy.

It was so difficult to accept my body because I just had so much negative feedback about fat bodies. And there wasn’t any real representation in the media. It made me feel really bad. It made me feel devalued, it made it a struggle for me to find out what it meant to be attractive to myself and others. It made it really difficult for me when I was questioning my transness and how I would fit into this mold for cisgender women.

10/30/2017

As a trans guy, sometimes I feel like it’s really stressful, waking up every day in the morning feeling like my body doesn’t look correct, or good enough, or anything. It’s hard for me to look in the mirror every day and feel super okay with how I look. I’m okay with some things, like my facial features and my body shape, but there is some stuff I do have that I don’t like. So, everyday I have to kind of force myself a little bit, like ‘you can deal with this,’ ‘you can go on with what you have.’

I feel with the trans community, a lot of people pressure you to get surgeries. And I’m not really feeling surgery, because I feel like I don’t need that much to make myself feel that good. I’m not a big fan of being under a knife or anything like that. Every day is like a big struggle because I have a lot of friends who are getting their surgeries, and I’m like, do I have to get my surgery too? Because all my friends are getting their surgeries? And in my head, I’m just like, I don’t need it. I don’t need it. I just feel like if I were to get surgery, I still wouldn’t feel complete, you know? Just getting under a knife isn’t going to make me feel better. I still would be a little bit depressed and sad. Right now, I just deal with everything that I do have and just go about my life.

10/25/2017

I relapsed, and I relapsed with this one. When we came back from the relapse, and we started working the program, we realized we couldn’t be together yet. We had to focus on ourselves and our recovery, and that’s what we did. We became friends first and we had about nine months of helping each other through recovery. And when we completed our twelfth step, which was the rule we set for ourselves, I asked him out on a proper date.

I think everything that we learned from recovery, we’ve applied to our relationship and that’s why we’re able to have the relationship that we have right now. We’ll disagree sometimes, have attitude, but we totally understand each other. I can get resentment over som**hing, and usually before I can even want to fight, I have to own my role in it. So our fights are minimal. And our intimacy has gone sky high. We just keep getting closer. It’s the first time I’ve ever had what I’ve dreamed of having.

10/23/2017

I’ve been diagnosed with HIV since before it was called HIV. I’ve had many health issues- several carcinomas, re**al cancer, I’ve been through chemo several times.
So considering all the torture my body’s been through, I’m happy with my body. I’m happy that my body has sustained so much.

I participated in recreational drugs for most of my life. With increasing health issues, and when I had a breakup after fourteen years, things spiralled out of control and I was using m**h. The recovery community in New York City is pretty incredible. It’s the first time in my life I’m not running from lots of things. One of them being body issues, how we look to others and how others perceive us. I think there’s a lot of fear of what goes into perception.

I found a photo of myself today, where I guess I was at my peak, it was right before I became really ill. I was in good physical shape, but I didn’t necessarily know that in my thoughts. I certainly had insecurities. Now that I’m older, I’m aware of how, for example, the HIV medication is affecting my fat content, so you know, I have a little bit of a pouch. It’s never going to go away. I can keep it from getting huge if I work out very hard, but it’s a struggle. Do I have issues with it? Absolutely. But I have to live with it and accept it.

10/16/2017

Being in recovery has been a great thing. It attacks some of the issues that go way way back and I think a lot of those issues have to do with physical appearance and overall insecurities. That’s why a lot of people usually turn to substance abuse. It’s not only that we want to belong to som**hing, it’s also that we want to impress, we want to feel loved, and likable, and it’s got a lot to do with your overall image. If you’re not happy with yourself, at least in my case, that’s why I turned to abusing. Recovery has made me think or pause and look back at my way of thinking. Now, instead of thinking that there’s a problem with me, I can think maybe it’s not that there’s a problem, I just need to accept things as they are.

10/13/2017

I identify as a trans-masculine person. I used to be really self conscious and I’d wear certain clothing to disguise how I look or wouldn’t go outside or hang out with certain people because I felt I had to fit in a certain way. I’m out of high school now, but a lot of times in school I’d have to talk a certain way, act a certain way, to be popular, or just to relate to them. I felt like I was just really pushing myself to be someone I wasn’t.

I used to go to school on 116th, where it’s a largely white community. Even the LGBT community there isn’t very open-minded. A lot of times they wouldn’t want to hang around me because of where I was from or my accent was 'too black.' I feel like a lot of times, my white allies don’t really understand the struggles that people of color go through. They feel like it’s okay to make certain jokes because they have a black token friend, a Spanish token friend, but really, it doesn’t give them the privilege to say certain words like, the N-word, for example. A lot of white people in my friend group were comfortable saying the N-word because they were friends with a black person. They thought that they got that pass, when really, it shouldn’t be like that at all.

10/12/2017

I’ve had AIDS for 34 years, which has been a bloody long time to be HIV positive and still alive. I’m not complaining, but a lot of symptoms have taken their toll over the years. From 1983 to 2006, it was really pretty easy. I took the pills and lived a pretty normal life. In 2006, I got Hepatitis C and had to take a very invasive treatment for that and have been on disability since.

I was married to a wonderful man for 20 years and he died two and a half years ago and it’s been really tough. I was 12 years clean and sober, but when my husband died, I started drinking and that ended up with ten hospitalizations in two years, for drinking. So now, I finally have 81 days, so almost that magic ninety day mark, so I’m hopefully there.

At one time, I weighed 292 pounds and being fat is one of the grave sins in the gay community. Usually if you don’t have a great body, nobody wants to know you. And then I started working with a trainer three days a week and by the end of it, I had this great muscled body and all of a sudden, I was very popular on all the hookup apps and it was so weird to have gone from a sort of fat pariah to a hot daddy. And now, I’m somewhere in the middle. Drinking a gallon of vodka every day is not good for the health. If you do it for many days in a row, you too will go by ambulance to the nearest ER.

10/09/2017

Finding your space as a trans q***r femme is so hard, especially as a plus sized person.

I had really bad bulimia. And I was dealing with a lot of intense self harm because I would look at myself and I would see scars from past surgeries or I couldn’t see my feet when I looked down, or my breasts were saggy. No one talks about that in the media, and everyone in high school was starving. There aren’t spaces to talk about it. It’s not just skinny white girls. There are beautiful, fat people who have eating disorders.

I usually identify as either gender non-conforming or trans femme. I feel like I’m always transcending whatever gender is. I’m okay with my body parts and I also know they don’t determine who I am. I can be a feminine person as well as be a masculine person, and still be me. As a gender non-conforming person, there’s not a lot of representation for us. It’s usually just the binary.

Being trans is not just, 'I’ll get surgery and then I’ll be happy.’ It’s a process. For me, it was a lot about being able to claim my identity without being ashamed of it, without someone saying, ‘Oh, you’re not trans enough.’ Or, ‘You dress too like this, so you can’t identify.’

10/06/2017

I’ve never felt good about my body, so that’s my new thing. When I was a kid, I was real skinny and we would go to the pool and my sister used to say, “Ew! You’re so skinny!” So I’ve always had body image issues. It’s all that leftover childhood crap. Dysfunctional family stuff. I was never told by my family, “You’re good-looking.” So, it’s all that kind of crap.

When I was forty, I started going to Twelve Step programs and I’ve done that now for twenty six years. I haven’t drank or drugged, so that’s helped tremendously with all that dysfunction. Twelve Step helps you get honest about yourself. It helps you separate your emotional luggage from other people. It secures boundaries between people. The Twelve Steps are a lot like Buddhism. Because you go through this personal transformation that addresses your problems and you find peace. The illness is self-centered fear. So you go through this process of the twelve steps and address all the self-centered fear. The last step is helping other suffering addicts. That’s what Buddhism is. The process of Buddhism is addressing all of your problems so you can be of service to other people.

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https://www.silverspsychotherapy.com/

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