"[My] Body" by Olive Rae Brinker<a href="https://raethedoe.itch.io/my-body" target="_blank" ]<my?]="" body]<="" a="">(</a>twitter). Olive is a good friend and the creator/artist of the Rae the Doe webcomic. She's not done poetry before, and was really worried about submitting this one poem and nothing else, but it's a really great one. Especially from someone who hasn't done poetry before. "[My?] Body is a poem about body image issues. Over the years small things, like a stranger buttoning your blazer because you're "wearing it wrong" and big things, like being told I shouldn't transition all added up to this feeling that I had no agency over my body. This is one of the first poems I've ever written so forgive me if it's a bit amateur. It's personal and dark and real and came straight from my heart. I hope you read it with an open mind." It's a four page poem that's really cleanly compiled and very readable. As she said, it really is very centrally focused on feeling like your body doesn't belong to yourself, and instead that even complete strangers feel entitled to controlling it. Transitioning can often be quite disorienting at first if you've been singled out in such a dehumanizing way all your life. It can also mean it takes you longer to recognize your body issues as gender dysphoria, because you both have such an estranged relationship with it already, and because you may believe all it is is simply processing the side effects of fatphobia.
I think I probably could've been in a place where I called myself nonbinary by the time I was 7 or 10 if that had been an option for me. I definitely would've started to consider it before I was 15 if it was possible and the language culturally present. Instead I delayed for two extra teenage years of questioning, because I was certain I was simply dealing with internalized misogyny and a need to be comfortable with the fact that I'm not small or skinny. This didn't help the fact that I was surrounded mostly by the kinds of trans people who felt that if you didn't at least partially align with being transfeminine or transmasculine and following a traditional western path in response to that, you were just cis and trying to escape accountability. In her own way, Olive tells her particular experience of coming to terms with her body and the fact that it is actually hers and not other's. There are so many fucked up things we hear, see, and are told when we're in the early stages of transition. It follows you for a very long time until you get to the point where you don't even feel like the person you used to be at all, and where those doubts seem meaningless after everything you've been through. That doesn't change the fact that the journey to those points is an immense undertaking that is often left unaddressed in published works about bodily autonomy. You either have people talk about fatphobia or transition, but the people who get published to discuss transition and their bodies are overwhelmingly very skinny and easily fashionable.
Some people both don't want to be fashionable, or can't, or recognize that 'fashionable' is defined as something dependent upon a certain degree of thinness to be true. More than anything is is an exploration on living as the sort of person people have zero respect for. I don't know what it is that causes these situations - because I've had them too - that makes people who don't know you think they can just touch you or say and do whatever they want, but I know that it can really fuck with you. I've gotten so much better at saying no, and that really helps, but the fact of the matter is is that when people have done that to you your whole life it will take just as long to let go and unlearn what that kind of behavior teaches you to think and feel about yourself. In just one poem, Olive summarizes all of this perfectly, in a straightforward narrative about bodies and healing. It may be a work all alone for now, but it shows both a lot of promise for her future writing in this genre and for her recovery on the path of recognizing what she's been through.
"It was never just about my weight, though. It was every time someone asked me, “When are you getting a haircut already?”"
[CW // body image issues, fatphobia, self-harm, bullying, disordered eating, transphobia, and sexual situations]