Amongst the many dramas I deal with fellow trans people, one that I’ve recently encountered was the difficulties of being both fat and trans. The trans body is always under strict scrutiny, and that also includes your perceived weight. I’ve been on-and-off fat my entire life; I know fatphobia very intimately.

Recently, I decided to talk about how I gained a huge amount of weight around my one-year mark on T. I jumped from 125lb to 185. And I credit this gain entirely to my HRT because my food and exercise had stayed constant for the past three years.

And how could I be so sure of my diet history? I wasn’t calorie counting, I was counting my money. I live on less than $200 a month after rent and utilities. Those $200 need to last me through thirty days of transportation expenses, my meds, my art supplies, my little luxuries, and my groceries. 

I know how expensive a bag of rice will cost me, and how long it will last. I know how many eggs I can eat today, if it means less protein and energy for tomorrow. I know that I can’t spare the funds to buy ‘healthy’ cereal bars if I could spend half as much to get the chocolate-dipped sugar-laden rice krispy squares instead, if I was to put an emergency snack in my backpack if I feel faint from skipping breakfast. I know recipes for dishes based on my limited budget and transportation allowance, how they keep in the fridge, how they compare to other foods that I’d like to eat throughout the week, and I stick with them.

So I know my food down to the $3.50 bag of chips I could be driven to buy. And I say with confidence that my diet has not changed – in quantity or type.

Yet no one believes me. And when I say ‘no one’, I mean more people than you might think. In every spoken conversation I’ve had with my weight gain on T (that wasn’t with medical professionals), there’s always been responses that claim I’ve done something wrong. I must have been subconsciously eating more. I must be eating more bread instead of meat. I must be swallowing my food instead of chewing it. I’m probably putting more milk in my coffee, or something.

Sure, perhaps the new brand of ground coffee I switched to is affecting my weight gain. Or my recent caesar-dressing phase where I craved mixed salad greens for two weeks. Or perhaps it’s because I’m not taking any classes on the third floor, so I’m not doing some stair-climbing cardio on select days of the week. But to be frank, my food or exercise can’t explain my weight gain.

I can understand people’s skepticism. A 60-pound weight gain is a lot, and there’s likely a reason for the sudden growth. But I have a reason – it’s HRT. For me, this is what second puberty is like. Yet people just can’t accept the idea humankind metabolizes food in diverse ways, and this metabolism could change throughout our lifetime. 

Plus, I definitely don’t ‘look like’ I’m 185 lb. This was me when I was 20, a year before starting T, and weighed 125 pounds;

And this is me now;  

(I know the picture isn’t clear, but take my word for it that most wouldn’t peg me as a 180-pound person.)

And when I was 16, I had a sudden spike of weight gain that couldn’t be explained (hmm, I wonder if there’s a pattern) because the diet cooked by my parents had been constant. And within the next year, I dropped it again to reach my pre-T weight. Here, I am 160 lb.

Not 185, but 160. And no, I did not grow taller between the ages of 16-22, nor did I join my highschool sports team or w/e to warrant the sudden drop in fat.

I don’t have a scale in my apartment. I only know my weight because of my regular doctor visits – if I want to talk about my anxiety medication or renew my T prescription, I need to visit the clinic, and a nurse will first weigh me, measure me, take my temperature and pulse, my blood pressure, and all that, before the doctor even comes into the room. So every 5 months or so, I see my weight.

And that 60 lb gain happened in less than ten months. But I had been steadily gaining body fat for at least a year before that point, around two months after my first T injection. So of course, I would ask my doctor what the fuck was going on with this sudden gain in weight, and both doctors (I had two because one left the clinic) handwaved the gain with ‘muscles are heavy’. 

They were never concerned. Which, of course, made me less nervous about this phenomenon, but I was still confused; how could it even happen? How is this sudden gain in weight – but not in mass – possible? 

Their answer was that current HRT data on patients accounts for very little that could be relayed to new applicants. What’s warned pre-HRT is a flimsy prediction based on what we know of hormones, and how the recent years of HRT practices have provided us with results. As far as I, their patient, is concerned, my changes couldn’t be said to be ‘unusual’ or ‘unprecedented’. There’s very little that’s ‘usual’ about HRT at the moment.

Not that HRT is some new fangled experiment that we know little about. We know how it works and what it’s likely to do. What we don’t know is what else it could do. Same story for many medications.

When I got my ‘So You Wanna Start Shooting Up On Man-Juice’ information packet, I got my little list of what to expect, and a timeline of when I can expect them to occur. You know; acne a few weeks in, being hot and sweating some time later, seeing thicker and darker body hair, and then finally rejoicing as you say goodbye to your period forever. Except my menstrual cycle was the first to go, and I didn’t get acne until almost ten months in. There’s a lot of diversity and limited information when it comes to HRT; I never got any mood swings, and no one told me that my hair and nails would get so annoyingly brittle.

So looking back, is it really so strange I’d gain so much weight and limited mass from HRT? Although I don’t know anyone else who gained as much weight – but not size – as I did, I now know how different our medical transitions could be. And knowing my weird tendency to fluctuate between sizes and weights so abruptly, it’s not without precedent. 

But so few people are willing to agree with me. It’s all about how calories as a unit of energy remains constant from the mouth to the expulsion, regardless of the food or the person. I can quickly point out several studies that suggest otherwise – that fatness is hereditary and different people really do retain weight differently – but my own history of fatness and HRT is enough to call it all into question.

And lets be clear; if I did indeed gain five pant sizes instead of two under HRT, it doesn’t change my worth as an individual, or my right to health and respect. But my reality is that I challenge the notion that fatness is something entirely controllable. 

We need to do better under our ability to recognize fatness as human diversity, and what fatness means to us.