Two New Anthologies Look Beyond Body Positivity and Sexism

At times, My Body, My Words defines “body issues” loosely, and looks more at how our corporeal selves interfere with who we imagine ourselves to be. In “Teddy Bear Theater,” Kaylie Jones confronts her own impulses after slapping her daughter for refusing to put on her coat after school—as if her arm had its own volition. Instead, she learns that, left unchecked, anger issues can influence her actions despite her best intentions. Molly Pennington’s “Sensitivity to Light” depicts life as “a hostage” to migraines in a medical system that under-medicates and invalidates women in pain. And in the interesting piece “Miscarriage,” Bryne Lewis learns to trust her biology, even when it seems wrong. “On the back porch, I realized my body had made that decision, the right decision, for me.”

With fifty-four essays sharing such a broad sweep of experiences, the collection succeeds in looking beyond weight loss journeys, and manages to be both meditative and playful. However, the breadth of coverage underlines just how open a topic “the body” is for one volume, and just how much more there is to say.

If My Body, My Words is about what Frankel calls “the whole mess of being human,” another new anthology takes a different approach, dialing into the more specific experience of identifying as trans or non-binary in a culture that labels you “Other.” Written on the Body: Letters from Trans and Non-Binary Survivors of Sexual Assault and Domestic Violence focuses on depth rather than range, specifically making space for what organizer and contributor Dean Spade calls “gender rule-breakers.” Editor Lexie Bean, a writer and TeenVogue contributor, garnered support for the project with a GoFundMe campaign. The result is a collection of letters to specific body parts, by anonymous contributors from the gender-variant community.

Unlike much popular writing about trans and non-binary experiences, Written on the Body is neither cultural criticism nor coming-of-age memoir. Rather, the letters reveal slices of identities in progress, not yet polished for the public eye. Most of the works don’t follow a clear arc—because they’re not stories. Instead, they offer private, narrow windows into a life. They don’t explain. Often, it’s unclear what gender a writer identifies with, what their sexual preferences are, how they were assigned at birth. In this gender-bending house of mirrors, a new way of being emerges, where the writers are people with genders, rather than gendered people. As the writers tell fundamentally human stories while declining to “place” themselves in a gender, how they identify becomes secondary to their personhood. They cast gender as a private experience rather than a public classification system.

Each essay is addressed to a single feature: hands, ribs, necks, and yes, genitals. Ieshai Bailey, one of the project organizers, explains that writing to a body part, instead of about it, can offer distance. It allows writers to zero in on a single feature, she says, “which may have once been objectified, misused, abused, dehumanized, medicalized, hidden, and hurt.” Some pieces, like “To my fifteen-year-old chest,” do just that. In practice, however, most of the letters cover less explicitly sexualized terrain, like editor Lexie Bean’s beautiful poem “To My Back”:

the chiropracter didn’t touch you

instead she said to the rest of us

what you used to protect yourself

years ago

is now only hurting you

if you keep making yourself small

your back is only going to get worse

i wish i knew

how to stop

making you small

i am sorry

i never stretch you towards

the sky

i am sorry

i care more about hiding my breasts

than your wellbeing

i am sorry

every possible solution to your pain

seems temporary

i am sorry

everything that still hurts

keeps climbing up your ladder…

 

Narratives of sexual assault don’t typically center around the back, but exploring the repercussions of trauma through a spine highlights just how pervasive and long-lasting a violent or abusive act can be. It emphasizes what is likely obvious in the trans and non-binary community—identity isn’t just about coming to terms with birth sex or sexual preference. Another letter, “Dear Eyes,” relives abuse through the pupils that witnessed it. “You’ve seen him. You know he’s not as strong as I am. You also saw him hit me.” These letters move the focus away from taboo body parts and allow the writers to figure as whole people.

While much of Written on the Body occupies private thoughts and spaces, for those living outside the old-fashioned definitions of “he” and “she,” perhaps it’s difficult to separate the personal from the political. The provocative critique of feminism, “Dear You-Who-Must-Not-Be-Loved,” objects to legislation like the Bathroom Bill, reminding readers that trans women are the people most at-risk in public restrooms. It demands that feminist upheaval against sexual assault include the trans community: “Society often doesn’t believe cis women when they say they’ve been raped. Society even (and sometimes especially) feminist society, doesn’t believe that trans femmes can be raped.” It reveals how easily—even with the #MeToo movement in full-swing—trans women might be left out entirely, or worse, vilified. “Patriarchy,” the letter continues, “means that cis women are identified with blame or victimhood or survival, transmisogyny means that trans girls are identified with violence.”