"As a disabled trans person, honoring my body's need for rest, medications and lifestyles changes meant gaining a lot of weight. It meant a new relationship with my body that has been joyful and positive, and almost everyone told me would be impossible as a fat person. 

I write this from the perspective of someone who used to be thin, and who spent my teenage years thinking I was a girl. Nowhere in this will I deny that being thin comes with privilege, or that my current body negates the privilege, or that my current body negates the privileges and advantages that I had access to. I will not tell you that it isn't hard being fat, because fatphobia, ableism, racism and misogyny are all inextricably linked and viciously persecutory.

But as a teenager who was in and out of doctor's offices facing the possibility of numerous degenerative diagnosisies, I was still more terrified of gaining weight than any of these illnesses, and I punished and policed my body the way that society taught me to. I felt convinced that my thinness was the only thing that made me worthy of love, especially in the growing vacuum left by my progressive loss of physical functions.

This collection i a letter to that young person. It is a love letter to the Fat Liberation movement. This is not about how everyone is beautiful, because I know from experience that hearing the phrase "all bodies are beautiful" often falls on angry, cynical ears.

The idea of beauty has been corrupted by whiteness and capitalism, made to feel both ephemeral and unachievable. It is also a gendered word that no longer quite fits with the way I move through the world.

This is not to say that I don't like how I look now. I do.

But you do not owe beauty to anyone. You have worth and value that are immutable and completely outside the concept of beauty or size." -Fierce Invalids