It’s finally started to cool down around these parts and for me that’s a good thing.

It’s the autumn that inspires me, the shortening days, the promise of winter. I love blankets of fresh snow and nights with crisp air. I like cold and dark and trees all around me.

I haven’t been very productive lately, writing-wise, and a lot of that has to do the weird in-between space I’m in right now. I started a new job, with hours that are very different from my old job and I admit that I am struggling to adjust to the change. Plus, my new job requires constant interaction with people and I find that to be exhausting. I struggle with people, you guys.

In a few weeks, I’m sure, when everything settles down, I’ll figure out a new writing schedule. Though, I have found that the less I actually write, the more I stay in my head, talking to my characters and living scenes with them. It’s a strange thing, living most of your life in secret, inside your own head.

But I really wanted to write about today is more body stuff, something I’ve been thinking about a lot. A friend of mine is in the process of transitioning from male to female and (he is still using male pronouns at this point) he is struggling with appearance. No, no, he’s not struggling to look more feminine, he’s struggling with looking attractive. Because you know as well as I do that being attractive is like the freakin’ golden ticket and if you have it, you somehow are given privileges that non-attractive people don’t have.

And that translate to transitioning trans people in that I know another trans man (female to male) who put off transition for over a decade because he felt that there would be no point. He’s overweight, you see, and because he didn’t look a underwear model with ripped abs, he felt that transitioning would be a waste of time. It’s not a vanity thing. It’s an issue of self-worth. Because he believes – knows – that an ugly body is less acceptable than a pretty one. And an ugly trans body?  Forget about it.

And that is so, fuck, I don’t know, unhealthy. I know I’ve talked before about gender and bodies and the intersection of them but I don’t think I’ve focused exclusively on gender and weight, or gender and body issues, and maybe we should talk about it more. It’s an issue in the LBGTQ+ community, the same as the straight one. Everywhere, all you see are pretty bodies, male and female, and somehow it comes across that if you don’t have one of those arbitrarily designated pretty bodies, then you aren’t as important.

A while back on Twitter, I posted that Ruby Rose is called androgynous and Lea DeLaria (Boo in Orange is the New Black) is called butch, despite the fact that in the TV series, they are literally wearing the exact same thing. Androgynous v. Butch – one of those has a trendy, positive connotation and one of those is can be used a little disparagingly and guess which one is which? You can’t tell me that in that case, butch isn’t code for fat.

Specifically, butch is used for fat in a way that is diminishing. I’m a big fan of the body positive movement, being healthy at any weight, and I don’t think that fat is a put-down. It shouldn’t be. But   using it in this way is designed to reduce sex appeal, or attractiveness, and therefore worth. So is it any wonder that a trans person who has a fat body would be hesitant to transition, knowing that their already controversial body would become ever more subject for ridicule? ‘I wanted to be a man,” my friend told me when I questioned him about this. “But I didn’t want to be a joke”.

My focus as a writer has always been writing in depth characters. It’s a concern of mine, that my characters don’t come across as fully fleshed out, because to me they are very, very real. Recently, on one of my works in progress, I had to confront my own notions of sexuality and attractiveness. One of my new characters has a physical disability and I caught myself trying to write my way out of it. Like, I was trying to lessen the severity of his disability so that I could rely on my own comfortable notions of what’s sexy. I was actually trying to re-design his body to make him more attractive. He’s fictional, of course, and I’m the writer, so I have the license to do that, but think of how often we do that in real life?

How often do we see someone who is overweight and make a judgment about their social life? How often do we want people to fit into categories that we’ve decided on based entirely on their physical appearance? I read a quote once from sex worker Levi Karter, about his frustration being labeled a twink. He’s dedicated to physical fitness, works out religiously, but because he’s short, he’s a twink. Another word that, like butch, can be used disparagingly and often without context. Not even to get into the gender policing that goes along with labels like those.

It’s important to me to tell the stories of unconventional characters. Because come on, what is more universal than sex? What is more of an equalizer than our desire for it? I’m making a conscious effort to expand from cis, white, conventionally attraction MC’s. Not to say that I haven’t used those – Ebron, for one – and I have others than I’m working on even now. But I’m trying to be aware, that’s what I am saying. I’m trying to train myself from falling back on that default.

Because everyone deserves to feel sexy.