Our Transgender Fat Friends Need Us More Than Ever
[Image description: A photo of the Transgender Flag which features five horizontal stripes of three colors in the order: light blue, light pink, white, light pink, and light blue.]
By Tigress Osborn, Executive Director of NAAFA
The first time I heard the word cisgender was many years ago at a presentation by a famous anti-racism educator. He was a cisgender white man, and he was talking about the ways we all hold different kinds of privilege, including his own as a white person, a man, and a person who is not transgender. I could understand from context what cisgender meant, but I couldn’t quite catch what he was saying. Sizz? Cist? I could tell there were others in the room who didn’t know either, so I asked aloud.
He explained the suffix cis, meaning “on this side,” and confirmed my contextual understanding, that we use it for people whose gender identity matches what people think they are based on their body. Today, we would say their gender identity matches the gender they were assigned at birth, whereas transgender people’s gender identity is different from the gender they were assigned at birth. Still getting used to this terminology? I’ve always liked the Genderbread Person as a tool for helping with this vocabulary. The suffix cis is not limited to gender. Author Leslie Glass, the creator of the Large Person’s Bill of Rights, uses the term cis-size to describe people in thinner bodies.
Years later, at my first NAAFA board meeting, I used the word cisgender and found people even more confused than I’d been the first time I heard it. I was surprised. I thought the term had reached a point of wide enough use in social justice settings that it wouldn’t have needed explanation at a NAAFA meeting. But as I got to know NAAFA more deeply than I had before joining the board, I learned more about the ways in which NAAFA has been radical and rebellious (just the premise of being pro-fat in an anti-fat world is radical), but I also learned the organization and its membership were not nearly as intersectional or inclusive as I’d imagined in all the years I had been admiring NAAFA from afar. In fact, at the same meeting, I had to explain that intersectional (a term coined by legal scholar Kimberlé W. Crenshaw) didn’t mean “what we have in common because we’re all fat.” NAAFA still needed to learn a lot about diversity and inclusion.
I came to NAAFA with a background as a DEI practitioner, working with youth and educators to better understand race, class, gender, and more. Diversity, equity, and inclusion were always on my mind. When I joined the board, my day job was as the reservationist at a transgender cabaret, where I was one of two cisgender women behind the scenes. I was around gorgeous transgender showgirls and their fans all the time, often helping those cisgender fans learn the difference between our performers and the popular drag performers in San Francisco. My personal and professional experience definitely informed changes in NAAFA’s approaches to creating more inclusive spaces, but it wasn’t only me. We all learned from each other, and we learned from people in our online community about what we could be doing better.
By our 50th anniversary conference in 2019, intersectionality and inclusion were very much on our minds for planning, scholarships, and presenters. A specific step toward gender inclusion came from then-board chair Darliene Howell, who suggested we give everyone pronoun stickers for their name badges. There were a few adventures at registration with members who were confused about why cisgender people would need to tell anyone their pronouns, but it was a good lesson for our members. (If you’re still learning, this might help).
We’re still on a learning curve, too, but when it comes to queer inclusion, we are leaps and bounds from where we were when I joined the board in 2015. Most of NAAFA’s community throughout our existence has been cisgender people. From what I can tell looking at NAAFA’s history and talking to the elders who lived that history, national leadership and major event participants historically did not include out transgender folks. (If you know otherwise, let us know!) This doesn’t mean there were no transgender people in NAAFA’s past; it means there were none who were out in those spaces, at those times. Some of that can be attributed to the times. Some of it is attributable to lack of awareness, understanding, and support from NAAFA’s membership and leadership. Other organizations, notably NOLOSE, were more welcoming.
Today’s NAAFA looks a lot different from historical NAAFA in many ways, including the participation of more queer and genderqueer people. (Queer can include both sexual orientation and gender identity. The Genderbread Person can help you with that, too, if you need it.) As we began to expand our understanding of intersectionality, we’ve worked harder to ensure that our intersectional approaches include helping our cisgender community members learn about trans fat inclusion. We still have a mostly cisgender demographic, which makes sense because there are more cisgender people in the world. But we also have a more actively supportive and intentionally inclusive community to receive those trans folks who want to be with us. We seek out ways to educate ourselves and others on how to be in solidarity with fat trans people and all trans people.
At a tech conference last year, I heard a speaker from 2SLGBTQIA+ organization say that the number of Americans who think they know a transgender person is so small that there are more Americans who believe they have seen a ghost than believe they have met a transgender person. If you’re involved in the 2025 version of NAAFA, that won’t be you. There are more transgender fat people and non-fat allies active in NAAFA than ever before. You may not have come to NAAFA knowing you would be in a trans-accepting organization, but we hope you’ll stay with us as we continue to create a safer space for our transgender community members.
NAAFA’s board and volunteer leadership today has representation from a lot of queer and non-binary people, and so do our virtual events and publications. This includes people who use lots of different terminology to describe their non-cis selves: non-binary, gender queer, gender expansive, and more. To adapt a classic gay rights chant, “We’re here, there’re queers here, get used to it!” Those of us who are cisgender in fat liberation spaces – whether we’ve been around for 50 years, 5 years, or 5 minutes – must show up as allies for transgender people, especially when they are being actively vilified, attacked, and stripped of their rights.
Body sovereignty is essential to fat liberation. It is essential to fighting transphobia, too. The same anti-fat trolls who call us delusional because we think our bodies are ok also call trans people delusional for the same reason, sometimes in the same breath. Anti-fatness is used as a way to deny trans people essential medical and reproductive care. Like all fat people, their size is often used to gatekeep surgeries and other medical interventions (read more about this from writer J. Aprileo on the NAAFA blog). As we watch 2SLGBTQIA+ rights and protections being rolled back all over the country, people who are fat and trans are doubly at risk. Until size discrimination is made explicitly illegal, it can lead to permissible legal discrimination even in places where queer and trans folks are still protected under the law. For fat and/or trans People of Color, racism exacerbates both anti-fatness and transphobia.
Today’s NAAFA exists in a country where our federal leadership believes that making America great “again” means making Americans conform to a gender binary. Transgender people are being dehumanized. The ever-increasing war on fat is dehumanizing for fat people, too. For those of us who embody many at-risk identities, this is an especially scary time. But we are resistant and resilient. There have always been trans people. There have always been fat people. There have always been trans fat people. We fight with and for each other to build a world where all bodies and all people are free.
To support NAAFA’s work to outlaw size discrimination and to build intersectional, inclusive fat community spaces, make a donation today.
Editor’s note: March 31 is International Transgender Day of Visibility, which honors the global achievements of transgender persons and raises awareness of the discrimination faced by the transgender community. For more from trans and non-binary folks in NAAFA’s community, check out Intersections of Fat and Gender Identity.
