Anita Rao
Hey y'all, it's Anita. Today in the podcast feed: a special edition of the Embodoied podcast featuring a collaboration with another audio journalist named H. Conley. Back in October of last year, HC emailed us an intriguing story pitch. One about how diet culture and anti-fat bias affect people seeking gender-affirming surgery. They took a deep dive into this topic last fall for their journalism master's capstone project at the City University of New York, and we are thrilled to feature that reporting today on Embodied. After their story finishes, stay tuned to meet HC and hear a little bit more about how this story came together. Till then, enjoy.
Chala June
I'm tired of feeling like I'm being tolerated.
H Conley
This is Chala June.
Chala June
Because if there's one thing about me — one, I would love to be intolerable. I will be intolerably trans and anyone who can't make space for that just can't make space for me.
H Conley
It's taken them a long time to get here — to being loud and proud and intolerably trans. They're 26, just a couple inches shy of six feet tall, and their style is self-described as "on the Mr. Rogers to Miss Frizzle spectrum." We met last summer when I did a fellowship at "Bon Appétit" where they work as an associate editor. It's hard for me to wrap my mind around someone not tolerating Chala, but unfortunately, our society and our medical system is set up to not tolerate their Black, queer and large trans body. I could tell you about so many of the structural barriers erected to keep trans folks from accessing the life saving care they need, but we'd be here all day.
So I'm going to tell you about one barrier to accessing one type of surgery and the way it affected one person: Chala. When they decided they were ready for top surgery — a mastectomy to masculinize their chest — they were told they were too fat for the procedure. To tell you about their experience, I'll be discussing anti-fatness, disordered eating and suicidal ideation. I know all of that can be triggering, so please take care of yourself.
Growing up, Chala's family had no room for queerness.
Chala June
So I am the youngest of four. My dad emigrated from Congo, so like, kind of, first gen — a lot of first gen morals and expectations. My mother is a Jehovah's Witness.
H Conley
There was a lot about themselves that they couldn't understand, and they didn't have anyone to talk to you about.
Chala June
There was no room made for gender variance at all. My mom being, like, so deep in her faith, but then also my dad being, like, a very traditional African man. Any sort of emotional stuff you really just, kind of, dealt with — navigated on your own. Because my dad was just, like, "Go talk to your mother," and my mom's like, "Well, here's what Jesus has to say."
H Conley
Their boobs started developing young, which brought unwanted attention. And they were bombarded with the message that that attention was their fault. Their chest grew faster than their spine, which caused chronic back pain from a young age. They did some physical therapy in high school, but insurance didn't cover enough sessions to make much of a difference. They felt highly limited in daily life.
Chala June
In gym class and stuff, like, all of the fucking running and jumping and shit and, like, I hated doing it. And I felt a lot of shame around that because I've always been a fat person. And it was like, "Oh, of course, like, Chala doesn't like running and jumping, you know, they're fat," but it's like, my fucking back hurts.
H Conley
In high school, they found their first queer community through the Gay Straight Alliance and realized they were bisexual. They went to Emerson College with some awareness of binary trans identity, but no knowledge of gender fluidity. It wasn't until their junior year that they realized they were nonbinary.
Chala June
And I'm just like, sitting in my dorm room, am on Tumblr — classically — and I just saw, like, "something something androgynous," and my brain went *gasp*. Because I think it was, like — I saw it, like, as a gender identity and not just as, like, an adjective, and I was like, wait, wait a second.
H Conley
Chala came out and spent the years after college exploring their gender and working in food. They were a short order cook, a prep baker, a cheese monger, a barista and a line cook. After a stint in California, they landed in New York where they started seeing a chiropractor in the fall of 2019.
Chala June
When she was like, "Yeah, like, two of your vertebrae in your lower back are just, like, resting on a nerve, just, kind of, like, pinching."
H Conley
She recommended they get a breast reduction, which they had been considering for a long time. She said their back wouldn't heal without relieving the pressure of their breasts, which had been crushing their spine for more than a decade. By that point, Chala was ready for their body to better reflect their identity. They were tired of being constantly misgendered, tired of being "ma'amed" and ready to give their back a break.
Chala June
And I was, like, thinking through it, and I was like, "Well, if I'm already gonna go under the knife, we might as well just get it all out the way."
H Conley
So Chala decided to get top surgery — breast removal and reconstruction of the chest to be more masculine. It's a major undertaking. In order to qualify, patients need a letter from a therapist stating that the surgery is appropriate and necessary, a surgical consultation, insurance approval, etc. It's an outpatient procedure that takes from an hour and a half to four hours to perform, and then a month-plus to recover from. Chala was ready to get the process rolling when COVID came along and delayed their search for a surgeon. Then they ended up at the bottom of a six month waiting list. When they finally got a consultation in January 2021, they kept their expectations in check. They didn't want to get their hopes up.
Chala June
Because I'm also, like, used to just, like, expecting to be disappointed.
H Conley
Even so, nothing could have prepared them for what happened when the surgeon came into the exam room.
Chala June
She, like, quite literally stood there, like, did a BMI calculator on her phone and was like, "Yeah, so come back in, like, six months, maybe try to lose around, like, 50 pounds, and then we can talk." Like, it was an incredibly triggering experience.
H Conley
I was shocked when they told me this. I had top surgery about a year and a half ago, but because I'm slim, my weight never came up during any part of the process. I didn't even know it was a factor. But Chala's experience isn't unusual. Many surgeons refuse to do top surgery on fat people. They cite increased risk of complications and say that patients won't be happy with the results. They use a measure known as BMI — the body mass index — to determine who they'll operate on. The BMI was developed by a Belgian mathematician almost 200 years ago, based on the bodies of cisgender white men. He was looking for a statistical way to measure weight at the population level. It was never intended to gauge the health of individuals — he was a statistician, not a doctor. In the 1940s, the MetLife insurance company used BMI in actuarial tables to determine an average or ideal man, based on their primarily white policyholders. BMI doesn't account for bone density, muscle mass, age, ethnicity or sex. There are doctors who argue it should be scrapped altogether.
Dr. Alexes Hazen
I think it's really imperfect.
H Conley
This is Dr. Alexes Hazen, a top surgeon who doesn't have a BMI limit in her practice.
Dr. Alexes Hazen
I don't know, it's like square footage in a house. You know, it's — it tells you some information, but it really doesn't tell you, like, what the layout is, you know. So that means, like, some people with a high BMI can be extremely healthy, and some people can be very unhealthy.
H Conley
Although Dr. Hazen doesn't use BMI cut-offs, she understands why other surgeons do.
Dr. Alexes Hazen
I think it's harder. It's more work, and so some people just aren't willing to do that. And for a lot of plastic surgeons, it's almost viewed as elective. So you know, if you — if you have a gallbladder attack, and you need your gallbladder out, you know, the surgeon is not going to say, "Well, you have a high BMI." They're gonna say, "We'll do this, but you're at higher risk."
H Conley
It's not that Dr. Hazen doesn't think about her patient's weight at all. Her surgical approach will differ depending on the patient's breast size and skin elasticity. For people with small chests, very small incisions can be made at the base of the nipple to remove tissue. But for most people, longer incisions must be made across the chest. The length of those incisions will depend on the amount of tissue needing to be removed. Larger chests can take longer to operate on and are often more challenging for the surgeon. It can be incredibly challenging to find a surgeon who takes your insurance, has availability, whose results you like and who you trust. Having a high BMI can make that search more challenging and more painful. The surgeon Chala saw didn't look at the person in front of her, just the number on her calculator that needed to come down. That dehumanization caused Chala to have ...
Chala June
A really bad spiral and quite honestly, like, experienced suicidal ideation in a way that I hadn't in a while. And that was a really hard thing to bounce back from.
H Conley
We're gonna leave Chala for a moment to dig deeper into why surgeons use BMI cut-offs. Not only is top surgery more difficult on heavier patients, surgeons also take it for granted that fat people have a higher risk of complications — not just from top surgery, but when it comes to any kind of surgery. For top surgery, complications can range in severity. Seroma, which is the accumulation of fluid, can be minor — as in just requiring an office visit to drain — or it can be more long-term and require going back to the operating room. Wounds can take longer to heal, which can extend recovery time. And more seriously, people can also develop blood clots. Here's Dr. Hazen again.
Dr. Alexes Hazen
So I think, you know, it's understandable that you wouldn't want to take on a surgery that already has a risk of complications, and then add on a known factor that will increase that risk.
H Conley
But a few more recent studies suggest that BMI doesn't actually increase the risk of complications from top surgery. Two studies from 2021 from the University of Ottawa and Georgetown University both found patients with BMI's considered obese have comparable top surgery outcomes to everyone else. Another study from the University of California San Francisco East Bay found that obesity alone shouldn't disqualify people from top surgery. This is why Hazen looks at overall health instead of relying on the BMI. In contrast, other research shows that being underweight or malnourished can increase your risk of complications. A 2020 study from Duke University called malnourished surgery patients a silent epidemic. And keep in mind that people who are crash dieting to lose weight — no matter their body size — can be malnourished, so telling people to lose weight to decrease their complications could do the opposite. Some experts say that surgical focus on BMI is inherently discriminatory, and that doctors are notoriously fatphobic.
Lacie Parker
I still have a lot of clients who express concern, even visiting their primary health provider, because they know that they are going to experience weight stigma. So it can be a barrier to getting good care.
H Conley
This is Lacie Parker, a psychotherapist who works with queer people with a focus on eating concerns and body image.
Lacie Parker
So weight stigma is one of the very few stigmas where it is still seen to be okay to be explicitly fatphobic or have an explicit weight bias. Kind of, ties into this rhetoric of, you know, being thin is better and that you can control your weight, and that if you are in a larger body, then you're automatically unhealthy.
H Conley
Because gender-affirming surgeries are often still categorized as elective, there's much more leeway for turning people away. It also allows surgeons to focus on aesthetics over access. Plastic surgeons are distinct from other doctors because their patients become their portfolio. They post before and after photos on their websites and social media, so they might not want to operate on someone whose results won't be to their own standard. I asked Dr. Hazen if surgeons make decisions about who to operate on with their portfolio in mind, and she said 100%. In contrast, the aesthetics of the results were pretty low on Chala's priority list.
Chala June
You know, I could look like I got fucking mauled honestly, like, I'll put a T-shirt on. Just take them away.
H Conley
But no matter the reason surgeons have for requiring weight loss — aesthetic or not — they might not be considering how damaging telling people to lose weight can be. Trans people are more likely to struggle with disordered eating than cis people. Statistics vary, but it's estimated that trans people experience eating disorders at two to five times the rate of their peers. There are a lot of contributing factors to these high rates: discrimination and bullying, family rejection and, most prevalently, gender dysphoria.
Lacie Parker
A lot of that has to do with trying to mold your body into what you want it to be, but also what society wants your body to be.
H Conley
Telling someone who has a fraught relationship to their body that they have to lose weight risks sending them back down a self-destructive path.
Chala June
I have, like, struggled with binge eating my entire life. I was a very lonely kid despite growing up in a big family, so food was how I self-soothed.
H Conley
Chala has always loved food. It's been a source of joy and comfort, a space for creativity and expression. But food has also been a source of shame, something to deny themselves to fit into what other people expect from them — a thing to run from.
Chala June
I have a distinct memory of, like, my mom had made, like, something really good for dinner once, and I, like, tried to get seconds because, like, my brother just had seconds. And my dad said to me something along the lines of like, "Oh, he can have more because he's a growing boy, you need to not eat like a boy." And that was an early just, like, dissonance, both between my eating patterns and my gender. And I was like, I don't understand what any of this is supposed to mean, nor how I'm supposed to apply it to my life. And so, the binge eating would be balanced out by periods of starving myself and only really eating, like, once a day, because I felt terrible about my body.
H Conley
The attempt to restrict calories after a binge is part of what's referred to as the binge-restrict pendulum. So you can picture your food consumption as a weight on a string. If you're consistently eating the amount of food your body needs, you'll hang at the equilibrium in the middle. If you intentionally reduce calories or skip meals, you'll pull the pendulum to the restriction side. The further you pull it, the further it'll swing towards binging once you can no longer deny yourself. Often a binge will be followed by shame that will cause you to try to restrict even further, which just causes the pendulum to swing more forcefully. Chala struggled with food through their junior year of college, when they realized they were nonbinary around the same time they got their first job in a kitchen.
Chala June
But it was through working in this kitchen that I was, one, in a dedicated environment where I was able to really learn so much about food. And that changed a lot of my relationship to it because it became less about this like — I mean, as with all disordered eating — it became less about the control of it and, like, feeling out of control and more about just, like, the learning aspect of it. And creating the space just be a big nerd about kohlrabi.
H Conley
But that January 2021 visit to the NYU surgeon set back all that progress. With the knowledge that they couldn't get top surgery without losing weight, they started restricting calories again.
Chala June
It was hard to get myself to eat. And like, I got very restrictive with what I was eating because I was so sad. And yeah, not eating and then binge eating, and then not eating, which doesn't help anything.
H Conley
After months of restriction and depression, Chala broke their routine and took a trip to California to visit their best friend. The two took shrooms while camping in the desert, and Chala ...
Chala June
Just found this moment of faith and just, like, knew that I was gonna make it happen. And I was going to make it happen in a way that felt good for me and felt true to who I am. And I was going to make it happen on my terms. And so, I did come back from that, like, refreshed and renewed to commit to just reevaluating all of the habits I had in my life.
H Conley
They committed to intentionally treating themselves better, to drinking more water, spending more time outside and to cooking and eating the vegetables they love.
Chala June
I would order this farm box, and it was, like, a chop challenge. And I was, like, you have two pounds of sun chokes, like, Swiss chard. And it's like, alright, let's go.
H Conley
They took their time — didn't try to rush to meet that six month timeline the NYU surgeon set. They found a different surgeon at Mount Sinai who said they only had to lose 15 pounds, so a lot of the pressure was lifted. Chala was able to lose weight on their own terms and at their own pace.
Chala June
But it worked. And I think really what it was, more than anything else for me, it was about the shift in, like, my mindset and how I treated myself more than anything else.
H Conley
They ended up losing about 60 pounds — more than the original surgeon prescribed. They scheduled top surgery with their new doctor for August 2022, more than a year and a half after that first consultation. As the date got closer, there was a lot of trepidation and excitement swirling around in Chala's head. Their sister, who's an ER tech, came up from Maryland to take care of them. She drove them to the hospital where they had paperwork to fill out and enough time to talk to their other two siblings before the surgeon came in. He drew the lines on their chest to show where he'd make his incisions.
Chala June
And I was nervous, but then we had, like, a moment because, all morning, I was thinking about the scene from Arrested Development where Katie is like, "Say goodbye to these," and she lifts up her shirt. And I was talking to my surgeon, I was like, "Did you ever watch Arrested Development?" He's like, "Yeah." I was like, "All I can think about is, 'Say goodbye to these.'" And like, we were both just cracking up and I was like, "Okay, I'm ready." I was like, "I'm — I'm ready for this." And then, you know, went into the OR, laid down on that very warm table — I wasn't expecting it to be so, like, perfectly heated — you know, like tucked me in, I was like, "Kinda nice." You know, a nice pampering, and they put the IV in and put the gas mask on, and were like, "Alright, just take a few deep breaths." And I was like, "Okay, we're gonna do this." And next thing I know, I'm just sitting up in a chair, very cold afterwards.
H Conley
Their recovery has required a lot of patience. They didn't have work to divert their attention, so had to just sit with their thoughts.
Chala June
There was this, like, feeling of relief of just like, "Thank God, it's actually happened." But I've also been in just, like, this odd headspace of, you know — I'm trying to practice radical acceptance and just, like, accepting how I am feeling instead of, like, shaming myself for not feeling how I think I should be feeling. Like, "Okay, you did the thing. Why aren't you, like, over the moon ecstatic about it?" I'm like, "Well, my body hurts. And my like — I can't do shit for myself, and I'm, like, in bed all day just, like, watching TV."
H Conley
Part of that headspace has been continued frustration over their protracted experience. When I decided to get top surgery, it was really easy. I went to the surgeon my GP recommended, and she offered me an appointment for three months after that first meeting — and I chose to delay by a month. Chala had to go through months of research, waiting and weight loss. It took them six times as long to get surgery. That's been deeply frustrating, but it also felt inevitable to them.
Chala June
There wasn't going to be a world where everything went smoothly. That didn't exist for me. It wasn't going to because of the realities of medical fatphobia, of medical racism. And it was very frustrating, as I was going through the process, to see several people who I knew who had — even people I knew who had, like, realized that they were trans, like, years after I had — be able to get gender-affirming surgery before me. And I carried a lot of that resentment until the day I was able to get surgery. You know, I think I do still carry a lot of that.
H Conley
They've been channeling that frustration into being a resource for other people in their situation. The good news is that ...
Chala June
I'm definitely really happy with the results, especially just considering the sheer volume of boobage that needed to be removed. Like my surgeon was like, "Yeah, it was definitely one of the larger chests that I've had to operate on in quite some time." I was like, "I'm sure."
H Conley
Now it's been a few months, their recovery has been pretty smooth. Chala is back at work at "Bon Appétit," writing and editing about the food they love. They're able to dance and move freely, able to throw on a shirt without agonizing over their silhouette.
Chala June
Well, it's nice to be able to, like, actually walk with, like, my chest held high.
H Conley
But now that their body aligns better with their identity, they have to reckon with the new way they're seen by those around them. Walking around the city, they've had to adjust to being perceived as a Black man.
Chala June
Two days ago, I was just, like, walking to my apartment. I turned the corner, like, too close to this woman or something, and she just, like, jumped back. Like she was so frightened, you know, by me coming around the corner, and I was like, "Bruh, I'm just trying to get home," you know.
H Conley
Their body better aligns with who they are, but they can't control how others see them or how they'll react to what they see. Chala doesn't want to be seen as a threat or a victim.
Chala June
That's a lot of what's been coming up just, like, in the months since getting surgery and a large part of the reason why I've been spending a lot of time just by myself at home.
H Conley
They've been able to find safety and freedom in queer community. Before surgery, they performed a couple of times as their drag persona, Pisces Moon. After a couple of months of healing, they've now thrown themselves back into drag with new confidence. I went to their first show back the Friday before Halloween with some mutual trans friends. Purgatory, this bar in Bushwick, was packed with all kinds of queers, there to scream their heads off for Pisces and the other performers.
Chala June
I definitely feel like now, I'm able to, like, do bigger gestures, to do more physicality and even, just, my comfort in wearing clothing with more feminine silhouettes has, like, really been boosted because I can wear them without immediately being perceived as a cis woman. And so, I think that alone has allowed me to really expand and branch out in my artistry. And then yeah, there's more physicality to it. The number that I had just done at $3 Bill, like, it was literally me just, like, jumping around and whipping a giant red ponytail. Before surgery, I was like, I don't — I don't jump. Yeah, even being able to, like, you know, wear a corset to do like sexy demonic burlesque number was, like, such a difference. Just like, going to try the corset on, I was like, "Yes, this is exactly what I want with, like, no boobs flopping over the top." You know, it's like, "This is perfect."
H Conley
Yeah, talk to me about being shirtless on stage.
Chala June
Oh, so much fun. I don't know, I just felt — it felt like a coming out party. You know, the nips — the nips are out. They're here. They're ready, now that they're legal.
Anita Rao
That was an audio documentary written and produced by H Conley, a journalist and recent graduate of the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York. And I have HC on the line now for a short debrief. Hey HC, thank you so much for sharing your reporting with us.
H Conley
Hi, Anita. Thanks for having me.
Anita Rao
So I would love to start hearing a little bit more about your personal relationship with Chala and what it was like to approach them at first about telling this story.
H Conley
I met Chala, I think my first day that I started at "Bon Appétit," where I did, like, an eight week fellowship fact checking for them over the summer. And Chala created this package for "Bon Appétit" for pride month called "Food Is Queer" that I had pitched a story for that they had accepted before I started working there. And so my first time meeting Chala, they, like, already knew all this stuff about me because they had been editing this article that I'd written for them. And we really hit it off and, like, had lunch one day, and I was telling them that I was looking into this thing about BMI limits and gender-affirming care, and was more asking them because they're a trans person who knows a lot of trans people. And I was thinking like, "Maybe Chala might know someone in this situation." And they were like, "That's me, I'm in this situation. That's what I'm going through right now." And it just — it was such a, like, it was so kismet and perfect, and they were so excited to talk about it, and were like, "This is an issue that I haven't heard anybody discuss before, and I want to share my story about this." And so, it almost fell into my lap like — yeah, it was, I was searching for someone and they turned out to be who I was searching for.
Anita Rao
That's incredible that that landed into your lap like that. And I know, kind of, building intimacy with — with someone that you're going to follow so closely for so long can be tricky, especially when you're trying to, kind of, be in the space as a reporter. And I'd love to know, kind of, what your approach was to doing that — how you thought about the rapport that you wanted to build with Chala and the role that you, kind of, wanted to play as a documentarian in this process. Because you do have a personal connection to the topic as well, so I'm curious about how you, kind of, balanced those two things.
H Conley
I think that was something I was worried about was that I, like, wanted to be friends with Chala. And, you know, we kind of were just meeting when we decided to work on this together. But I think something that I've found when interviewing other trans people is that the rapport is really natural, just because we have been through similar experiences or have gone through similar, like, mental processes about ourselves. And so we have a kind of shared mentality that I didn't feel like I needed to be — I didn't need to separate something in order to be a reporter about it because I was more just talking to them like a person and hearing their story. And there were sometimes questions I had to ask that I probably wouldn't ask just as a friend, but because they're also a journalist, we were very much on the same page. And even though some of the questions were maybe hard to answer or uncomfortable, I didn't feel like I had to walk the line of journalist versus friend. I could just have a conversation with them and use that audio. I don't know, that might not be very clear.
Anita Rao
No, that totally makes sense. And I mean, I feel like there is this ongoing conversation in journalism right now about, you know, how much can a reporter be part of the story? And are you still, you know, being objective, if you are a part of the story? Is objectivity even a thing? And so, I feel like the lines are being blurred in very intentional ways right now. And it seems like you were trying to, kind of, be mindful of how you wanted to present as an interviewer, but also acknowledged that you do have some shared identity markers and shared community with this person that you're interviewing.
H Conley
Yeah, and at my graduate school that I just finished up at, we read Lewis Raven Wallace's book. And, you know, it very much dives into the idea of journalistic objectivity. And you know, I have long felt that pretending that you're not a human being with history, and with thoughts and emotions is, you know, almost like lying to your audience if you don't acknowledge that you have personal feelings about a topic. And there's no way for me to be — to pretend to be objective when it comes to talking about the issues surrounding trans people because there's so many attacks against trans people, and I am trans. And so, I inherently have a stake in trans people living better lives and having more freedom and rights, and pretending that that's not true would be foolish. And nobody would believe me, so I might as well talk about it out in the open.
Anita Rao
Totally, totally. I want to talk a bit about the content of your piece in terms of talking about fat bias and healthcare. And I know from our experience on Embodied, some of the shows that we get the most pushback about are shows where we're talking about diet culture. We're talking about how diet culture shows up in medicine, where we're talking about fat bias in medicine, where we're talking about, kind of, questioning BMI. That brings up a lot of emotions for people, and it's really counter to what a lot of us have grown up learning about what health is and how to define health. So I'd be curious about, kind of, any takeaways you have from your conversations with folks inside the healthcare system about this, and how you felt bringing up some of those those questions and questioning some of those systems within healthcare.
H Conley
Yeah, you know, it's something that Lacie Parker, who is a psychotherapist who I happened upon and interviewed for something else, and then was like, "You seem like you'd have thoughts on this topic." And she was like, "Oh boy, do I." And anti-fat bias is one of the few things that — it's seen as like, "Well, it's for your own good that I'm discriminating against you," or it's because, "You're objectively unhealthy." And that idea of objectivity again, of like, "I'm a doctor, and so I know fatness is unhealthy." And I, like, didn't have a lot of background in this area, and I've spent a long time really trying to learn more about anti-fat bias. And I've been listening to the podcast "Maintenance Phase," and I've read Aubrey Gordon's book "What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Fat." Both of those really showed me, as someone who has never experienced anti-fat bias, the breadth of it and the depth of it, like, the ingrained nature of it. I mean, in "What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Fat," Aubrey wrote about how a study showed that anti-fat bias is essentially part of the curriculum of medical school. And when I talked to Dr. Alexes Hazen, who herself said, like, "I know what anti-fat bias is like, I have a high BMI. But objectively, this is true about being fat." And I think the main takeaway that I had from it is that top surgery is really important for a lot of people and whether they are at a higher risk of certain complications, it seems to not be such a great risk that they should be denied this care. And, you know, it seems like a lot of the denial of care is more about aesthetics, or maybe minor complications that most people are like, "I will accept those aesthetic problems or those complications because I really just want a flat chest, and that is my big priority. And it doesn't serve me to have to wait years in order to access this thing that will change my life."
Anita Rao
Totally. I would love to end talking about the very first line in the piece that really struck me. When Chala says, "I would love to be intolerable. Intolerably trans." And I'm curious for you, I mean, you have graduated, you have produced this beautiful piece, you've been thinking a lot about these issues, you're about to really set out more into your professional career as an audio journalist. What does it look like to be intolerably yourself as you move forward?
H Conley
I think, when coming out back 2019, I think my parents were worried that being openly nonbinary, that using they/them pronouns in my email signatures, or having it be clear in my, like, job applications that I was trans would count against me. And I also have a disability, I'm legally blind. And that's something that, like, I have heard from bosses that they wouldn't have hired me if they had known beforehand. So I have, like, had this thing that is very integral to who I am and how I function in the world that I was told I should keep hidden because it could count against me in searching for jobs. And I don't really have any interest in hiding the fact that I'm visually impaired or the fact that I'm trans because they're too important to who I am and how I function in the world. And if somebody doesn't think I can do my job because I'm trans or legally blind, like, they're wrong. And I think being upfront about these aspects of myself that are very important to me is more important than whatever it might be that somebody might discriminate against me because of these aspects of myself. I would rather everyone know and be aware, and if they don't like it, then that is just one person who doesn't like me, and I can live with that. So being intolerable is, kind of, like being yourself without worrying about tolerance, I guess.
Anita Rao
I love that. Well, thank you so much for producing this work and sharing with us, and we are really excited to continue to follow your career and listen to your work. H Conley, writer and reporter who produced the wonderful piece that you all heard today. Thank you so much.
H Conley
Thank you, Anita.
Anita Rao
This episode was edited by Emily Laber-Warren and Kaia Findlay. Jenni Lawson is our sound engineer and Quilla wrote our theme music. Amanda Magnus and Audrey Smith also work on our show, and special thanks to Chala for their openness and honesty.
Embodied is a production of North Carolina Public Radio-WUNC, a listener-supported station. If you want to lend your support to this podcast and WUNC's other shows on demand, consider a contribution at wunc.org now. Incredible storytelling like you hear on Embodied is only possible because of listeners like you.
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Until next time, I'm Anita Rao, taking on the taboo with you.