Wrestling, like drag, is an over-the-top performance. You of course have people who opt for more subtle personas, whose in-ring moves tell the story of themselves and their relationships with their opponents, and then you have a man who is carried out in a chair by his troop of 'boys' as peacock feathers flash across the screen. He grabs the camera and pulls it to his face as he tells you that you are going to see the best wrestler on your TV or mobile device.
Or you have a woman who is billed at 90-someodd pounds who is suplexing a woman billed at 185 pounds.
Somewhere in this performance I found myself or at least who I am now.
I have spent so many years, in large part thanks to my mother & family, trying to become smaller. Crying to become smaller. I never saw myself which was apparent by the way I would look at my old pictures & think 'Was I really that small?' when I know that at the time I did not see it that way. I would not say I had an eating disorder but I absolutely had body dysmorphia.
One of the most difficult things for me in terms of accepting my body as it relates to my gender is that I have a 14" difference between my hips and my waist which has traditionally been a marker of femininity. To be non-binary, rather than its own thing, has been pushed even by queer media as taking on a look that fits a more binary expression of gender. If you were assigned female at birth, to be non-binary means to try to look more masculine. And vice versa though quite frankly non-binary people who were assigned male at birth quite often get overlooked or erased. I struggled that everywhere I turned it seemed I was being told to be smaller, slimmer, in ways that I cannot possibly be. Hide my body.
Wrestlers go through a lot of dysmorphia. I know this because people do, but also because it is an industry in which looks can be what brings success, particulary in a reality where for the longest time Vince McMahon was running the only successful company in the country (I'm sorry, Impact Wrestling, I love you). But at the same time I see wrestlers, like Eddie Kingston, like Willow Nightingale, who are bigger in their own ways, & who are strong, & who defy the notions placed on them by outsiders who think that what it means to be a performer is to look like you are on a steady diet of lettuce, red meat, and steroids.
I started last summer to go to the gym. At first I had two goals: to get out of the house so as not to lose my mind during summer break because of a lack of structure, to start better defining my back.
Weights are intimidating. I sat at the machines and started at what, 10 lbs? 20lbs maybe? I kept going. What I found was that weights helped alleviate most (not all) of my lower back pain and almost all of my shoulder pain the more regular I became.
My mother said 'Spend more time on cardio, you don't want to get too big doing weights.' I looked at the wrestlers in front of me. I did want to get 'too big' at least as far as her opinion was concerned.
On certain Internet circles (it's Twitter, but you know it happens in other spaces online), the truscum/transmeds insisted that non-binary people were 'trenders' who did nothing to transition. But transition sees different tactics. For some it is a haircut, a change of clothing, for some it is hormone replacement (& necessary for them! support free access to it!) & for some it is surgeries (also necessary for some & should be free!).
But what I know as part of my transition can go unnoticed by most. I am building myself constantly, continuously. I look at my screen & see I do not have to be tiny, & I do not have to be a body builder either. I can just be, & I can be strong(er) & I can even be large(r). When I flex even if I am the only one who sees the differences in the mirror, I see them, & I think that is me, this is something I have worked at, & I am proud. I shave my undercut myself in the bathroom. I clean up the hair that has fallen into the sink. This is me. This is the person I am but also the look I have cultivated as a way of expressing a gender that is mine.
I think without wrestling it would have taken longer to understand and accept myself.
But I have learned to take up space.