Pathological body projects in the pages of Teen Vogue

Liv Hewson in Teen Vogue

Teen Vogue offers up another serving of gender agitprop, this time featuring a troubled young actress who identifies as nonbinary (and, lo and behold, the reporter is ‘nonbinary,’ too):

Liv Hewson can’t remember a time before feeling “an inarticulate distress, a nebulous discomfort” in their body that they didn’t have words for and didn’t quite understand. Thus the Yellowjackets star, who is nonbinary, couldn’t tell anyone about it. How to begin describing gender dysphoria without a language for it in the mainstream? Nonbinary people are hardly a recent reality, but only in the last decade or so have public figures started identifying as such. Hewson tells Teen Vogue, “There was nothing to say.” 

While growing up in Australia, Hewson tried to untangle their feeling without tools, but it “ate at” them. When puberty arrived with its bodily changes, they developed a “really nasty” case of anorexia. Through recovery, Hewson realized the eating disorder was in part a result of gender dysphoria — “a discomfort with and alienation from my body, and a need to control it or be in charge of it or shape it.” At that same time, around age 16, Hewson began learning about feminism and queer history, “reaching for information and community wherever I could find it.” They started to feel things click into place.

“I came across the term ‘nonbinary’ for the first time, and it was just immediate,” Hewson recalls. Oh, that's 100% what my deal is, they thought. That explains everything. “But very quickly on the heels of that was, I can't do anything with this. It's 2012, and I'm 16." They continue, "It was this beautiful, celebratory thing of that's me. I know exactly who I am, I've fixed it. But I couldn't tell anyone because, at the time, it really felt impossible.” 

When Hewson describes her struggles with anorexia as a “need to control [my body] or be in charge of it or shape it,” she is equally describing her struggles with gender and her desire for surgery.

Her efforts at deflection sound like the kinds of feints at recovery that so many anorexics cycle through as the disorder seeks cover under anything that justifies and ennobles a continuing obsession with controlling the body, whether that’s a grueling fitness regimen, a highly particular diet, a new trans identity.

But how do you survive the unsurvivable without losing parts of yourself? What does it serve to call traumatized children “evil?” 

These are questions that Hewson and I, as nonbinary people, find endlessly relevant in our political moment. American politics are hyper-focused on LGBTQ+ children, especially trans children, to the point of attempting to ban their existence. This ideological and legislative push is cannily framed as “in defense of children,” but in reality it seeks to punish deviations from a cisgender, white, heterosexual norm — consequently punishing anyone, including and especially children, who deviate.

During our childhoods, we never heard about transness or gender-affirming care as anything other than a punchline; now we’re living in a time when a 2024 presidential candidate compared puberty blockers to chemical castration before deriding top surgery on a debate stage. Conservatives talk about trans children as a historical anomaly, a failure of modern society, a social contagion, an impossibility; but people like Hewson have already lived otherwise.

… “I'm just so done feeling any shame or apology about it,” Hewson says. “This is true about me, so why would I spend any time hiding or prevaricating around that or feeling shame and grief about it? This is who I am, and that's actually wonderful. Not only is it not a problem, it's a good thing, and it deserves space. I deserve to be in the world as much as anybody else; so do all nonbinary and trans people.”

Here comes the drama, the artificially heightened stakes: people who worry about irreversible surgeries on troubled adolescents and young adults want to “ban their existence.”

Teen Vogue: It seems a lot of media coverage is like, “Oh, my God, nonbinary people, this thing that came into existence six or seven years ago, fully formed!”

Liv Hewson: I literally remember that not being true. In 2012, I told my friends to start using they/them pronouns for me, and it's not like I'm the only person who did that. The information that I was reading then came from somewhere. The way that nonbinary people are discussed, as we enter mainstream awareness, is completely ahistorical. That's a shame in so many ways. It's a disconnect to our history, and it's used as justification to dismiss us. It's so annoying.

OK, so it came into existence 12 years ago. That changes everything.

As far as the “history” goes, it’s borrowed, stolen, or wholly invented. There’s good reason to think that people with unconventional relationships to whatever sex-role stereotypes were in force in the time and place where they lived have always existed. This doesn’t mean they would recognize themselves in Tumblr discourses about identity.

TV: I want to ask you about your top surgery. Our culture is petrified of assigned female at birth people getting top surgery; conservatives and TERFs say things like, “Girls are mutilating their bodies” or “What if they regret it?”

LH: It's really misogynistic: “These girls couldn't possibly make this decision correctly and will need to be stopped from doing terrible things to their bodies.”

When people talk about gender-affirming surgery using words like “mutilation,” that's not very nice. Is that how you think about people who've had surgery for other things? It's a disgust reaction, and I do not take disgust into account as a legitimate point of discourse. I don't have to entertain it and I'm not going to. It's a waste of everybody's time, it's knee-jerk, it's not grounded in reality, and it's not useful. 

And it's a squeamishness about medical intervention. I think the idea of making legislative or cultural decisions in and around [that] is laughable. Your squeamishness is not what the world turns on; it doesn't matter.

One time somebody left a comment under a picture of me where you could see the edges of my top surgery scars, saying something along the lines of, “This is like women cutting their fingers off.” At first that really disturbed me. I was like, “Man, that is just a horrible thing to say.” And then it suddenly struck me as a little bit funny. I was just like, "And are the women cutting their fingers off in the room with — 

TV: — us right now?"

LH: Exactly. I am not going to entertain anybody's disgust over my body. It's my body, it’s healthy and strong and beautiful, and there’s nothing wrong with it. Point blank.

In terms of “What if you feel regret?”: Is the idea that nobody ever feel regret about anything? Aside from the fact that we have complete statistical information about regret rates of gender- affirming surgery and this is an absolute nonstarter, what? Are you also going to legislate against people getting tattoos? It's just control: “I want you to make decisions based on my level of comfort with your existence.” That is completely irrational.

Strawmxn abound: “Is the idea that nobody ever feel[s] regret about anything?” Is a mastectomy like a tattoo or like any other surgery? Objection is rooted in “squeamishness” or disgust or a desire to control what should rightly be free—namely, access to disfiguring surgeries. Besides, everyone has regrets. What’s the big deal?

I’m not surprised the jab about women cutting off their fingers discomfited Hewson. Move this kind of extreme body modification from sexualized and objectified body parts like breasts to less loaded territory—fingers, kidneys, kneecaps—and the idea that a part of your body can be anything other than part of your self becomes utterly bizarre. Female body hatred is so normalized that it’s easy to overlook. But the idea of snipping off healthy fingers still unsettles.

TV: Have there been moments of gender euphoria for you since your top surgery?

LH: I cannot tell you the complete, fundamental shift that I have felt in the year since having surgery. I knew that I wanted top surgery for a decade; it's the longest I've ever thought about doing anything. The place where I went, I had that clinic's website open on my laptop for five years. It was this impossible mountain: I want that, but I'm never gonna get it. No one's gonna let me, blah, blah, blah. To have that be in the past now...

I stand differently, I walk differently, I carry myself differently. It feels different in my body than it ever has. I have just never been happier. I've never been more centered. I've never felt more stable and present and alive. It's the best thing I've ever done for myself. It’s taught me a lot. 

The recovery process taught me about rest, accepting help, and caring for my body as something connected to me rather than separate from me, that I’m in opposition to: This is mine and I want to take care of it. I feel good in it and good about it.

What this interview and the photo shoot that accompanies it—which portrays a fresh-faced young woman draping and exposing her body for the consumption of unseen others—show is how dangerously misguided the demands for trans and nonbinary representation are. Trans is an idea. It is not a neutral or inconsequential idea. It is an idea that can lead young women to reject themselves and cut off their breasts. This idea is now being packaged and sold to girls and young women in glossy magazines the same ways a hundreds of other forms of female insecurity and discontent are packaged and sold in these very same pages.

That “inarticulate distress, a nebulous discomfort” Hewson spoke of in the article’s first sentence is always searching for new language. And there is always some new way for girls and women to be ‘wrong,’ in need of fixing. This profile is an advertisement for extreme body modification: “It’s the best thing I’ve ever done for myself.”