This got me thinking. Why does society push the gender propaganda onto us so hard? Other than the fact that we are easy to govern when we are boxed and labelled and told what to do and what not to do. Every far-right, conservative nationalist fascist nation and its representatives LOVE gender. That’s the thing: gender is not scientific. Sex is natural, but the expression of it in a society that demands it to be expressed a certain way is not.

Third genders, intersexuality, femininity and masculinity have co-existed in the world for all of time in almost every indigenous community. They were sometimes sacramental, sometimes ceremonial, but most of the time, a recognized sociocultural identity, just like man or woman, until they were wiped away by colonization, missionary activity, or legal reforms. Legal reforms by fascist, ultranationalist lawmakers.

Nádleehí of Navajo (Diné). Winkté of Lakota. Agokwe of the Ojibwe (Anishinaabe).He’émáné’e of the Cheyenne. Alyha of the Mohave. Hwame of the Mohave. Muxe of the Zapotec (Oaxaca, Mexico). Māhū of the Native Hawaiians. Māhū of the Tahitians. Fa’afafine of the Samoans. Fa’afatama of the Samoans. Fakaleitī of the Tongans. Vaka sa lewa lewa of the iTaukei (Indigenous Fijians). Akavaʻine of the Cook Islands Māori. Whakawāhine of the Māori (Aotearoa/New Zealand). Tangata ira tāne of the Māori (Aotearoa/New Zealand). Hijra of India. Jogappa of Karnataka and parts of South India. Bissu of the Bugis (Sulawesi, Indonesia). Calabai of the Bugis. Calalai of the Bugis. Sekrata of the Sakalava (Madagascar). Xanith of Oman (historical social gender category). Babaylan of several Philippine Indigenous groups.

Just because we can’t pronounce their names doesn’t mean they didn't exist until most of them had to face a forced assimilation of ideologies upon colonization.

So what really is fact? What is the truth about human gender? Is it what the church believes? Is it what the state believes? Why would we want to put on a mask our whole lives if it didn’t come naturally to us?

Is being attracted to a man what qualifies me as a female? There's plenty of gay men attracted to men too. Is being “feminine” what qualifies me as a woman? There are plenty of masc women and fem men in the world. Is it the ability to give birth alone? So then what do we make of the infertile female sex and the transgender men who give birth?

The fight for freedom around each gender emerged from the restriction of its terms. A woman can’t be masculine? A man can’t cook? Nothing in our biology stops either of these groups from doing these things. So most certainly the terms are wrong and hint at ulterior motives of the term-setters. There has to be a system in the larger context but it simply is not the supressing of needs.

It’s important that you stay true to your needs and instincts because the law and the narrative keep changing. The world was not perfect yesterday, and neither will it be tomorrow. And a topic like gender that neither wages wars nor counters them is pretty low on the priority list. But as long as it is a topic capable of polarising humanity, it will be weaponised.

Buffalo Chicken Wings. Jazz. Impressionism.

True creativity and innovation have always been an act of resistance. Limitations are never a roadblock but an essential ingredient to the dish, an important technique of the painting, and the secret note of the melody. String all of it together, and you get personality, you get soul.

Turning workarounds into legendary influences rarely happens intentionally. The mechanism of standing against rules and circumstances set up against you is so personal and telling of what the time and its inhabitant stand for. And somehow, even without the moment’s knowledge, it preserves itself as an ode to human ingenuity. So often in our lives we stand cornered by our lackings. At what we don’t have and what we probably never will. We keep forgetting that adaptation and innovation are what fought for our species thousands of years ago in the forest in the first place.

India is proving this again today. The youth of the nation are fighting against its government, its very own elected representative body, for accountability against competitive examination paper leaks. But how do you grab the attention of the highest governing body of a nation so old? Or as Nolan’s Odyssey makes us ask, “Why would they talk to the ants?”, even if the ants elected them to power. The youth of India had a clear crisis to overcome: a future rigged against them and a government that refuses to care for it. So they showed up with tools that they could pick up - satire and social media. And just like musicians who played because they were musicians and artists who painted because they were artists, the youth of India protest because they are Indians. The social media account of the makeshift organization organizing the protest itself has a following of almost 26 million people. The protest sites are packed with supporters - the biggest show of support any movement in India has gotten in recent times. Of all the ways we could have gone about this, the exponential ability of social media to harness human creativity undoubtedly fuels this movement.

If art and resistance are two sides of the same coin, necessity is the metal that it is forged in. Chicken wings originated because the people had the right not just to eat food but to enjoy it as an experience; jazz thrived because it was important that the people danced, especially to their own tunes; Impressionism took off because my art is my autonomy, and students protest because this is a country they sacrifice not just hours of their youth to but their lives as well.

Creativity is a muscle that takes training to build. It is a force exerted against every narrative that halts, chokes, and obstructs you. Everyone claims Gen Z is the most unserious generation. In reality, it is simply the most creative generation because when your world is a constant choice between hell or high water, it’s human nature to do a little dance of defiance.

Two things are not up for debate here:

1. It’s unacceptable to mistreat people based on their looks

2. Having extra fat on your body leads to lipotoxicity, which leaves you at increased risk of comorbidities

What started as a protest against mistreatment grew into a functioning social justice movement and then into an argument for neglected health. The movement itself poses no inherent problems, but the true adversity lies in its co-option by capitalists with ulterior motives.

According to the scale prescribed by WHO, a BMI range greater than 30 is classified as class 1 obesity. Although the BMI is a rudimentary calculation that doesn’t take into account weight constituted by muscle mass, it is still valuable in understanding general population body mass distribution.

Why is there a call for alarm about excessive body fat in the first place? Visceral fat, the fat that is stored deep within the abdomen around vital organs like the liver, pancreas, and heart, is highly active. It constantly releases damaging inflammatory chemicals and hormones called adipokines into the bloodstream. This triggers widespread inflammation, disrupts hormones, and forces your vital organs to work harder. The liver, heart, kidneys, and pancreas all have to work overtime. Cartilages of load-bearing joints of the body break down. Osteoarthritis sets in, making it even harder to move. Sleep apnea, breathlessness, obstructed mobility, reduced quality of life, and deteriorating mental health add to the agony.

So no, it is a health hazard when your body is pushing obesity, and treating it as a trend is a social endemic.

But why, then, has a notion that is objectively life-threatening been sustained? Health can definitely be found in every size. There are plenty of individuals who have a higher body fat percentage than a size 0 model who are perfectly healthy and functional. But more often than not, this “size” is caused by a blanket of fat covering up an already muscular body. Because fat sits on top of muscles and bigger the muscles, the larger the size.

That is not the same as visceral fat. It is not comparable to excess fat creeping into the nooks and crannies of your body because it has nowhere else to go.

One of the primary reasons this agenda has been propelled forward is due to the commercial value it provides to corporations. It always reminds me of the scene from WALL-E where the characters have reached the zenith of consumption. And no, campaigns being run to promote acceptance is not the problem. The encouragement that people of varied body types have received to not attach their self-worth with their physicality is what Body Positivity was always about. Every body, irrespective of shape and size, must be accepted. But is it always the healthiest body they can live in? No. Accepting your body is Step 1. But the parameters of health itself are not subjective. Health is, quite literally, an objective measure of bodily physiology. It’s not a mere rearrangement of aesthetics.

The real tragedy is when companies appropriate their sales with movements such as Body Positivity. But trying to match cumilative growth rates in a capitalist word while maintaining an ethical responsibility is not what most corporates are known for. They want to sell as much as they can, to as many buyers as they can. The more fragmented the society, the more diverse the consumer population.

So who else should be in charge here other than the consumer? The host of the consuming body. The one who has to live and function in it. It is your responsibility to understand that the food is rigged. Its made for you to never stop eating it. The very sedative lifestyle that modern life pushes us into is almost by design. Your lack of sleep and lack of social bonding is ultimately , unfortunately, your responsibility.

Then arises the question of “What about people who have made it to 90 and were fat and ate whatever they want?” or “What about the ones who were really healthy and still were affected by cancer?”. There are always exceptions to evety data set. You can either tie yourself to the train track and wait for the train to run over or accidently be hit by it. The greater odds are not in our hands but that doesnt men you glue the odds to yourself permanently. In my personal opinion, longevity aside, being able to feel agile and pain free in your body is an incredible feeling. To be able to run up a flight of stairs, swin a lap, engage with your community over the shared love of sports, sprint at will to catch someone from falling or even having a good nights’s sleep - these are fundamental characteristics of the human experience that are being robbed by lax habits.

But shame? Shame is not the tool to usher people into better health. You cannot shame your body into loving it. You cannot cash out the damage to your mental health with your physical capabilities. You have to do it with kindness and acceptance. Every individual deserves to love and respect the body they inhabit at every size and shape. There is no perfect standard one has to chase. But constantly chase health. Chase self-improveent. Not just for you but for the collective humanity.

Master’s in public Health is a soup of Policy, Politics, Statistics, Economics, Epidemiology, and Healthcare. Which is what motivated me towards it in the first place. I, someone with an emerging political and ideological conscience, was deeply interested in how invisible strings in society shape our outlook on health. Both individual and national.

This was an endeavor I took completely upon myself. For a course that was self-financed, it sure was fairly expensive given the rupee doesn’t convert generously into pounds. So naturally, I had to pick up part-time jobs. It is here that the stark reality of the situation settled in. In class, I was investigating health promotion, protection of human rights, having a political temper, investing in a better standard of living for all, and the Ottawa Charter. After work, you would find me scrubbing away dishes for less than minimum wage at a South-Asian-owned cafe.

Here are the caveats:

1. I was to fend for myself. Which means that earning and spending were personal.

2. If they weren’t born and bred in Oxford, the majority of the student population were from third-world countries, which they left solely for the earlier mentioned currency conversion rates.

3. Britain is piss broke. The old cloak of Imperialism fails to keep warm the stark economic stagnation that the country has been facing.

The majority of healthcare workers in the UK quit due to rigorous working conditions and undercompensation. It is this opportunity that creates the heavy influx of healthcare professionals from developing countries. Families rear and breed nurses, doctors, dentists, and allied health professionals solely to export them for forex rates. When skills are not valued and compensated for by your own country, working in worse conditions for better pay doesn’t seem like exploitation.

UK’s youth, however, have reported severe unemployment and degrading mental health conditions. Affording a home is a far cry when the chances of decent pay itself are bleak. The government, naturally, is forced to prioritise its own population and is at the precipice of changing the time period of obtaining citizenship due to naturalisation from 5 years to 10.

Apart from the holy trifecta of London-Oxford-Cambridge, the rest of Britain’s per capita income is lower than Mississippi - the poorest state in the US. The GDP that Britain boasts is almost exclusively held up by the ultra-rich that trot through the trinity. The UK’s biggest export is service, and we know what that means in the time of AI. Thatcher’s reform, the 2008 economic crisis, Brexit, futile government changes, and political unrest have further intensified the wound.

I would have stayed. But as I said, as a responsible, blood boiling, change craving 20-something year old, I need to be somewhere that inspires me to live. I cannot sell the very ideology that keeps me afloat.

I know I speak from a place of privilege as I already have an education to fall back on and owe nothing to anybody apart from myself. That’s not the case for everyone. What was important to me was ruling out the causes that affect poor health. One of the biggest contributors to declining health, be it mental, physical, or emotional, is exploitation. The irony of the situation left me in stark unrest. So, I left.

Take a look at any gym you find yourself in. Most women stick to the less intimidating spaces there: the stretching room, or, in its absence, the lowest-weight sections. In fact, one of the biggest and most established gyms I have been to had a mini weight section with dumbbells spanning from 2 kg to, at best, 7 kg inside the stretching room for girls alone. The boys’ stretching room was exclusively used for what it was made for. My college gym had 2 separate gyms for boys and girls. As though they had to ration out the weights, we were fed the smaller, odd looking, skin peeling equipments. And the men got the big-boy weights with slightly better shape and size. Even among the worst equipment, we would land ourselves the worser ones.

Lesser girls train seriously. I get it. Because why would you take time out of your day from your life where you are either in the preparation of or in the process of providing your birth-assigned labour for free? Why would you make your way to another place where men can stare, ogle and visually undress you? Why take another route to walk to and from a place where you know you will be met with an increasing population of men? Girls don’t just have to measure reps, range and sets; we have to calculate how much to bend down, what size underwear hides away the best, how to duck and weave “how many sets do you have left” from men that aren’t even hitting the same workout as you.

There has almost never been a female trainer who knows what they are doing. There has almost never been a female trainer. Period. But asking to understand the female body and alter training accordingly is a far cry in a world that doesn’t even take a girl training in the gym seriously. The average female experience guided by a male trainer is a heavily loaded leg press machine with their biceps doing most of the lifting. It takes a pumped bicep trainer to feed the false ego of the trainee.

If you are a woman, it takes a certain thick skinned-bitchy looking-demon fighting-ears covered in blasting music- female archetype to make it that far in the gym all by themselves, but to the other half of the population, it’s a place to work out. So now when I spam pull-ups in their faces, do not doubt if it’s personal. No revolution is impersonal.