When reviewing the recent BMI research that was printed in the Lancet for my post on the “Tsunami of Obesity” something occurred to me. The paper was at pains to say that they had split the data they were reviewing by sex, because “BMI trends can differ in men and women”. Even when looking at the trends on a global basis, the results were still talked about with regards to men and women. I even mentioned how some of the lowest mean BMI were found in different countries for men and women, whereas the highest mean BMI for both men and women was found in Nauru.
What about those people who don’t identify as male or female? Where would they fit into this research? Are they being excluded because of the use of this false gender dichotomy?
I don’t blame the researchers here for this. They were using preexisting data collected between 1980 and 2008. Importantly they noted that much more data was available for women, whereas 59% of the national data for men was from the 2000s and 34% was from the 1990s. I think that shows just how much emphasis was placed on women when looking into weight issues during the 1980s and possibly even earlier.
I think it provides an insight into how weight management has been viewed historically – as a female issue, not a human issue. I would suggest that the pressure on women to conform to the idea of a “healthy weight” has been around a lot longer than it has been for men. When I was growing up, men had “beer guts” while women “had a bit of a pudge they needed to get rid of”.
Yet here is still a group of people who identify as neither men or women who aren’t included in this research. What does this mean for them? It certainly doesn’t reduce the pressure placed on them to confirm to the socially acceptable idea of weight and size.
I think it would be fair to suggest that gender identity is important when it comes to research into weight and health issues. Social pressures would be different depending on the gender identity which could lead to different trends in these groups than what we see if we try to make them fit into the false dichotomy. Why not just look at this as a human issue, rather than focusing on gender?
What do we do about this? I don’t think I have the answer.