The Third Closet
My name is Abigail Jacqueline Jones – though you may call me Nancy if you would prefer. I’m a performance artist, a writer, a publisher of zines, and an independent academic researcher with a particular and overzealous interest in the stranger side of human sexuality. I live and work in east London, from a bedroom-turned-studio in a house overlooking an enormous old horse chestnut tree: a lonely, stranded remnant of the ancient Waltham Forest, cast adrift amongst Edwardian suburbia. I was diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome in 2010, at the age of thirteen, and then with Autism Spectrum Disorder in 2016, after the former diagnostic term fell out of fashion amongst psychologists and neuroscientists; it took me until I was in my mid-twenties to begin what is commonly referred to as the process of unmasking my autism, and considering how difficult it is to untangle the authentic you from the mask engendered by a lifetime of repressing my autistic traits and behaviours, I am still far from being finished with that process. I came out as a transgender woman in July 2017, at the age of twenty, after spending my entire childhood as an only child educated in all-male educational institutions; and in 2023, at the age of twenty-seven, I finally came out as a giantess.
And no, that last one is not a fucking joke.
Honestly, though, I wouldn’t blame you for thinking it was. I would not blame you in the slightest for viewing what I just said as offensively trivialising towards the experiences of queer/trans folks and neurodivergent individuals alike. Appropriating terminologies used to describe what can be, quite literally, the most terrifying ordeal a queer, transgender or neurodivergent person might ever have to endure in their life — coming out of the closet, unmasking themselves, revealing your truth to a world so frequently hostile to difference and divergence, and telling everyone around you that the person everyone around you thought they knew, and loved, was nothing but a facade concealing literal lifetimes of repression, trauma, anguish, pain — in so unapologetically audacious a fashion. Standing here and comparing my own experiences of processing my relationship with what I know you all probably think of as being, you know, literally just a kink, a fetish, some weird-ass erotic fantasy, to the overwhelming burden of shame, of social, medical and biopolitical oppression, that these marginalised communities of which I am myself part, and should therefore know better, have suffered throughout the course of history. But let me just turn that immediate impulsive opinion round on you for a second. Hear me out.
You may well want to argue that I’m horrifically downplaying the immense suffering, shame and trauma that my fellow queer, transgender, disabled, and neurodivergent folks face on a daily basis, trying to just survive in an outwardly hostile, violent world with which their anatomies, neurologies, identities, and desires are utterly incongruent. In return, however, I could very confidently respond by suggesting that you are the one downplaying and trivialising my experiences, as well as those of the dozens of individuals to whom I have directly spoken, and the hundreds more with whom I have otherwise interacted — as both an academic researcher, and as a traumatised individual picking up the pieces of her own shattered soul — who share similar hyperfixations and fantasies to mine. Who feel this same distinct somatic, psychological and emotional longing, for some reason or another, to rise above the tree-tops, the pinnacles of skyscrapers twinkling in the night, the peaks of mighty mountains, and feel the tender starlight tingle on their skin. To intrepidly explore the world at the scale of Mary Norton’s Borrowers or Jonathan Swift’s Lilliputians: to curl up, safe and snug, in the warm and comforting palm of an adoring, doting partner far bigger than one’s own diminutive self, or perhaps to explore the boundless plains and mountainous contours of titanic human lovers, to allow oneself — or alternatively demand — to be be held, to be handled, to be toyed with like a living doll. Who feel this lion-hearted yearning to break free of the monotonous restraints of common human scale, suddenly, spontaneously shift from outsizing entire planets, or nebulas, or galaxies to being no bigger than the tiniest of bugs, and with every sense at our disposal, experience the world, experience the Universe, and experience each other – emotionally, sensorily, somatically and indeed, at times, sexually — at every possible scale the human mind can conceive.
I will not judge you for thinking, right off the bat, that to compare coming out as a giantess to the process of coming out as a trans woman or to the process of unmasking my autism would indeed be to trivialise, severely, unforgivably, the absolute heart-wrenching anguish experienced by both groups throughout the process of coming out of the closet. There is a difference between being ignorant of a concept — that is to say, making an active, closed-minded choice to reject it outright upon being presented with it, no matter how compelling or demonstrably proven it may be — and the mere state of unknowingness that comes with never having been exposed to it before. Allow me, therefore, to explain everything. To educate you on what it truly means for me to proudly, wholeheartedly and earnestly identify myself as giantess. To expose to you the existence and contemporary composition of the size community: this divergent, empathic, supportive, sex-positive, often very queer and ultimately extremely celebratory space within which those of us who share these exhilarating hyperfixations upon the thought, the fantasy, the sheer somatic feeling of being giant, or tiny, or of shifting between anatomic scales, have sought sanctuary to coexist, connect with and uplift each other; to share DIY art and literature with each other — ranging from simple digital sketches and short stories made by hobbyists making size material for the pure, unadulterated joy it gives them, all the way up to expertly crafted novels and literal oil paintings produced by classically trained professional artists — and to forge legitimate friendships with each other that can last lifetimes.
Please allow me, in addition, to posit for your consideration the thought that in all the time I have spent exploring various size community spaces, as human sexuality researcher and as self-identified giantess — including virtual conventions and social groups, Discord servers, DeviantArt groups, Twitter hashtags and Tumblr blogs, alongside several other dedicated independent websites and forums — I have, with almost shocking frequency, found myself compelled to compare them to both historical and contemporary trans support groups I have researched, or personally attended, throughout my adult life as a transitioning individual. I have witnessed countless overwhelming expressions of neurodivergent and queer joy when other self-identified giants, or tinies, or size-shifters — who had long felt deep-rooted shame resulting from their strange, unconventional special interests and fixations surrounding size — have finally realised they have discovered a safe haven to openly share their fantasies and desires, to bare this weird and wonderful side of their soul to a collective of folks who actually experience the same feelings they do, and share their creativity without fear of judgement or mockery. In much the same way that being queer is about much more than just who you have sex with or about whether you dress like a boy or a girl, or being autistic is about much more than experiencing difficulties socialising, so too is size about far more than superficial outsider preconceptions. I do not identify myself as a giantess because, as my own closest friend once suggested (with the most supportive of intentions) after I “came out” to her in January of this year, I get myself off with thoughts of crushing tiny men. (For the record, I am sapphic, and I consider myself to be somewhere mildly on both the asexual and aromantic spectrums. Men, of any scale, do not factor into any of my fantasies.) I identify as a giantess because it is the context through which I have come to most clearly understand my neurologically divergent, gender-variant body and brain, and furthermore process its complicated relationship with the social, political and environmental contexts within which it exists. And over the past year, for the first time in my life I have realised that I am not alone in this regard. Thankfully.
I have had to come out of three different closets over the course of my life. On the 7th July 2017, following a whole chain of earth-shattering revelations — long overdue — that finally struck me during a long, existential late-night wander through an empty Hampstead Village, I began the process of coming out as a trans woman to my friends, and subsequently, later that year, to my family. By December of that year, I had fully crossed the threshold, and stepped tentatively forth from the first of my closets. I started taking oestrogen pills in August 2019, shortly after finishing my undergraduate degree, and changed my name legally later that month, however by that point I hadn’t presented as male in over eighteen months. Now that I was out of that first closet — all the way out — I sure as shit wasn’t going back in.
I have had an autism diagnosis of some sort or another since I was thirteen years old, and had been suspected to be autistic since early childhood. It was not until fairly recently, however, that I began the emotionally taxing labour of deciphering the parts of my identity that were genuinely mine, and which belonged to the mask beneath which I had attempted to conceal my neurodivergence. I bought myself a copy of Steve Silberman’s book on the history of autism and the autistic community, Neurotribes, from the flagship Waterstones on Piccadilly in 2021, and it was only after reading it that I properly began to investigate what it truly meant for me to be autistic. It was only then that I began to process the sheer amount of damage and trauma that had been inflicted upon me throughout childhood, as a result of lacking the knowledge and language necessary to understand why my body reacted to certain stimuli, to certain emotional triggers, and to certain interpersonal situations, in the strange and anxiety-ridden way it always did. I was never given this knowledge as a child. I was never taught this language. I was trapped in this state of unknowingness by an ignorant world around me that owed me — a disabled child — a duty of care it neglected to provide.
I have spent much of the early stages of this decade coming out of my second closet and exposing people in my life to my true, authentic, autistic self. To this day, at twenty-seven years old, I am still processing what it means for me to be autistic. I am still processing the ways in which the unrelenting terror and anxiety I grew up experiencing manifested as this “perfect” form of quiet industriousness, this "giftedness,” that led many people around me to believe that I was far more mature than my years, and capable of bearing far more pressure to excel within a normative, capitalistic, status-obsessed society than I actually was. But still, I am happy I took off the mask. I am happy I stepped out of this second closet. And once again, as God is my fucking witness, I am never, ever going back in.
I have been obsessed with size and giant-ness, for want of a better term, since I was a young child. As an extremely tall person, marginally closer to seven feet tall than six, with whose extraordinary scale literally everyone around me seemed to be obsessed growing up and, in many cases, continue to be obsessed to this day, you might consider it somewhat natural for me to have internalised this very public obsession in some form or another. Similarly, as a trans woman who stands 6’7” in bare feet, who in her childhood and adolescence only ever encountered cisgender women on her own scale in late-00s freak-show television shows like Superhuman: Giants and Extraordinary Bodies, or in the context of male-gaze fetish content — and who, of course, was never introduced to the concept of transgender identity in school, having come of age before the explosion of trans visibility in the mid-2010s — you might also suggest it made sense for me to have internalised the idea that to be an extremely tall woman was abject, and my obsession with tall womanhood growing up was something abject too. To have internalised the idea that my own obsession with tall womanhood, as a teen “boy” embedded within hypermasculine single-sex educational environments throughout adolescence, was rooted in some sort of “deviant” sexuality, and not instead in gender euphoria: the desire to do a tall woman, as opposed to the devastating yearning I harboured to be one. Faced with the impending body horror of testosterone-fuelled pubescent transformation in my early teens, and witnessing with terror the sudden explosion amongst my peers of a kind of patriarchal, heteronormative hypersexuality I hoped I would never experience myself, in the absence of widespread awareness of "gender euphoria” as a concept at the time I nonetheless had no other framework through which to explain this strange affinity other than that of sexual attraction, as viewed through a strictly sexist, binary and cisheteronormative lens. Through the societal demand, in other words, that any affinity a person has for any individual of the same sex can only acceptably be rooted in a kind of admiration, in perceiving them as a role model for one’s own approach to the performance of gender, and not in sexual or romantic attraction, and that contrarily any affinity a person has for anyone of the opposite sex can only be rooted in sexual attraction: viewing the bodies, personalities, behaviours, or fashions of any members of the opposite sex as something to be emulated oneself being strictly verboten, particularly amongst those of us raised as men or boys.
Centred though it was on a desire to seek gendered role models as a trans woman who would not be introduced properly to the concept of transgender identity until she was an adult, my affinity with tall womanhood throughout early adolescence — framed so often throughout popular media at the time as something freakish or abject or strange — forced me to confront the possibility that I not only had a sexuality at all, but that it was an abnormal and perverted one. My relationship with size, and the giant female body, has therefore historically been something rooted in gendered trauma for me. As an adult woman in my late twenties, only now finally processing the effect this trauma has had on me, I am absolutely fucking determined not to let it define me any longer.
Adopting the identity of giantess as a kind of literal gender identity — which is, quite honestly, how I have come to consider it these days — is an act I consider an earnest yet subversive little fuck you to these traumatising impressions I internalised throughout my adolescence, surrounding the supposed societal wrongness of my giant body, and its visceral fucking burning desire to transcend the boundaries and bondage of cisheteronormativity and whatever the fuck the gender binary is. I am an extremely tall woman. A trans woman. A divergent woman. An abject woman. I am a ginormous, queer, punk-ass bitch who has dealt with an absolutely un-freaking-holy amount of internalised shame and loathing on account of my non-conforming body and brain throughout the course of my life, simply because of the fact that it, and therefore I, could not comfortably be fit within any conceivable gendered, sexed, or neurotypical norm. Therefore I would consider it well within my rights to reclaim the identity of giantess as something empowering to me, and consider myself justified in calling the process of me coming out as a giantess as coming out of my third fucking closet. Because that is exactly how it felt to me.
This photograph was taken shortly before the London Trans+ Pride march on 27th July 2024. I am wearing what I call the safe for work version of the outfit I wear when I perform as “Nancy” — a Chappell Roan T-shirt covering the customised pentagram lingerie piece I expose to my audiences on stage — and I am carrying a placard depicting a giant woman preparing to devour the UK Health Secretary, Wes Streeting. (In the weeks immediately before this event, Wes Streeting had announced his intentions to uphold a ban on prescribing puberty blockers to transgender youth, in what I and many other trans folks worldwide have perceived to be a blatant act of political transphobia.)
The photograph was captured by Dani d'Ingeo, and was subsequently published by Dazed.
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I decided to start this blog as a companion to my current creative research project, Nancy//the World, which you can read more about here. Nancy//the World is the umbrella title for a whole collection of multidisciplinary artistic and academic endeavours centred around exploring size kinks and fantasies from the perspective of marginalised queer, trans, disabled and neurodivergent members of the size community, and using their experiences to forge a framework for investigating the ways in which marginalised members of divergent kink and fantasy communities more generally use their various unconventional erotic, sensory, somatic, aesthetic and imaginative hyperfixations as conduits through which to explore their relationships with their bodies and brains, and navigate this often hostile world in which they exist. As someone who is herself a proud member of the size community, and who herself sits at the crossroads of all four of these intersecting oppressions, I wanted to ensure that I had a platform to discuss not just the creative and academic processes underpinning the realisation of Nancy//the World, but to be open and vulnerable about my own personal experiences and the ways they have informed my work. Throughout the coming months and years — as this will be a very long-term endeavour — I intend to use this space to construct a deeply intimate and personal narrative not just about what I am researching for the purposes of this project, but why. I would like to thank you for reading this first entry, and ask if you would come along on this journey with me.
If you would like to connect with me directly to discuss anything I’ve spoken about in this blog or within Nancy//the World more generally, the easiest way to reach me would be via Discord or Twitter. My Twitter handle is @abigailisnancy and my Discord name is Abigail is Nancy.
If you would like to support my work financially, you can buy me a Ko-fi via this link. I do plan to open up a Patreon in the near future if there is demand, but this is still yet to come. Any donations would be greatly appreciated as my work is currently unfunded, and I am therefore trying to keep Nancy//the World going in between working a minimum wage, zero-hours job at a small local theatre venue.
If you are yourself a member of the size community — first of all, hello!!! — and would like to contribute in a different way to my creative research work, I am currently conducting recorded conversations with various figures within the community via Discord DM exchange or via Zoom, and am soliciting for participants. If you would like to contribute your own words or experiences to my already considerable archive of size community testimonies, please contact me by filling out the online form linked here.
Otherwise, I’m still so happy you’re here, reading this blog, and I hope you’ll keep on following it as this project progresses. Please feel free to share it around on social media too. It would mean the absolute world to me!
All the very best,
Abigail Jacqueline Jones
a.k.a. Nancy, “The Seven-Foot Slut with the Seven-Figure IQ.”