D.B.H.

[TRIGGER WARNING: Rape] Fat women are treated as utterly undesirable in our culture [and] are often turned into a ‘bizarre’ fetish object. The result is that fat women are told to be grateful for any sexual attention they receive from anyone, whether they themselves find that person sexually appealing or not. In other words, even more than your average women, fat women are only allowed to be occasional objects of desire and are regularly denied their right to have and pursue sexual desires of their own.That way of thinking becomes very dangerous when sexual violence is mixed in. When fat women are raped, they’re often told they should be grateful that anyone wanted them, or, alternatively, disbelieved because it doesn’t seem plausible that anyone would want them ‘enough to rape them.’ These arguments not only rely on the dangerous myth that rape is about uncontrollable sexual desire (it’s not), but also propagate the message that fat women’s bodies aren’t valuable enough to the culture for their violation to be taken seriously.

We have to consciously study how to be tender with each other until it becomes a habit.

It took me a long time to realize that my partners were having sex with me in part because of the way my body looks, not in spite of the way my body looks. It sounds simple, I know, but when you spend your whole life being told that fat bodies are not sexy, it takes some time to realize that sexiness isn’t that simple. This understanding is not something that happens overnight for most of us. Hell, it can take years. But, the sooner you learn (yes, learn) to feel sexy just the way you are, the sooner you’ll be able to enjoy your sexuality more fully. Really, this goes for men and women of all sizes, not just fat women. You owe it to yourself and your partner to trust that he or she really desires you and to do the best you can to keep that in mind when you find you have a hard time letting go and really being seen during sex.

oppressed people resist by identifying themselves as subjects, by defining their reality, shaping their new identity, naming their history, telling their story.

The claim that sex workers “sell our bodies” is not only logically absurd (I was a prostitute for years, but my body is still right here with me), but totally sexist because it is based on the notion that a woman’s sexuality is her entire worth. The belief behind this expression is that since a woman has nothing of value to offer except her sexuality, if she “sells” that she has “sold herself” and there is nothing left. The fact that anti-sex worker activists use this expression so often says a lot about them.

Trans people are told by the law, state agencies, private discriminators, and our families that we are impossible people who cannot exist, cannot be seen, cannot be classified, and cannot fit anywhere. We are told by the better-funded lesbian and gay rights groups, as they continually leave us aside, that we are not politically viable our lives are not a political possibility that can be conceived. Inside this impossibility, I argue, lies our specific political potential—a potential to formulate demands and strategies to meet those demands that exceed the containment of neoliberal politics. A critical trans politics is emerging that refuses empty promises of “equal opportunity” and “safety” underwritten by settler colonialism, racist, sexist, classist, ableist, and xenophobic imprisonment, and ever-growing wealth disparity. This politics aims to center the concerns and leadership of the most vulnerable to build transformative change through mobilization. It is reconceptualizing the role of law reform in social movements, acknowledging that legal equality demands are a feature of systemic injustice, not a remedy. It is confronting the harms that come to trans people at the hands of violent systems structured through law itself—not by demanding recognition and inclusion in those systems, but by working to dismantle them while simultaneously supporting those most exposed to their harms.