One of our baby girls is fat, in the 99th percentile for her age. She is super cute and sweet. Lately, she has been sick with various breathing issues, so she has been reluctant to take her bottles. Normally, she’ll take 4 ounces of formula at lunch and 8 ounces in the afternoon. Today, I was lucky to get to her take 5 all day.

There was a substitute covering a lunch break in my classroom today. We emphasized to her that we need to keep trying to get the baby to drink her bottle until she finished it. She said, “Why are you guys so worried about taking her bottle?”

My coworker replied, “That’s where all her nutrients are. She needs the nutrients and the water.”

To which the substitute replied, “But she’s so fat. She doesn’t need it.”

By starving her. She insisted that her baby was ‘too fat’ and had an aim to remove any and all ‘chubbyness’ so her baby would be thin. She’d already been warned by her doctor about the baby not getting enough food, but insisted she knew best.

After several months of this her baby passed out cold one day and was rushed into hospital where the doctors found her to have severe malnutrition, a low body temperature and low pulse rate. They asked my cousin what she’d been feeding her daughter and she said “one bottle of skimmed milk a day. I don’t want her growing up fat.”

Even after nearly killing her daughter my cousin maintained her view that fat = bad and ended up with all her kids taken from her because she was starving them and neglecting them.

When your fatphobia leads you to starving your own children then you’ve got serious problems.

Is

Real

She backed off saying, ‘Well he looks fine!” – proving once again that weight bias is not truly about health – But I know many other parents who are not as informed as I am about weight science and size diversity would react to this interaction by policing their child’s food intake, if not as an infant, then when he was an older child. This is exactly the type of seemingly-inconsequential interaction that starts the ball rolling on a lifetime of dieting, disordered eating, negative body image, and weight-based abuse for too many fat people.

Years later when he was five, another doctor measured his weight and height and commented that he is off the charts on both, but “at least he is in proportion.” And if he was not “in proportion,” I am sure I would have been advised once again to “watch his weight.” 

I no longer allow healthcare providers to weight my children unless it is absolutely medically necessary. They are unable to control their weight talk, which is a known harm for children.

1. The 4 years old daughter of a friend of mine came to our house to spend the weekend. She gave me a letter from her mom that said that the child was in a glutenfree diet because she was getting ‘awfully fat’ when eating cookies or bread (my celiac ass; who gets dhiarrea and loses a scary amount of weight whenever I eat something with gluten was like ’???’).

You can bet that I went to the supermarket with the kid and told her ‘go & take whatever you feel like eating’ and the poor child came back smiling with her arms full of biscuits and cupcakes.

She didn’t got sick (as a celiac would get) and told me later that she hated the diet her mother made her follow; because her cousins didn’t had to pass through that.

And what’s the scariest thing about this story? Her mother was a NURSE. A fucking nurse who didn’t have a clue of the harm that she was doing to her daughter’s body!

2. My little sister started to feel fatigued and dizzy at 9 years old. She felt nauseated at the sight of food and had abdominal pain that increased with physical activity.

Mom got her to the ER and the doctor dismissed it saying: ‘she’s fat and probably is feeling ill after eating too much burgers, get her to make some exercise and she will be better in no time’.My mom didn’t felt ok with the diagnosis and took my sister with a second doctor who also told her that ‘the child was just fat’.

My sister’s skin was starting to get yellow as the days passed and the abdominal pain was getting awful so my mom (heaven bless her!) got her to the ER for the third time:

SHE HAD STAGE 4 HEPATITIS AND WAS ABOUT TO DIE.

She survived after a long and painful recovery who involved being in bed for a whole year (remember that we’re speaking of a 9 years old child). Luckily they saved her liver and she didn’t went through a transplant… but let this sink:

If it weren’t for my mother, fatphobia would have killed her. Fatphobia kills kids and teenagers, fatphobia kills inocent people everyday. It treats human beings as lesser than others and hurts them in their most vulnerable times.

FUCKING TAKE NOTE OF THIS!

just look at these!!

And the inciting incident? There was a concert in Cairo by the Lebanese band Mashrou’ Leila (whose lead singer Hamed Sinno is openly gay and an advocate of LGBTQ rights) where someone waved a rainbow flag.

The Egyptian government has made as of October 3rd 22 arrests according to the BBC and 33 arrests according to the Independent (both also linked above). Both articles as well as the facebook statement made to the Mashrou’ Leila facebook page made reference to “anal examinations” (which the facebook post correctly calls out as rape), and that some of those arrested are minors, as well as the aforementioned Grindr stalking.

Not only has the Egyptian government used this tactic before (from 2016 and from 2014), but it’s the same tactic that has been used in Chechnya earlier this year (and possibly continues to be used; news coming out of Chechnya is rare in the best of times).

While both the BBC and Independent articles endeavor to state that in Egypt homosexuality is not technically illegal, the Egyptian government’s use of laws against “debauchery” and “blasphemy” makes clear that that’s just a pretext and a smokescreen.

This comes on the heels of the US ambassador to the UN Nikki Harley (a Trump appointee) voting “No” on a United Nations condemnation of the death penalty for LGBTQ people.

If there were ever a time to hold our elected officials accountable and demand for an end to the oppression of our LGBTQ Muslim siblings, it’d be now.

Wolfenstein, for those who don’t know, is a videogame series with soon to be eleven entries in the series, all of them entirely centred around killing Nazis ever since the very first game in 1981.

13-year-old Virgil Smith rescued 17 of his neighbors during Hurricane Harvey.

When flood waters poured into his apartment complex in Dickinson, he and his mom, Lisa Wallace, took shelter at a stranger’s second floor apartment.

Virgil says he got a call from his friend in another building.

“He was like, VJ, can you come help us because you know that we can’t swim,” says Smith.