Mynd you, møøse bites Kan be pretty nasti.

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!

I have always been really lucky with doctors. The doctor I had for the majority of my childhood that I remember never once pressured me to lose weight. If I went in with a something that could be link to my weight they might mention it, but the doctor never looked at the fact that I was overweight and mentioned it. I once went in and was diagnosed with heartburn (how I missed the signs and needed to see a doctor is beyond me xD) and after going through everything, she looked at me and said “losing weight has been known to decrease heartburn, but medication can do the same. It’s your choice what treatment path you take.

When I moved as an adult and got a new doctor, the second time I went to see him, I asked him about my blood work he ordered and that I was concerned about my health in relation to my weight and he asked me why. His words, as I remember them, were “Yes, you should strive for a more active lifestyle that you can manage, but from your blood work, it looks like you eat a fairly balanced diet. Clearly you eat either more calories, but your blood work is healthy, and that’s what I am concern about.”

Lastly, I have a psychiatrist who is amazing. We have spoken on my weight in regards to my mental health and I jokingly asked him if he was going to tell me to work out more like one of my other psychiatrist and he sat forward, and said (again, in the way I remember them) “why? I might tell you to go outside and go for a walk, because being outside and a simple walk is good for you and something you can manage. I am not in the field of deciding if you need to work out and neither are they.”

If YOUR health matters TO YOU, then do some experimenting and figure out how YOUR body works best. What makes YOU feel good in YOUR body? Do some research on and then talk to your doctor about something called “metabolic health” – basically the idea that if your heart rate, blood pressure, A1C, cholesterol, and other “numbers” are good, then you’re “metabolically healthy”. But remember that people who have “good” numbers can have other health problems, too, and you can have some “bad” numbers and still be pretty healthy. Do some research on “Health at every size”, too. Consider the idea of “health” in the context of chronic illness, mental illness, and disability, too. Are you “healthy” if you have chronic migraines, depression, or scoliosis, but still do well by other measures? How about asthma? Or diabetes, in fact?

There are lots of ways to be healthy or unhealthy. It’s not a straightforward thing, or a single thing.

And it sure as shit doesn’t show from the outside. You absolutely cannot look at another human being and know that they are healthy or unhealthy.

Nor is the health of any other human being in the entire world your business unless they invite you to make it their business. Yes, even your family members. (The exception is your own minor children. Adults who have become unable to take care of themselves and for whose health you are responsible have, presumably, asked you or authorized you to make their health your business.)

Do not assume that there is ANY weight that is “too thin” or “too fat” to be healthy. Find a weight that works for you, both in that you can maintain it without doing things that will negatively impact your metabolic health (like dieting or overexercising, neither of which is good for you and neither of which works to keep your weight down long term, and both of which can actually CAUSE WEIGHT GAIN long term, which leads to yo-yo dieting or weight cycling, which is very bad for your metabolic health long term) OR your mental and emotional health (by, say, causing you lots of anxiety), AND that feels healthy. Because when your body works the best it can for you, you can feel that.

And, again, don’t fucking worry about anybody’s body but yours. Don’t listen to people who try to make your health their business without your invitation, and don’t listen to people who tell you that your body ought to conform to some standard they have in their heads.

And finally, you have no responsibility or duty to anyone to be healthy, and you are not worth more or less as a human being based on your health. You are not bad if you are unhealthy or good if you are healthy. You’re a person, and that’s enough.

My result was totally normal.

I told my regular GP the next time I saw her. She hit the roof, and that woman hasn't been back.

1.

“Okay, and who’s the president?”

“Obama, no wait, shit *vehemently* fuck, I hate him… what’s his name…”

“It’s okay, you know who he is.”

2.

“Who’s the president?”

“*drunkenly angry and confused* ..uhhhhhhh…Orange… damn it what’s the fuck’s name….

“Yup, good enough.”

3.

“And who’s the president,”

“Not fuckin’ Obama!”

“I feel ya.”

4.

“Who’s the president- wait, nevermind you’re from Korea you said, right? So who’s-“

“Everybody knows that Trump-bitch.”

“Oh, well, alright then.”

5. (My personal favorite)

“Who’s the president?”

“Ew.”

which is not to say that not knowing this is your fault, or that i don’t understand. i’ll never forget sitting in a classroom with my high school gsa, all five of us, watching a documentary on depictions of gay and bi people in media (off the straight and narrow [pdf transcript] — a worthwhile watch if your school library has it) when the narrator mentioned “the stereotype of the gay psycho killer.” we burst into giggles — how ridiculous! — then turned to our gay faculty advisors and saw their pale, pained faces as they told us “no, really. that was real” and we realized that what we’d been laughing at was the stuff of their lives.

That is what LGBT people were up against not long ago and the remnants of that fantastical-sounding hysteria and fanaticism are not only still here but regaining power again in the U.S. pretty rapidly.

I will harp on this until the day I die. It’s not information that people have nowadays both because it’s not really needed - thank GOD - and it’s been erased - not so cool.

pastors would take payment to perform the ceremony and then not show up. crematoriums would sometimes refuse to handle the bodies; funeral homes were no better, and my dad once walked in on a mortician dumping rubbing alcohol all over himself after he’d BEEN IN THE SAME ROOM as the body of one of my father’s dead friends. the funerals were held in people’s basements, the very very few churches at funeral homes willing, meeting halls, and in the homes of lesbians, who were some of the most steadfast allies during that time period. The few straight allies pitched in where they could – like that one woman who buried a lot of them herself, in her own cemetery, because their families wouldn’t come claim the bodies – but it was awful.

my dad was a reformed catholic but he knew the words and twice he had to perform the funerals to lay these people to rest because he was the most qualified. I stood next to him as he tried not to cry over his dead friends and to let them rest in peace. I watched my mother, at the back of wherever she was, quietly sobbing, and her lesbian friends who had ACTUALLY watched the person in question die, still comforting her. 

I got told by other adults that my entire family was going to hell because we deigned to care for queer people (and my dad especially, as a nurse, deigned to “waste” his knowledge and time and energy on easing suffering).

I was six years old. Freddie Mercury hadn’t even died yet.

recently a friend and I formed a queer social group/activism group and some older gay men came. And they cried, because, and I quote

“This is how it started, back then. we just got together, ten or twelve of us, and decided we were going to do something about it. And we made it out, despite everything, despite AIDS, despite the stigma. And you will too.”

And I had to respond, because I was little, but I was THERE for that, and I grabbed his hands and told him that his history is our history and we need to learn it.

we need to remember. the dead, the living, and their stories.

if you know an older queer person, inquire if they’d be interested in writing down their memoirs. If they’re not writers but want to tell the story, hit me up – I am, and I am absolutely willing to do a living memory.

but you guys gotta know… they are NOT “the only history books we have.” because… we have actual history books. just because they are rarely taught in schools does not mean they don’t exist!

i’ve been keeping a list of all the lgbt books i want to read or reread, which are mostly history, and it is, at this moment, 239 books long. and that’s excluding quite a few that i was less interested in.

obviously, it can’t cover everything; obviously, it is skewed toward white american experiences; obviously, we should always be supplementing it by talking to older people in our community as much as we can. but it does us no favors whatsoever to pretend that all the knowledge in these books is lost to history, existing only in individuals’ minds, when actually so many people have taken great pains to write it down and make it available for us to explore!

so yes, meet older people and talk to them and take them seriously! but also please, i beg of you, read a book.

Here are all the transcripts for the NYC Trans Oral History Project

Here’s the ACT UP oral History Project which has videos and transcripts

Here’s a list of a bunch of known oral history projects

The book was also amazing and awful. It was the first book in a long time that took me longer than a day to read. It was very informative and honestly tragic and it took a lot of stops to get through reading all of it. Most of it I already knew about in general, because of some of the groups I’ve been a part of, but every once in awhile something specific would just be a complete gut-punch. Someone mentioned funeral homes further up, and this was something I will always think about because of that book. I went into reading it knowing that funeral homes would refuse to take the bodies of AIDS patients. What I didn’t realize was that, during the epidemic, only one funeral home in the entirety of New York City was taking bodies of people with AIDS and only then doing it in secret. 

You should also learn how the US government (read: Reagan) denied funding for the research for ages, which crippled organisations that wanted to study and lessen the disease.