The Fairness for all Marylanders Act 2014, My Testimony

My dear dragon suggested that I share my testimony that I submitted in writing to be shared with the Maryland House of Delegates Health and Government Operations Committee, which will have a hearing on the bill Wednesday March 5, 2014, Ash Wednesday. The chances are looking very promising that the bill will pass in Maryland this year, providing much needed protections for transgender and gender non conforming people in the state.

Here it is:

March 3, 2014

Dear Maryland House Health and Government Operations Committee:

I write to you as an almost lifetime resident of the great state of Maryland, having spent about 39 of my 43 years living in Montgomery or Baltimore Counties.  My few years apart from Maryland landed me in an apartment in Washington, DC, less than 1 mile from the state border at downtown Silver Spring.  To say that I am deeply a part of the fabric of Maryland life is an understatement, as I am able to trace my ancestry on my father’s side back to the 18^th century in Montgomery County.  There is even a street in Montgomery County named for one of my ancestors, who migrated to the farmland of Maryland from Ireland at a time where the Irish ‘need not apply,’ and yet he found a refuge in Maryland.  In addition, I’ve been blessed to have received most of my education from Maryland public schools, having attended Montgomery County Public Schools from Head Start through High School graduation, and attending Montgomery College and The University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC), where I graduated cum laude in 2004.  This exemplary education allowed me to earn 2 graduate degrees from The George Washington University, as well.

I mention this at length to show that in spite of my educational background provided to me by a public educational system consistently ranked as the best in the United States, I still struggle to find employment that provides a living wage, let alone a wage that is commensurate with my educational attainments.  This happens not because of my credentials or my skills, but because of how I look.  I have no problem finding employment in the low paying service sector, where my intelligence, empathy, and dedication have served pet owners and book lovers well in my many years of retail/pet care employment, and my appearance means little in these industries that struggle to locate and retain good employees.  However, I have had little luck in cracking the white collar world, despite one undergraduate and two graduate degrees. 

As a gender nonconforming individual, my appearance is the only thing that sets me apart from my better employed and compensated peers from high school and college.  My partner, who is transgender and comes from a similar background of educational excellence in Massachusetts, is in the same predicament, and has been so for years.  I was sure that returning to school to earn college degrees, as has been suggested as the best way to adapt to the current lengthy economic downturn, would be able to lift me out of my working class existence and allow me to earn a living wage.  This has not been the case.  In fact, now I am almost $50,000 in debt, unemployed, and living off the generosity of my retired, disabled mother.  I fear that because of the discrimination that transgender and gender nonconforming people experience in Maryland and most other places, that I’ll never be able to afford the kind of middle class life that my parents were able to build in Montgomery County as public sector workers without college degrees. 

I am proud to have been raised in Maryland, and as a scholar of American literature and culture, I am proud of the tradition of outsider, nonconformist, and social justice figures in Maryland history.  Writers and abolitionists like Frederick Douglass and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, creative geniuses like John Waters and John Barth, women unafraid to break down barriers like Billie Holiday and Mama Cass Elliott, and many other figures in Maryland history have helped shape its image as a place of refuge and support for the outsider and the minority.  Our legacy as a colony supporting religious liberty in the Maryland Toleration Act of 1649, and our recent passage of the Civil Marriage Protection Act allowing for marriage equality for all loving and committed couples, demonstrates our enduring legacy as a place that genuinely strives to give all Marylanders the equality that allows them to perform at their best, and contribute to a better society.

 

I hope today you will vote for the passage of the Fairness for all Marylanders Act of 2014.  Let’s continue to place Maryland at the top of the list of places that promotes a just and egalitarian society for all, and a place that emphatically shuts the door on ignorance and discrimination against anyone different from ourselves.  Thank you for taking the time to read my letter, and for making me exuberantly proud to call myself a Marylander, because Maryland is a place that embodies the best principles of United States democracy.

Yours Truly,

Chubmudgeon

Cc: Maryland Coalition for Trans Equality (MCTE)
Senator Jennie M. Forehand (jennie.forehand@senate.state.md.us)
Delegate Kumar P. Barve (Majority Leader; kumar.barve@house.state.md.us)
Delegate Jim Gilchrist (jim.gilchrist@house.state.md.us)
Delegate Luiz R. S. Simmons (luiz.simmons@house.state.md.us)

My Doubt Started Thanks to the Greek Gods

I got some helpful feedback on my Facebook page about my questions in the last post, thank you all who responded.  I think the questions will stay questions that follow me as I journey on in my interactions with the world, and that it is OK to stay in the questions.  For now, I'll just meander on in the blog, and see what happens.  

One of the topics I was thinking of dedicating this blog to is my interest in faith and religion.  I'm not so keen on the word spirituality, mostly because I find it to be a nebulous term that doesn't work for me.  When it comes to world views, I don't like nebulous.  Really, though, most of us prefer the concrete, the binary, the non-gray, and I recognize the trap this kind of thinking ensnares us in no matter what subject we're investigating.  My discomfort with the idea spirituality must be my paradoxical need to hold on to outmoded ideas as I work through new ones. 

That disinterest in nebulousness is what kept me away from anything to do with religion or faith for a long time.  Even as I became more accepting of multiplicity and fluidity and the unknowable in many other areas of my life and my perception of the world, I still expected religion and faith to be clear, solid, binary, and totalizing.  I'm guessing that is a tall order even for G-d/a higher power/the laws of physics and nature/the petri dish we're swimming in to deliver.

However, I started to find myself cultivating relationships with people who were observers of religion, more specifically, Christianity, the religion I was born into.  I had long been a believer of that liberal conviction that anyone who was a dedicated Christian was an anti-queer, close-minded, right wing fundamentalist know-nothing.  I thought that any Christian who didn't claim that queers were against the bible and going to hell were just trying to obfuscate the 'facts' of Christianity because they were trying to change the rules to fit their own beliefs, instead of G-d's 'actual' rules.  I was nothing if not dogmatic when it came to my rejection of Christianity, a counter-move of mine to pretend I rejected Christianity before it had a chance of rejecting me.  My stuck out tongue to the big guy upstairs, if you will.

In most things, I seek out wisps and puffs of judgement and brew it up into my complete rejection from individuals and institutions and groups.  It has taken me until just recently to recognize that this is something I do, instead of something done to me.  It is a feeling like old skin, and so comfortable in its deflection of most forms of connectivity.  I must stress that this animating principle did not come from out of the abyss, but by focusing on the times I was rejected, and using my sensitivity to the signs of rejection to suss them out in situations either devoid of such rejection, or so insignificant to expend brain activity on, I missed out many of the moments of inclusion, of welcome, of recognition that we were the same tangled mess of DNA and neurons.

Being an individual with this predisposition, I forgot to look and see how almost all of what Christianity does say, particularly what Christ says, does welcome me.  But, did I want to be welcomed by Christianity, or any other religion?  For a long time, the answer was "No, not really."  By this time I was partnered with someone who had spirituality at the center of their life, and so I was content to be supportive without being connected to the religious traditions of my partner.  Since there were aspects of religion I had always liked, mostly that of art and music, as well as an admiration for those who were able to be selfless enough to embody a lot of the altruistic beliefs of religions both 'Western' and 'Eastern,' it wasn't that difficult to start to be inside religion without feeling part of it.

I've identified as an agnostic for a very long time, somewhere between 15-20 years I think.  This is how I identified over my life span: 0-12 Christian, 12-ish to early to mid twenties, atheist, since then, agnostic.  I continue to identify as an agnostic, and expect that not to change.  I think it is the most tenable position I can take as someone who strives to be open-minded.  Agnosticism is often portrayed as the laziest, cop-out-iest position one can take on the matter of faith; you either have it or you don't.  This belief annoys me, because it fails to recognize that I'm not trying to evade the question when I say "well, I don't know," I'm saying instead "the cosmos is such a wondrous, awesome, miraculous place, and nobody has enough knowledge to know with certainty how it all came together, so why not stay open to possibility, especially when there are so many competing ideas for the hows and whys of the universe."  It is a position that continues to ask, to study, to observe, and to contemplate, all activities that keep one mindful and engaged in 'the big question' of our existence and the world around us.

Very recently I've begun to see that being a part of religion and being an agnostic aren't positions that cancel each other out.  I'd long read of priests and other religious leaders who have discussed their own struggles with faith, but dismissed the idea that one could permanently be in a state of unknowing and still consider themselves completely a member of their faith.  I also was well aware that faith itself is a state often described as "a belief held while acknowledging that belief's lack of proof, but still holding that belief as true."  Isn't agnosticism then a variation of faith, a belief that there is no proof for, but a hope that there is some truth (or truths) out there that explains it all?  To quote Special Agent Scully questioningly quoting Special Agent Mulder, "I want to believe."  

Since July, I've been attending church regularly.  Not the denomination I grew up in, but one not too far removed.  This denomination is one of the two my partner follows (being a child of an interfaith household perhaps predispositions folks at an early age to be open to the 'yes, and' or 'yes, also'), and it allows me to have my cake and eat it too, in that it has a lot of the old timey ritual and history and art and music I like with the new timey progressive acceptance of queers and women and other religious practices I need.  It fascinates me that some of the older denominations established in the US are among the most progressive.  We shudder mock-dramatically about how repressive and strict and cold those Puritans were, but many of the churches they founded today have an entirely different bent.

I'm also attending because it is my history, after all, this Christian monotheistic faith, and while I don't think Christianity is better or more right than most other religious beliefs, it is like coming back to myself to attend a Christian church, to claim my right to be part of a faith that my ancestors believed.  I've heard Buddhism described as a practice, and not a religion, and I think I'm approaching Christianity in the same way right now.  There is much to learn, and I'm looking forward to that.

Thus, while there is more to add and probably more to come, this is a good stopping point for my religious musings.  I appreciate you coming along.  I worry my discussion of Christian denomination here is still setting up a binary of good Christian denominations/bad Christian denominations, and I apologize if that is so, as this is not my intent.  Oh, the title refers to the fact that learning there were earlier religions before my own that people now dismissed as myths allowed me to think about other ways of being for first time as it related to religion, and one of the first times I thought about alternate ways of being in general.

I am rather surprised to see that I haven't written in here in well over a year.  Bye bye 2013, hello 2014!  I've always been conflicted about this blog, what I want it to do, and if it is a worthwhile endeavor.  Here are the thoughts I'm having: 1) isn't the blog sort of an already outmoded vehicle for fashioning and furthering one's online identity?  2)  Should the blog have a targeted focus, or can it be about anything?  3)  Should the blog have more of an active focus (social justice, education, advocacy, etc), or should it be more passive (my reflections, observations, musings, in other words, more personal and internal)?  4)  How much time should I devote to the blog, or can I even commit to a regular schedule?  5)  Who is my audience, and how do I reach them, should I want to?  6)  Do I want to publicize the blog, or keep it quiet and let folks find it if they are so inclined?  7)  How much of my personal life do I think is wise to share?  8)  What is the expected outcome of blogging, is the goal internal or external (in other words, are my goals focused on the effect it has on my life, or the effect it has on other folks' lives)?  9)  How does blogging help or hinder my ongoing struggle with how much attention I draw to myself/need, as well as thinking through the methods I have used, or contemplate using, to get attention or deflect attention? and 10)  How much attention do I want to pay to the craft of blog writing, and will I be OK with the flaws and imperfections of my writing?

We'll see what develops, and thank you for dropping by.  Here's to a 2014 that is bursting at the borders with promising possibilities!  Enjoy a picture of my darling pugston terrier, Ursula, who can be found on Facebook and Twitter.

All of Me (Why Not Take All of Me)

Belonging.  Be longing.  I have always struggled with both states of being (although they are aspects of the same core emotion), and I have many opportunities to reflect on what belonging means, and what I am longing for, at this point in my life.  It may be a cliche, but it seems to be true, when you figure out one answer, another question pops up to bedevil you, and so the quest for a state of belonging, and the absence of longing, continues.

Some answers came.  I was longing to be loved, not by duty, but by want, and that happened.  I tend to be an over sharer on social media about my relationship, and a large part of why I do that is to reassure the phantom me from the past that, yes, love can happen to the oddest and misfit-est of us, too.  I'll tell you I do this as an example to others, who may be struggling with finding loving relationships of their own (and such relationships come in so many different forms, not just the binary romantic 'couple' form), and that is true, too.  I always thought I was too 'something' to ever have the kind of partnership I wanted, and needed:  too needy, too cold, too fat, too queer, too unaccomplished, too immature, too poor, too awkward, too moody, and so on.  I figure we all feel we're too 'something,' in different ways, and I hope that the fact that my 'too something' was somebody else's 'just right' might provide a speck of hope for others to know that they're 'just right' (yes, I know you're now probably thinking of Goldilocks and the Three Bears.  Thinking about bears, no matter what kind, is always a good thing).

This is a joy that can't be described, and I am thankful every day for this gift.  However, there are other longings for belonging that tap into our roots as social creatures.  I can't fight societal dynamics, no matter how hard I try, and so I also long for community.  Honestly, when I see the word 'community' used in current discourse, it often annoys me, as it seems too insubstantial a word for what kinds of kinship organizations we create with others who share an intrinsic aspect of our being.  I use it, too, reluctantly, because I haven't found a word that encapsulates what I need from the communities I find myself in.

Perhaps too, the problem is that I long for one magical place, filled with darling humans, who accept all aspects of myself.  I don't mean that in some magical sense of perfect harmony, but a space where nobody thinks twice about whether I am 'allowed' to embody a particular identity.  I don't think I'm unique in longing for this, and feeling that there isn't such an ideal waiting for them, but it often is a surprise and blow when I am made aware of how difficult this is to locate.  I want to be among people who accept me for being fat and queer, not one or the other.  I want to be in a space that accepts me for loving someone who self-identifies as a Fat Admirer, and accepts my partner, too.  I want to be in a space where my voice is longed for, where people let me speak for me, and accept that I have valid things to say about my embodiments, and that recognize that there are very many different ways to live a life of value and integrity and wholeness.  In fact, a place that recognizes that wholeness is an impossible goal anyway, and allows us to figure out what shape we want our lives to be.  A location that thinks weirdly rule abiding and anti-authoritarian contradicting eccentric queer spheres are hunky dory and full of self agency. 

I know, I'm asking for rainbow dolphins and super galactic kittens and rivers made of sweet, sweet chocolate here.  I get that much of what guts me here is the dirty flip side of group dynamics-that what helps bond a certain community of people together creates other groups of people to be guarded against.  We only know the borders of our own groups by knowing, and in many cases actively policing against, those who are not fit for 'our group.'  No group is immune, no matter how 'progressive' or open-minded, particularly when they rarely have to interact with people who fit the definition of the 'other.' I'm not proud of my own prejudices, and I don't expect a pat on the back for my work to undue my prejudices; I do follow a live and let live position about other people's lives, and I often try to analyze my own reactions to people I recognize as my 'other,' lest I allow myself to wallow in lazy thinking or the need to feel superior, or threatened by, others.  I hope I am doing the work I need to do to overcome these aspects of societal community building, but I suspect this is a lifetime work order.

What I can do, and what I know is probably not the best thing, is to stop associating with groups who refuse to hear my voice, or evaluate my lived experiences in mis-informed and stereotypical ways, when deciding what they think about people 'like me.'  I have always been a 'you draw more folks with honey than vinegar' kind of person, but it is only recently that I've begun to re-evaluate that position.  I'm embarrassed to admit this, but it is only recently that I have fully understood what I've heard people of color who are involved in social justice circles say, that it is not their job to educate whites about their privilege, and about racism.  Previously, I accepted that this was true, and that this was a viable option for some, but for myself, I would need to be 'nice,' and not rock the boat.  Now I get it, now I understand, and now I want the same for myself-if you aren't at least minimally responsive to ideas about gender privilege and straight privilege and thin privilege, then I have no time for you. 

I think one of the absolute best slogans I've ever heard is from the disability rights movement: "Nothing about us without us."  When you are hit with the realization that in fact the world doesn't hear us all equally, or allow us the latitude to live lives as rich with possibility as those taken for granted by so many US residents, it masticates reality and tosses you out of your own center.  It sure makes the journey back to your center so much easier when you have allies, colleagues, friends, loved ones, who recognize you in all your complexity, allow you to speak your truth without denials and erasures, and recognize the joy, love, and worth of even your most stigmatized identities.  I still long to belong in such a space, but do have hope that someday this sphere will exist, and I hope that for you, too.

In the meantime, I am hoping to adopt a dog.  As I've told my partner, caring for dogs taught me how to care for, and love, humans.  I try to model the acceptance, the unconditional love, the gratitude, the trust, and the subsuming joy for life that dogs show in my own relationship.  Thank goodness I've learned so much from dogs, for I also, like many dogs, will follow you wherever you go if you have a treat in your hand.   

Zombies: It's a Lifestyle Change, not a Diet

Stephen King argues in his non-fiction book Danse Macabre (http://www.amazon.com/Danse-Macabre-Stephen-King/dp/1439170983/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1336655091&sr=8-2) that the types of horror that we consume are influenced by the cultural fears and anxieties of the times we live in.  For example, movies like "Them!" from 1954, about giant ants, represents cultural fears over the realization of nuclear weaponry, after the horror of dropping the atomic bomb in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  The great Universal horror films of the 1930's, which harken back to an almost pre-industrial 19th-century Europe, were a great distraction from the all-too-contemporary Great Depression and the frightening modernity of living in a post World War I world.  Are these European monsters (Dracula, Frankenstein, the Wolfman) merely the front lines of the very modernist horror show of World War II to come, teasing out US audiences' anxieties about what was left unresolved after the devastation of WWI?  Gives a whole new spin on the next generation of these films, when Abbott and Costello hung out with the Wolfman, doesn't it?  Once WWII was over, and the United States begins its ascendancy to the top of the superpower heap, Boris Karloff and the rest have to jape with comedians, not menace poor damsels in distress, a sure sign that the world was safe for democracy and consumerism once again.

I've always been a fan of a good monster movie, and my allegiances have always been to the vampires.  They're the most human of monsters, if for no other reason than their close resemblance to non-monstrous humanity (although in recent decades the serial killer has usurped vampires in this category, adding a sort of 'banality of evil' ethos to the monster pantheon due to their obvious un-supernatural nature).  Their sensuality and allure have been well documented, and they have been able stand-ins for all sorts of cultural fears, many of those related to queerness (see, Carmilla, Anne Rice, "True Blood").  In fact, vampires themselves seem to embody the idea of 'queer time' or 'queer temporality' in provocative ways, since their ultimate allure is their immortality, and their shady existence (literally).  Who wouldn't want to have the power to mesmerize others, draw them into your control, and then decide if they live to serve you or not, all while living forever, and never aging?  It sounds like both the historical stereotypes of gays, and everything our contemporary time dreams about, and no wonder their popularity continues to live on in so many different forms, including Mormon vampires (the "Twilight" series).

Even though my fandom has always been for the vampires, there are aspects of Frankenstein's monster that appeal to me.  In keeping with my evocation of queer theory in the previous paragraph, the tomb as womb in the Frankenstein narrative is a queering of reproduction in very provocative ways.  As well, using a more traditional assimilationist approach, the primal need of the monster to be accepted as fully human, to be able to participate in perhaps the most fundamental of human rituals, the ritual of kinship formation and social networks via communication and connection, and to feel something akin to giving and getting love, speaks to any outsider bullied or stigmatized or shunned.  In other words, Frankenstein's monster sure could have used an "It Gets Better" video.  The werewolf doesn't much interest me, but I appreciate the dynamic it tries to play out, the culture/nature divide, although the lack of any real female werewolf leaves the base story of the werewolf much too patriarchal for my tastes.  The werewolf narrative often reads to me like a scary variation of Huck Finn or any John Wayne movie, those rugged individuals trying to escape the constrictions of 'polite society' (otherwise known as 'Girls Town') and heading out for the wilderness in order to enact 'real' masculinity free from criticism and restraint and girlie cooties.

I've spent some time on some other monster staples because, well, even though this blog post is about zombies, I don't much like zombies at all.  They bore me.  They have no personality, they have no humanity, they don't for a moment allow me a point of connection, and even worse, they don't much scare me.  However, I find their use in this contemporary moment as being a great source of amusement for so many to be telling.  I would argue that zombie narratives are so popular today because they represent the 'obesity epidemic.'  Many folks are familiar with the cultural analysis of perhaps the greatest zombie narrative in the US, "Night of the Living Dead," that it evokes the dread of what was happening in the 60's, the Vietnam War, Civil Rights struggles, the rebellion against the military industrial complex and the increasingly ineffectiveness of governments to serve their citizens.  Zombies, because they are such ciphers, seem to have gained traction in recent decades as being a 'go-to' monster for explicating societal dreads.

What could be more fearful than the 'obesity epidemic'?  Every day, in a million different ways, fat people are presented as the most dangerous thing to happen to our society since perhaps the Black Plague.  Soon the whole world will be fat, we'll all die impossibly young, with a plethora of crippling diseases, draining the coffers of nations via our health expenses and failing to reproduce, because everyone knows fat people are icky and shouldn't be touched, let alone screwed.  According to the now-disproved social-contagion theory, just being around us fattys will make you fat, and of course hauling our fat asses around in cars and airplanes is causing the destruction of the environment.   It is heady stuff, having the power to destroy the universe as we know it, and I for one won't take this responsibility lightly (rim shot).

Zombies are fat people, no question.  Like the stereotypical representations of fat people (and not, let me be clear for those of you who traffic in fat stereotypes, real fat people), zombies stumble and lumber around, unsteady on their feet and struggling with locomotion.  Like fat people, zombies have pasty, blotchy skin; the fat get this way from all that time indoors in their mother's basements gaming and consuming high fructose corn syrup.  Like fat people, zombies rarely get to dress in fashionable tailored clothing, or even care to invest in their personal appearance.  Like fat people, zombies have no interest in sex.  Like fat people, zombies are mindless and have no reason and won't deviate one bit from their hunger drive; fattys are so dumb you can't get them to see the error of their ways and start dropping the lbs.  Like fat people, all zombies care about is eating, and will do anything to eat.  Not only that, but their favorite thing to eat is brains, thereby symbolizing exactly what fat does to a human, it eats away their brain, their seat of consciousness and understanding of themselves as a human being.  Like fat people, zombies reproduce rapidly, and if we don't annihilate them, they'll be none of us (thin)humans left.  Therefore, no mercy or kindness can be shown to the zombie or the fat person, and they must be destroyed as soon as possible.

Thus, both zombies and fat people are completely dehumanized, and audiences can deploy their own well-stoked anger and fear of fat people vicariously through zombie narratives in TV, film, and games that requires exhilaration when zombies are killed, and the collective sigh of relief that the world has been made safe for the non-zombie/fat again.  Every day the collective drumbeat of 'obesity epidemic' rhetoric does nothing more than hasten the transformation of fat people into dehumanized, monstrous zombies who must be destroyed.  However, there is one key difference between representations of zombies and fat people, and I think it is frighteningly telling:

There are no images of headless zombies, but an industry of headless fatty images*+

*thanks to Charlotte Cooper for this wonderful phrase
+although I've been playing around with these ideas for a few years now, thanks to folks at the Popular Culture Association Conference for indulging my riffs on this topic

My 400-pound pet peeve

I just read this interesting New Yorker piece (linked from Longform.org) about Hurricane Katrina:

http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2005/11/28/051128fa_fact?currentPage=all

Maybe none of you know this (mostly because you're not reading my blog), but one of my dissertation chapters was going to be about fatness and Hurricane Katrina, so I tend to read things I stumble across about Hurricane Katrina.  This may sound like a stretch to you, a whole chapter about fat and one particular event in U.S. history, but it was meant to be deployed as a space and place to talk about larger issues of size, race, class, and identity/community formation (among other things), and of how fatness was used (and, more importantly, not used) to discuss the event, the aftermath, and what it symbolized about U.S. society.  It would have served as a great prelude to my last chapter, on geographies, nationalities, and fatness.

Since the dissertation was never finished, I suppose what I was going to do is irrelevant, but I share it anyway.  The reason I want to talk about this linked article does link to the dissertation chapter in a rather loose way.  Specifically what I'd like to speak about is this early sentence from Katherine Boo's piece: "On the evening of September 3rd, though, a gunshot victim, a four-hundred-pound woman, and a man with a broken spine arrived at the gym simultaneously, joining two hundred other evacuees."  I was excited, here was a journalistic piece that will talk about fatness and Hurricane Katrina!  However, the 'four-hundred-pound woman' never made another appearance in the story, and so I have no idea what happened to this woman.  Did she have to go through what had been mentioned on the less mainstream online sites, that is, wearing plastic bags as clothes because there were none to be had in her size?

If Ms. Boo never planned to write about this woman, why did she make an appearance in the article? Presumably because she was listed alongside individuals with bodily trauma, the reporter sought to portray her as equally traumatized.  However, without supporting details, we have no idea if her weight was impacting her health in such a way that she needed special attention from health-care professionals.  Even if this was the case, Hurricane Katrina did not cause her weight, so her inclusion in this group seems odd.  More likely, Ms. Boo, like many non-fat people, grossly underestimate the health of fat people.  Telling the reader that an individual is 400 pounds says very little about their health, particularly if it is framed in the context of bodily trauma.  More precisely, the bodily trauma that woman was experiencing was a trauma placed on her by a society that refuses to recognize, let alone shape itself to accommodate, fat people.  Sadly, Hurricane Katrina only exacerbated that condition. 

I think the real reason we are told that a 400 pound woman is one of the early arrivals at the shelter has nothing to do with Hurricane Katrina at all.  It is part of that all too familiar trick of making sure 'we' call out and move to the margins any person who does not fit 'our' idea of what a human being should be.  Those 400 pound women must be marked, a permanent 'O' on their written selves, so the rest of the reading public knows that they're reading about someone who is 'less than' and 'other than' themselves.  It happens in all sorts of written work, from newspaper pieces to critical law books, college textbooks and in footnotes to college textbooks.  It also happens to people who weigh both much less, and much more, than the 400-pound woman of this New Yorker piece. 

Why do writers include weights for those who have weights many deem to be 'too much' or 'too little'?  If they don't plan on addressing the topic of weight and body size in their work, then there is no reason to do so.  I have asked one of the former ombudsmans of The Washington Post why body size isn't included in their style guides in ways that seek to minimize this type of othering, in keeping with their policies about race and other characteristics.  Unsurprisingly, I got no reply.  Unless the weight is given for every person mentioned in an article, this kind of selective 'outing' of fat people in writing is bias, and it needs to stop.  I'm tired of seeing bodies like mine treated as freaks of such magnitude that our weight must be hung around our heads even in places where no image of fatness exists, the ultimate shame of daring to live while fat.

I also get angry when I see this happening for people with other bodily traits, like stature, for example.  I also find the practice to be so obviously about policing bodies, that I find it hard to see how otherwise knowledgeable people don't catch it and erase it.  My favorite example of this is found in the Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism (http://www.amazon.com/Norton-Anthology-Theory-Criticism/dp/0393974294/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1331141739&sr=1-2).  In a book chock full of cultural studies critiques of all sorts of representations of various identity groups, we find a charming footnote in the entry for Judith Butler's Gender Trouble.  This charming footnote provides basic biographical information on both the drag queen Divine and the director John Waters, queer film collaborators.  Divine is described as a '300-pound drag queen' and Waters is described as a director, with no body weight given. 

One of the reasons I find this so delightfully f-ed up and endemic of the need to stigmatize fat people no matter when and where they dare to show themselves is because it collapses all temporality into one moment.  At the time of this book's publication, Divine had been deceased for many years, so the editors of this book decided that the corporeality of Divine was frozen in time for the periods of his life in which he weighed 300 pounds.  Considering that weight is often a destabilizing status (our weight fluctuates daily, even if only by a few ounces), this fact seems oddly flattening of the varied lived experiences of any person, even a fat one.  Secondly, it rather hilariously presents an image of Divine bursting fully formed, like Athena out of Zeus' head, as a fat drag queen from birth, and that he maintained a stable 300-pound weight for his entire life, from cradle to grave.

Since I think Divine is a god, this image is oddly comforting, even as I recognize the insidious way it seeks to mark an individual with a stable identity while at the same time performing the slight of hand that makes most people think that a fat identity doesn't exist, is in fact impossible, and that we're merely only thin people waiting to be let out of our traumatic fat cages.  A good start would be if writers actually provided some humanity to the fat people they seek to diminish by making them an absent presence in their work. 

The rest of the (fat) story.....

My last post described my own experience with a public health initiative geared towards ‘childhood obesity,’ and of my impressions that it was not successful in instilling lifelong thinness in at least two of the teens involved, myself and one other teen:  one female, one male, both at the higher end of the percentages used to measure ‘childhood obesity.’

I tried for the most part to let the events tell the story, so one could take away an impression from that blog post that the experience, in the long run, was not particularly damaging to my health.  I lost a little bit of weight, I gained it back, but maybe I learned some things along the way about ‘good health, nutrition, and exercise’ that I didn’t know before, one could infer.  Plus, there was no mention of explicitly shaming tactics used to get us to lose weight; we weren’t publically humiliated in front of our thin peers at weigh-ins or in forced exercise routines, or otherwise exposed to negative images of fatness and fat people.  However, these sorts of programs don’t happen in a fat-hate-free vacuum, they are bound up with a lifetime of campaigns, both covert and overt, that seek to belittle the fat person with very little push back from fat people themselves.

What comes after that National Institutes of Health-supervised program shows the long-term effect these sorts of messages have on fat children and teens.  The following school year, at about the same time of year (Spring), I was in the ER, having my stomach pumped after a suicide attempt.   I was in my first year of high school (10^th grade), and had turned 16 only a few months before.   I won’t say that my life as a fat person was the only reason that I decided to take an overdose of pills, but I would say that it was the biggest reason I felt as depressed as I did.

I had discussed in my previous post my understanding and awareness of my fat identity, and of how young I was when I realized the importance this part of my embodiment would have on my life.  I wasn’t aware of my conflict over my gender identity until I was older, perhaps no older than 5.  I spent a good part of my childhood deeply puzzled by gender identity and expression.  About the age of 7 I was exposed to a transgender identity for the first time (via a CBS Evening News report on Renee Richards), and I wondered throughout my youth if I might some day have a ‘sex-change operation.’    One thing I remember doing all the time as a child was praying to G-d to change me.  I was a reasonable youth, and offered G-d a choice, since I was sure asking for a lot.  G-d could either keep me as a girl, but make me thin, or keep me fat, but turn me into a boy.  At a very young age I was aware of the different standards about fat and gender, and thought that the worst possible outcome for me was to be female and fat.

Sadly for that young me, I never woke up in a differently sized or gendered body.  I grew up, and out, and stayed a tomboy for a long time.   Once I entered puberty in my early teens, I began to question my sexuality.  I questioned it not so much because of who I was attracted to, but because of my gender conflicts.  My teen self could not even imagine a world in which a trans man would be gay.  It was still difficult for me to imagine being trans, or gay, let alone combing the two together.  Remember that we’re talking about the mid-80’s, during the ‘AIDS hysteria,’ and in a suburban world where I knew no openly GLBTQ people.

Thus, I began to contemplate life as a lesbian.  That made some sense to my adolescent mind, since I could be a tomboy and like girls, since that is what I thought lesbians were.  But as I contemplated this identity, well aware of all the stigma surrounding gay and lesbian lives, I noticed something else.  There were striations of ‘acceptable’ female identities, and one of the representations used to demean women was an image that looked a lot like me: a mannish, fat, lesbian woman.  Nobody was claiming that representation as a cherished part of their community-not women, not feminists, not lesbians.  I didn’t know there were women who were seeking to cherish fat representations like this, women who formed the Fat Underground in the 1970’s.  I had no idea there was any sort of fat positive community in the world until my late teens.

I felt like I was living in an impossible body, with unthinkable identities, and I had no idea what to do.  One thing I thought would solve my dilemma was to take sexuality out of the picture altogether.  I decided that I would not have romantic and sexual feelings for anyone, since I could not reconcile my own sense of self with the labels available to me, and when I tried, I only saw abjection.  This is really an impossible place for one to exist and thrive in, and as a result I suffered from depression.  The thought of a lifetime of loneliness and estrangement from perhaps the most exalted state of human experience, love, was weighing me down more than any ounce of adipose tissue ever could.  Thus, the suicide attempt at 16.

For me, the combination of queerness and fatness was hard to navigate, and the societal forms of prejudice against both states of being were detrimental to my mental health.  However, as odd as it may sound, growing up I was never personally shamed, insulted, hated, or belittled due to my gender nonconformity, presumed lesbianism, and attempted asexuality.  I did not grow up in a family that made me feel bad for wanting to dress like a boy, or play sports, or spending most of my playtime with boys.  I did grow up in a family that made me feel awful for being fat.  Once I claimed my queer identity, my family has never made me feel less than for being queer.  And although I never told my family that the fat stigma that I grew up with contributed to my suicide attempt, my family stopped shaming me for being fat after it happened (and please know I am not suggesting suicide attempts as a way to stop fat stigma!).

I’ve been blessed in so many ways; despite having to grow up dealing with pervasive and powerful stigmas around sex, gender, and body size, I made plenty of good friends as I grew up.  Outside of some teasing in 1^st grade, I never was singled out and targeted for bullying, and my closest friends accepted me as I was.  Sadly, I was much better at being social and making friends when I was a youth than I am now as an adult.  But that, along with every other aspect of my ability to interact with other humans, has been profoundly impacted by the fat stigma I endured as a child, where the scariest part of that scarring was the language around being excluded, unloved, and hurt because I was fat.

The picture above shows me and my partner, the amazing Mycroft Masada Holmes.  Until we became partners, I had no idea if I could be in a healthy, romantic, loving relationship with another human being.  Thus, the slogan, which Mycroft designed, reflects the fact that the child me, the one who learned how to feel excluded because they were fat and queer, has learned in adulthood how to love and be loved as a fat queer person.  I hope you will support campaigns that seek to minimize shaming children for their bodies, and that you’ll learn more about this particular campaign to speak back to those who refuse to listen to the words of scarred former fat kids about how soul destroying it is to recognize that the world wished you never existed in the body you have.

http://danceswithfat.wordpress.com/the-billboard-project/