Is this you?

Twitter is such an amazing "tool" sometimes.  I have made some very very good friends...

I have also pissed some people off and that is okay.  I dont have to "wear there issues" so to speak.  But the anonymous questions and intentional hurtful jabs at me... they get to me sometimes..  It is most definetly my fault for allowing all of my pages to be open.  I HAVE NOTHING TO HIDE.  As a result; I got the following blog emailed to me with the question... was this written about you?

I wish I could say yes.  Did you miss the part about her being a supportive friend and that she is loved by the writer?  What you intended to hurt me with ... was really very nice.  Yes I am fat.  Do you know why? Do you care?  Have you asked about the health issues I have that keep me this way?
I Have A Big Fat Friend

One of my best friends is fat. She's really fat. I cannot guess her weight but I know that she cannot buy anything in the mall or standard women's sizing. She’s “point and laugh fat.” She was and is one of the most supportive people to me through all of my illnesses and through my divorce. We’ve been friends for a really long time. Decades.

Her life has been a constant battle of not having as many friends or lovers BECAUSE of her weight. She's very highly educated, smart, creative, and a genuinely good person. She takes good care of her animals and from her photographs I can tell that she's been a very fat person since she was a very little girl.

She's the kind of fat that gets stared at when we walk into stores. But when I hang out with her, all I see is HER. I don't NOTICE her weight because I LOVE HER. But she notices people staring at her and when she points it out I look and I see it too. People mock, they make fat faces, and yes - they are completely cruel.

As a "norm breaking project" once, one of my students once made a video with her boyfriend. In it her straight gender-norm boyfriend dressed as a woman to show the responses people give to people who are DIFFERENT in our society. They had three friends at the mall use professional cameras from the school’s AV equipment and show faces and responses far away. No one knew they were being recorded.

He did nothing but walk to an Orange Julius, buy a drink the way anyone would, bring it out of his "purse" and pay for it. He then sat down and drank it in the mall the way he would anytime. He did nothing, “swishy” or silly or odd. In fact, he was very masculine behaving because he wasn’t actually FEELING like a woman he was just dressed as one.

The camera showed people mocking, staring, laughing. People came up behind him and laughed and pointed. It was STUNNING. Everytime a professor, doctor, nurse, teacher, coach, or "professional" does the same to ANYONE who is different they are essentially reproducing hatred back into our cultural fabric. Refusing to treat trans, or mocking fatties, all of it – ALL OF IT is further justifying bullying, hazing, and all forms of injustice and inequalities at "difference."

As for my fat friend, there has never been a time when I was with her that she wasn't giving back to people in such a lovely way with phone calls, genuine love, and kindness. Her body is weird. The way her mother and father treated her (as the embarrassing fattie of the family) an outsider and all of society has sends a very clear message that this woman with two Master's degrees that she is WORTHLESS and should be mocked and hurt for her difference.

It doesn't matter how much good she has done for me or the world. It doesn't matter even if she saved the world from disaster, I'm sure people would still line up to mock her and cameras would catch it.