Hi friend,
This week on Patreon, I've shared an excerpt from the book I'm working on (working title: Body Liberation for Business) about balancing SEO – search engine optimization – and respectful wording.
The
full excerpt is available to the Supporter level and up.
In the Body Liberation Blanket Fort, open to all Patreon supporters, we've been doing body doubling events with great success. It's like sitting in a room with supportive and fun colleagues, except that everyone gets their own space, temperature and music.
A follow-up:
Reader Brandy Morris replied to
last week's letter with a great point that I'm sharing with permission:
"One thing I've been doing is encouraging providers that ARE welcoming and inclusive but not really saying so on their website, to specifically state they respect and welcome people in larger bodies. It's like, my B stamp of approval hahahaha.
I did it with a bed store that customized my mattress to help support me and my physiotherapist who has, over 5 sessions, NEVER spoken about my weight, suggested I was hard to work with, or treated me differently than anyone else in her practice.
Funnily enough, I did mention HAES as a place she could read more and when she wrote back, she even told me the principles that spoke to her most when she read it. Now THAT is a rare and welcome outcome!"
Allyship opportunity:
Last chance to send an encouraging note to Dragon! (See
this past letter for details.) I'll bundle them all up on February 10 and send them on to her.
Please send your cards and letters to Dragon at 14201 SE Petrovitsky Rd Ste A3 #324, Renton, WA 90858 USA.
Now, on to this week's letter:
Here's one simple action you can take to help end discrimination against fat bodies this week: Stick your neck out.
Quite often these days, thin (usually white) folks feel the need to message me and tell me about how they were going to speak up about this harmful action or that piece of fragility, but they didn't, because they knew I'd say something.
Please don't tell me this, and please don't do this. It's scary for everyone to speak up; I don't have some magical speaking-truth-to-power ability that you don't. (Though I do have the privilege of a good support network, a therapist and the lack of a corporate job to get fired from.)
If you're a thin white person afraid to stand up to thin white people because you're worried about damaging your professional and social networks, just think about how much higher the stakes are when fat folks speak out. We run that same risk, plus the risk of being blackballed, harassed, doxxed and more.
For example, many of my clients are in the Health at Every Size® community. When I stick my neck out there to fight for the rights of fat people to healthcare and human dignity, I risk all of those things from the paragraph above. (And if you think I'm exaggerating about the consequences, I was doxxed a few years ago by someone in my Facebook friends list who didn't like what I had to say about including fat people in eating disorder treatment.)
Every thin person who uses me as a human shield and battleax -- who sits there and watches while I fight -- also increases my risk. If you're not at least backing me up, no one else will either.
Stop letting fat folks fight all our battles alone. The least you can do is join us.
