Hi friend,

 

How do you like the new look for the newsletter? I attended an email design webinar right before I traveled earlier this month, and it got me all excited about design again.

 

Also, you have till Wednesday to enter the drawing for the Pan Eros Film Festival tickets!

 

As someone deeply committed to size inclusivity and active in Health at Every Size for a long time now, I'm thrilled to endorse Jen McLellan's new Size-Friendly Birth Course. If you're looking to deepen your understanding and implementation of size-friendly practices, this course is for you.

 

Why this course matters:

This isn't just about learning; it's about becoming part of a community committed to size inclusivity. I believe in this course's power to make us better professionals.

 

 

 

People responded to the email and commented on social media about how miserable my trip sounded. And yeah, it wasn't a fun time. But it was so much less unpleasant than flying before I had the ability to get two airplane seats that it hadn't occurred to me that it was actively terrible, just less so.

 

It's fascinating because generally, when very fat people talk about our experiences, we're not carefully making the point every sentence or two that those experiences are due to oppression, not faults in our bodies.

 

And when very fat people talk about our experiences, we don't generally get the same reaction I just did. It makes me wonder whether it activates our sympathy more when it's made clear to us that a bad experience isn't the fault of someone's body -- whether we intend that reaction or not.

 

 

This is a half-formed thought I've been mulling over, and gender studies are way outside my lane, so feel free to tell me I'm off the mark here.

 

 

» Portland, OR: Fat Joy Summer Celebration (see)

 

» Ilya Parker's database of Affirming Fitness and Movement Practitioners (see or register)

 

» Survey on experiences with body size in medical settings (fill out)

 

» Now out: Body Phobia: The Western Roots of Our Fear of Difference (buy)

 

» Reader Question: What is Food Noise? (read)

 

» Fat Friends Pen Pals (see)

 

» May your calls for Justice (including food Justice) decenter whiteness, reject the colonial mindset, and not seek to replicate supremacist systems. (read)

 

» dangerous...to who? (a post about a kid's toy) (read)

 

» Are you a plus-size person with experiences to share? (see)

 

» I love Sage Bodywork's videos with fat models! Scar Massage Tutorial: Get Your Mobility Back after Surgery (Lasting Relief!) (watch)

 

» Reader Question- How Does Questionable Research Happen? (read)

 

» Why The Washington Post thinks Big Food has corrupted the anti-diet movement. (read)

 

🦄 Unicorn chaser: Mars on Earth: How Utah's Fantastical Moqui Marbles Formed (read)

 

On the trip I talked about last week, I happened to stay at a new-to-me (built in 2001, renovated in 2011) hotel in my hometown, a Courtyard by Marriott. I long ago stopped expecting hotels to be designed to include me, but there were soft benches in the lobby, and when I walked into my hotel room, behold:

And when I went to the bathroom, behold:

To you, these may just look like generic hotel chairs and toilets, but to me, it was a chair where I could sit, and a desk where I could work, and a toilet where I could wipe myself.

 

I wouldn't say that I experienced joy, exactly, but there was a deep sense of relief that I wouldn't be spending the next few days in a hotel room where the only place I could sit was the bed, and where I wouldn't have to take embarrassing and uncomfortable measures to keep myself clean in the bathroom.

 

It's funny, though. It wasn't until I began writing this letter that I realized that there had been an armchair in that room as well, and I had no idea whatsoever how large it was.

 

I was in that hotel room for three days and it never even occurred to me to see if the chair was going to include me.

After so many years of being excluded by armed chairs, this one might as well have not existed, so quickly was it dismissed from my mind. In fact, I didn't even think to photograph it; I snagged the photo above from the hotel's website.

 

While I was in my hometown, I popped into a cheap shoe store for some funeral-appropriate black flats. I didn't see a bathroom and I really needed to go, so I asked an employee, who cheerfully showed me to an unmarked bathroom in the employees-only area.

 

If I hadn't asked, I wouldn't have known (or been able to access the bathroom). And fat folks are often told that it's our responsibility to constantly ask for accommodations and workarounds and inclusion.

 

But if you'd been told ten times a day for your entire life that there's no bathroom and you should be ashamed for asking, would you be asking for a bathroom in the shoe store?

 

 

The Trevor Project defines gender euphoria as "satisfaction or joy caused when one's gendered experience aligns with their gender identity, rather than with the gender they were assigned at birth."

 

I had assumed that gender euphoria was specifically talking about a feeling of joy or elation, but the definitions I'm seeing often refer to satisfaction or contentment as well.

 

So maybe relief or happiness at finding a chair that's designed to include your body is a form of fat euphoria, and I had a little taste of it at that hotel.

Unapologetically fat,