FAT SEX WEEK XXL: Femme Sex Chat with Catiriana Reyes AKA Miss Sparklez
Sparklez says in our interview, “Trans women are worth more dead than alive. We have more bio power dead than alive.” Let’s change this and amplify the voices of Black Trans Women! It starts with listening to their perspective (like this interview!) and it moves to giving opportunities for work, housing and community organizing that respects and center their needs and experiences.
Click here to read the whole article and watch our fabulous interview!
Four Strategies I’m Using to Move Forward in the Wake of the Election
I am remembering the legacy of resistance I come from. Before every event and performance I produce I do a circle prayer/offering of good intentions where I honor our queer ancestors. (If you’re curious what that looks like skip ahead to minute 9 of this video.) I don’t take for granted my ability to be a fat queer flamboyant femme, I know that just thirty years ago I wouldn’t have this access to express my authentic self. The ease I have being a weirdo in this world is because of the blood, sweat, and resistance of those people that came before.
It looks like it might get harder to be a weirdo for awhile. And at least I know that we have communities and we can create some really beautiful shit. And grass roots works a lot faster than government, the glacial pace of regression under Drumpf won’t be able to move as fast as we will. We can support each other and we can continue to make change.
Why All Bodies are Good Bodies: Body Liberation Activism in Five Minutes
On that trip of a lifetime earlier this month, (I’ve been home a week/can’t believe it’s already been a week!) the first group go around we said our name and something people could talk with us about. I have been in a lot of facilitated groups; this was the simplest and most effective go around for sparking individual conversations! Some people picked silly stuff and some people went more serious. I chose strategically because I knew the folks with whom I would engage with were global influencers, it was a rad opportunity to get to talk to them about body liberation activism!
What I did not expect was how sharp and quick my 2-5 minute spiel about body liberation activism would get when I delivered it 20 times! Sometimes it was one-on-one sitting next to each other on the bus, sometimes it was at dinner to a few folks, and then that time Jenna asked me about it I gave a full five minute workshop about it with a tiny cluster of curious Storytellers. Jenna and I continued a lengthy conversation about it for almost a whole day.
I went to the DNC’s Women’s Leadership Forum Conference and it was Rad!
October 22nd and 23rd I attended the Democratic National Committee’s Women’s Leadership Forum’s 22nd Annual National Issues Conference in Washington, DC. Say that five times fast. In short, it was wildly more awesome than I expected it to be.
In this article I go down the rabbit hole about how much I enjoyed hearing Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, Jamilah Lemiuex, Elizabeth Plank, Nina Turner, Laurel Richie, Tina Tchen, Jana Babatunde-Bey and many more powerful and amazing women speak at this event!
How Getting Neutral About Food Helped Dara Drop Sugar
When I posted my thoughts about being a good ally to fat folks by getting neutral about food, Dara and I have had a lot of conversations about it, including a pretty startling revelation that I wasn’t aware of. It turns out that Dara, working to get neutral about her food self-talk in order to be a better ally to me as a fat person, was able to transition to a low-sugar anti-cancer lifestyle a lot easier with food neutrality than if she had kept up agonizing about food being “bad” or “good.” Her words on this are below.
Thoughts on Facebook Legal Name Policing
I’ve been thinking a lot about the Facebook legal name policy lately. For those of you who haven’t heard, Facebook has been deleting accounts of people who don’t wish to use their legal name as their profile name. They’re coming for people, one by one, and telling them they either need to change their name to their legal name or convert their profile to a “page.” Pages don’t have the same kind of interactivity that a regular profile has.
This is very disturbing on a lot of levels. The first, is that primarily in this round, drag queens and gender variant folks seem to be targeted. They’re also on the forefront of the fight with Facebook to reverse their legal name policy.
What is baffling to me, is that Facebook is a platform that is reliant on users for content. It seems wildly inappropriate for them to be putting requirements on users to out themselves. If folks don’t feel safe using facebook they won’t have the kind of content they currently have. People who are using legal names would be more likely to curtail content.
Click here to read the whole article.
Bridging the Gaps between Feminisms by Being Better Allies to One Another
I have an article up on Everyday Feminism today about working across different kinds of feminisms. A lot of the work I do in my activism is bridging gaps between folks who believe differently and yet all still call themselves feminists. We can work to do things differently if we work on our ally skills, and leave room for rage and compassion.
Check out the article! Building Allyship and Finding Room for Multiple Feminisms.
Guest Post: How to Be a Good Ally to My Crippled Arm
My bestie Jacqueline Mary is disabled in a way where it is not readily apparent to the naked eye. Her arm was shattered in a bike accident a couple of years ago and the initial surgery restored only a small percentage of function in her arm. But because she still has her left arm and most people aren’t particularly observant, it’s not obvious right away that there’s anything different about it. She often has to tell people not to touch her arm, especially strangers in public, and sometimes people we know don’t even believe her and continue to poke, touch, even punch her in the arm because they think she’s joking. She’s also in a lot of chronic pain that has gotten worse over the last couple of months.
She posted the following note to Facebook and I really loved it. Not just because she’s my friend, but also because I thought it was an exceptional example of stating your needs and asking for help–I believe vulnerability is a sign of strength.
How to be a Good Ally to Fat People Who Appear to Have Lost Weight
Our culture normalizes talking about bodies all the time. There is especially a lot of value placed on weight gain or loss. Turn on a television and just listen to diet chatter. It’s pervasive, obnoxious and well-meaning individuals perpetuate it in our personal lives all the time.
I like to create an environment in my life that is about substance over small talk, where compliments are genuine and weight is value-neutral.
“Oh, but Bevin,” you may be saying. “I really mean it as a compliment when I notice you’ve lost weight!”
But, well-intentioned friend, just because you’re well-intentioned doesn’t mean what you say doesn’t have a harmful impact. Weight loss doesn’t mean I look good. I believe I look good at all of my weights–all bodies are good bodies. And I know your perception of me might have changed because you are socialized to believe smaller is better, but I would like to gently invite you to do something different with your nonpliments of “You look so good!” when someone has lost weight.