NAAFA Community Voices Blog
Sharing thoughts and ideas from fat community.
Image shows a young black woman with blonde hair and wearing glasses, a pink sweater and a laptop on the desk in front of her.
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I Lost My Queer Identity the Day I Said I Do
From a young age I had no doubt that both boys and girls were beautiful to me. Growing up in a home where my parents were also foster parents, I was exposed to lots of different types of kids. Not only the privileged kids that I went to school with, but the children who didn’t come from a “stable home” with two parents who paid attention to them and showed them love every day. I learned that people are interesting and loveable no matter how they grew up.
Asexuality for Pride Month
According to Meriam Webster, Asexuality (Ace) is: not having sexual feelings toward others : not experiencing sexual desire or attraction. Basically, it is an inborn absence of sexual desire.
Fat Liberation or Body Positivity can be hard spaces for Asexual people to navigate sometimes because for many, body liberation also includes sexual/sensual aspects of their lives. For myself personally, talk of fat sex/pleasure or images of those things makes me uncomfortable.
Finding safety in Queer spaces can be hard for Asexual people. When you are Fat and Asexual, it also comes with all the Fat bias, weight stigma, Fat hate too.
Asexual people are not wrong or broken or looking for attention. We are here and we are valid.
Pride And Prejudice And Love And Liberation
Happy LGBTQIA+ Pride Month 2022!
This month and every month, I’m proud to be a queer and nonbinary trans person, a fat-attracted person married to a wonderful superfat queer gender non-conforming / butch / mas(s)culine-presenting woman, and an ally in the fat liberation movement.
I am not writing this piece to receive “ally cookies” (rewards from an oppressed community for supporting them in ways that everyone should as part of being a mensch, a good person). My kavannah, intention, is to show other thin people some ways they can begin, maintain or grow their practice of allyship with the fat community. Whether we are LGBTQIA+ or not, wherever we are and go in life, we can and must share the good news of fat liberation. We must center fat voices, and we must add our own in solidarity. It is not always safe, or without cost, but it is far safer and less costly for us than for fat folks.