Blind Prophecy

Final day of the Creating Change conference. I’m actually in the Detroit airport at the moment (although I may have to actually post this later, depending on how soon they start boarding) ready to go home.

I started this morning with a workshop on Fat-phobia (a.k.a. Sizeism). I wandered in rather skeptical, but left a true believer. It’s amazing that the more one learns to see how sexism interacts with racism which interacts with ableism which interacts with heterosexism which interacts with cisgenderism which interacts with oppressive theism… the more quickly the connections make sense. Our presenter began with discussing the stereotypes about fat people (ugly, lazy, slobs, weak-willed), the types of discrimination faced from the medical community and non-Fat people (as well as other fat people, of course), the systemic limiting of power and access to change, and the grey areas around the movement. I suddenly started to see that requiring a fat person to buy two tickets on an airplane is unfair in the same way a business without wheelchair access is unfair–except far more commonly, society tends to put the blame for the problem on fat people rather than the 18″ average seat size of airplane seats. I saw connections with racism, ageism, and cisgenderism in the gay male community (white, young, athletic, masculine presenting = good; non-white, older, fat and non-masculine presenting = bad). My new resolution: I no longer diet or exercise to lose weight. I eat sensibly and exercise because I’m genetically predisposed to heart problems, diabetes and high cholesterol, and anything I can do sensibly and responsibly to minimize my risks is worth doing.

Bernice and Toshi Reagon performed for the closing plenary brunch. Since they also performed at the last Out & Equal Workplace Summit, I don’t have much to say about them. It was nice, but not particularly new for me.

After the plenary, my co-worker and I stuck around to participate in the feedback session with conference directors. While a lot of people raised issues that amounted to “why don’t I see my issue represented well at Creating Change?” I do think it says a lot that the directors listened respectfully for calls for more sexual freedom classes, more intersex education, inclusion of asexual issues, making space for atheists (that was me, of course), and the like. There were also some rather harsh (and, I believe, somewhat warranted) criticisms of the access for the disabled. In fairness, the issues were mostly the fault of the hotel (one participant referred to it as “an MC Escher Print” and another called it “the circles of hell” – referring to a set of circular balcony/walkways around the central tower, often requiring long walks to get to places like the food court or hotel lobby), but NGLTF did choose this hotel.

I can’t wait for next year (end of January in Denver, Colorado — mark your calendars!), but I’m exhausted, drained, and not ready to go back to work tomorrow. I know this picture of Pat and I is blurry, but it sorta fits with how we felt at the end of the conference.

Filed under: creating change, detroit, queer rights by Jere Keys