Fat, Doctors, Bingo:Lots of Links

Lynne Murray says:

Haiku…Gesundheit!

Bigotry drowns the

cup of time. New voices rise,

birds sing at dawn. Hope.

Okay that’s my half-baked haiku about fat acceptance.

When Laurie asked me to guest blog I took a moment from my crisis du jour and ran my sieve-like brain through the net to come up with some heartening resources that sparked the hope part of the above poem.

Debbie’s recent post on Hanne Blank’s book Virgin, reminded me of a very useful letter-to-a-doctor Blank kindly shared with the size acceptance community, now archived on the web page of the amazing Stef.

The way the letter was presented to the doctor is as important as the letter itself.

I learned this the hard way when I tried simply bringing along NAAFA’s excellent Health Care Provider Info flyer to a potentially fat-hostile doctor (i.e., new doctor—if you have enough rotten experiences, you tend to see all doctors as hostile until proven helpful). Now I see that I shouldn’t have waited till I was naked under the tiny tissue cover up and the doctor launched into her diet spiel before remembering the flyer and hopping off the examining table to get it. I scared the hell out of the tiny Asian woman M.D., who literally jumped backwards in fear. “Oh No! Attack of the Naked Fat Woman!” was written all over her face. She read the flyer, put it in my file and cut short her diet talk, but we did not bond, to put it mildly. She found some unethical, though not illegal, ways to punish me later.

Much better would have been using a doctor’s urgent need to be informed and prepared BEFORE seeing the patient by making sure that she/he had time to read either the NAAFA flyer above or a letter such as Hanne Blank’s.

When I went to sea in a sieve on the net, I found some brilliant dialog and witty expressions of size acceptance rising. For example 29-year-old activist BStu’s Fat Hate Bingo Cards.

Kate Harding at Shapely Prose framed the her/history of the dialog as —“Inspired by the anti-feminist, white liberal, and sexual assault bingo cards,” (another amazingly creative idea!)

I also enjoyed the funny yet thoughtful responses to the Fat Hatred Bingo Cards by the awesome young woman who founded the rotund dot com.

So talk on, rock on, and so on!


Hanne Blank, fat, medicine, Lynne Murray, body image, size acceptance, feminism, bingo, medicine, doctors, Body Impolitic