Tag Archives: bullying

Robert Reich: But What’s “Normal” Anyway?

Robert Reich in a small crowd of men. Bill Clinton is leaning down and touching Reich's cheek. The top of Reich's head is below Clinton's shoulders.

Laurie and Debbie say:

Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley . He served as Secretary of Labor in the Clinton administration, for which Time Magazine named him one of the 10 most effective cabinet secretaries of the twentieth century. He currently writes regularly at robertreich.substack.com, and for The Guardian.  While he generally writes about politics, from a perspective we both appreciate, today he took the time to write about his life, in Why I’m So Short.

From time to time I burden you with some personal stuff, based on my belief that our values begin with who we are and where we came from. Besides, I’ve been writing this daily letter to you for almost two years, and you have every right to know a bit more about me.

So today I want to get very personal and tell you why I’m so short — a condition that led to lots of bullying and ridicule when I was a kid, which in turn helped shape who I am.

When he failed to pass 5 feet, his mother, who had been expecting a growth spurt,

took me to see a doctor in New York who specialized in bone growth. He took a bunch of measurements, asked questions about the heights of my grandparents and great-grandparents (they were all normal), did some X-rays, drew some blood samples, and three weeks later phoned to say he had no idea why I was so short.

He talks about problems with dating, and about revisiting the reasons for his height when he and his wife started talking about having kids.

Medical science had advanced considerably over the two decades, because there was an answer to why I was so short.

I was a mutant. More specifically, I had inherited a mutation called Fairbanks disease, or multiple epiphyseal dysplasia — a rare genetic disorder that slows bone growth. (The actor Danny DeVito also has this condition.) Normal bones grow when cartilage is deposited at their ends. The cartilage then hardens to become additional bone. But my cartilage didn’t work that way. …

… the geneticist explained that the odds of passing this mutation to my children were very small. And even if they had it, the odds that it would slow their bone growth or cause any other irregularities, or be passed on to their own children, were miniscule.

We decided to have kids. And our sons turned out perfectly normal.

He then goes on to make the important point of the essay:

But what’s “normal” anyway? And why is normal so important?

I’ve had a wonderful life. I have a loving family. I’ve had good friends, work that I consider satisfying and important, reasonably good health except for the above-mentioned problems. So what if I’m very short?

Because he is one of the world’s most prominent little people, parents come to him for advice about short children:

I … tell them that if they or their children are desperate, they can resort to limb-lengthening surgeries, growth hormone treatments with unknown and potentially dangerous side effects, humatrope, and a wide variety of homeopathic or crank remedies.

But I gently urge them not to do any of these things. I tell them to love their short kids. Inundate them with affection, and they’ll be okay.

We both really appreciate this balanced view: there are options (we’ve written about limb-lengthening here and here) and you don’t have to use them. As Debbie said in the 2022 post linked above, “it could be about weight loss surgery, it could be about skin lightening, it could be about body hair removal, but this time it’s about limb-lengthening surgery.”

Reich quotes one pediatric endocrinologist as saying: “They want growth hormone, looking for a specific height. But this is not like Amazon; you can’t just place an order and make a child the height you want.”

He’s honest about the downsides of being short, including when he ran for office and that was all the media wanted to talk about. He cites some interesting studies about the actual lives of short people as opposed to the social assumptions about those lives. He points out the ways heightism is built into language. Think about the people we can “look up to.”

Mostly, however, he’s just talking about himself: what he’s been through, what he’s learned, how he sees himself now. And he wants his substantial subscribers’ list (over 2300 people have liked the post so far) to understand that it is possible to have a really great life without ever reaching 5 feet tall, and that being bullied sucks–but it isn’t necessarily enough reason to dislike or re-form your body.

Every voice for appreciating yourself as you are is valuable: Reich’s is only different because he can reach a wider audience than most.

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Debbie is no longer active on Twitter. Follow her on Mastodon.

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The Biggest Loser: Now Teaching Weight Cycling and Bullying to the Next Generation

Lynne Murray says:

We value children in America, but some more than others. Many, if not most, fat children learn very early that approval and sometimes even affection will be withheld unless and until they lose weight. Since no reliable method exists that will guarantee weight loss or prevent weight gain for most people, children–even toddlers–are thrown into a world of food deprivation and body anxiety. They would have to do the impossible simply to be accepted and loved.

The Biggest Loser (Golda Poretsky calls it Yelling at Fat People) gains a great deal of traction from the myth that extreme food reduction and extreme exercise cause permanent weight loss For an explosion of that lie, see Ottawa physician Yoni Freedhoff, M.D. on how this combination actively damages a person’s metabolism, setting up victims for short-term drastic weight loss followed by nearly unavoidable long-term weight regain

Now The Biggest Loser aims to extend its franchise to teach a new generation of young fat people just how worthless they are and how acceptable it is to let thin trainers bully them “for their own good.”  In a blog post coupled with a campaign to protest NBC’s decision to air this show for teenagers, Golda Poretsky describes this new frontier of child abuse:

Why should adults have all the fun of enforced starvation, dehydration, and emotional abuse on national TV? … [T]wo 13-year-olds and a 16-year-old … Are competing, sort of, in Season 14 of The Biggest Loser. But don’t worry, The Biggest Loser producers have the kids’ best interest at heart. The kids aren’t really competing. They’re just going to be “mentored.” It sounds like they’re just going to endure the dangerous aspects of the show without weigh-ins or any hope of winning money from it. I guess having the kids compete for money would send the wrong message. You wouldn’t want the kids to think that life is a competition where winning money is the important thing. They should definitely get the message that being thin is the only important thing. Way to go, NBC. Nice work.

Two authors who have written about fat adults are researching fat children’s experience for upcoming books and finding the stories of childhood suffering excruciating. Rebecca Jane Weinstein, author of Fat Sex: The Naked Truth (see my August 2012 review here) talks about the “profound pain” expressed in interviews for her upcoming book, Fat Kids: Truth and Consequences (Kickstarter fundraiser page at the link).

Kids are struggling. Fat kids, skinny kids, girl kids, and boy kids. The pressure to be thin is overwhelming. I was just a precursor to the devastation that is happening to kids because of weight, bullying, shame, fear, pills, surgeries, and profound pain. The childhood obesity crisis around the world may be troubling, but not only because kids might be fatter. And everyone, kids, their parents, and all the good intentioned people trying to protect the kids from their fat bodies, need to know the truth and consequences. We must protect their hearts, souls, and sanity as well. These are stories of fat kids, former fat kids, and kids who think they are fat.

Weinstein says:

[T]the interviews are sometimes hard for me to process. I cry with the people, not only after, although I try not to. I cry after as well, and then I am profoundly grateful for what they have shared. Their stories have put a tremendous amount in perspective, have helped me feel appreciated, shown me that I have a real purpose in life, and I know they have to be shared.

Lonie McMichael, PhD. is the author of Talking Fat: Health vs. Persuasion in the War on our Bodies and Acceptable Prejudice? Fat, Rhetoric and Social Justice, due in 2013 from Pearlsong Press. She is currently working on The Unlovable Child: Collateral Damage in the War on Obesity, described as a look at how …

… we have put our children on diets, forced them to exercise, and told them just how bad fat is all in the name of health. Yet, our children are not getting healthier or skinnier. What they are getting is terrified of being fat. In addition, if they are fat, they are being bullied and shamed – by their peers, by society, by the adults who supposedly care about them, even by our government – in misguided attempts at weight loss. Using the experiences of adults who were fat children … she explores the ways in which adults have healed from such traumas….[and] the long-term effects of trying to make our children into one-size-fits-all health obsessed drones.

Sharing stories can help, for example Cat Oake, the very confident woman who maintains Cat’s House of Fun (motto: “Changing the World’s View of Fat Chicks, One Visitor at a Time) has a section of page where people are invited to share stories of early life as fat kids entitled “I was a fat kid…this is my story.”

Oake says:

The goal of this site is simple…to share and to learn. Everyone has had a different set of life experiences…some great and some horrific. If you have no memories of being a fat child that were bad, then, by all means, share a happy story from your childhood. With any luck this site won’t turn into a gripe session, but rather an open, sharing diary about life as a fat child in our society.

The stories are heartrending. I’ve visited the page a few times to read them in small doses. Some of those who share their experiences have managed to fight through childhood pain to build rewarding lives. Others have reached adulthood and still blame themselves with anguish that has not diminished. For some reason the saddest to me were those who grew up being tormented for being fat and now see their children facing the same pain. Parents of fat children are often blamed and targeted for having “let their kids get that way.” Whether or not they were fat kids themselves, parents desperately wish to give their children a better experience. We’ve blogged about this in March, 2012 (including some great resources) here

There are no easy answers to healing a world view that rewards bullying of fat children. Calling out bullies wherever they flourish–including on network television–and naming their actions as damaging is an important part of the remedy. Two things I did were small, but I hope helpful: signing the petition against The Biggest Loser’s targeting of fat kids and contributing to the crowdsourced funding for Rebecca Jane Weinstein’s book (link above). One day and one small action at a time, we can let fat children who suffer know that some adults realize that the bullies are wrong and we are fighting every day to make it better.