A new version of me.

It’s not shameful to be large, only if you think it is a bad thing.

This is the first time I open up about myself in a different way. My friends and colleagues know me as an avid social justice advocate. Before joining an international agency, my activism was more pronounced, but now I carry it through into the documents I write, into the meetings I participate in, into the conversations with colleagues who are decision-makers or who have strong influence on decision-makers.

Often my activism centers around gender and race, two of my main identifiers. When asked about myself, the first things that come to mind is that I am a cis-woman and that I am white but mixed race (European and Latin American). Both identifies come with immense privilege while also placing me at risk of experiencing sexism and racism.

Pero, this time, I want to write about a different identifier. In addition to being a white-passing Latin American cis-woman, I am a large woman.

When the above sentence makes people uncomfortable and if they immediately tell me, “You are not large!” or “Stop that! You are beautiful,” it is painful. It is painful because it is placing negative values on my largeness as well as negating my lived experience. People telling me that “I am not fat/large/big,” does not take away the fact that when I shop, I look for the larger sizes. Larger people are often thought to be less healthy, have lower self-esteem and lack motivation. Fatness has been vilified by Western popular culture and media, and those of us who don’t fit in (literally) are left to fend for ourselves to build up our self-esteem. Capitalism, white supremacy and patriarchy intertwine to make us feel absolutely awful. With this said, I am writing for the first time about my experience as a large woman.