Christine Schoenwald

"Throwing tons of time and energy into dieting instead of working on my novel."

I’m a survivor — of fat camp. How terrible could a weight-loss camp be? Well, it was bad enough that I’m still dealing with its after-effects decades later.

Christmas, Hanukkah, and Kwanzaa are nearly here. So, what do you do when your family doesn’t celebrate any holidays whatsoever?

I still went to the painful place of being fat-shamed and decided that was why he had refused to kiss me. The pain never fully went away.

Now I know that just because I’m fat doesn’t mean that I don’t have moments of fatphobia. My own fatphobia has taught me a lot.

“You’re fat and ugly,” I’d hear, or, “Look at your stomach, it’s disgusting!” This wasn’t a neighborhood bully taunting me on my way to school — this is what I said to myself all day long, well into adulthood.

I know there are far worse injustices happening in the world, but getting weighed in front of people smacks of fat-shaming, and feels incredibly invasive.

When the formerly fat spoke of their hardships, I didn’t take them seriously. I thought that without the problem of weight, their lives must be perfect.

A sad fact: Many men who are sexually attracted to fat women are ashamed of it. We need to talk about men who want sex with fat women but won't date them.

There isn't a competition between transgender women and cisgender women on who's the better woman. How you express your womanhood is up to you, as is whether or not you want to express it. It'd be better to widen the definition of a woman rather than limit it.