About drmsmichelann

http://missmichelann.com

Prof, critical systems thinker, intersectional BOPO feminist, cyberpsychology researcher, writer, speaker, mom, dog stalker, wife, and deep-thinking sci-fi-loving nerd.

Posts by drmsmichelann

It was never about protection. It is always about control.

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How homophobic, transphobic, racist, and sexist misinformation persists.

people holding brown wooden signage during daytime
Photo by Alex Motoc on Unsplash

(Published 10/2022)

The world is on fire. In some places, quite literally. When things get scary, a big chunk of the human race decides that something else is the problem, and usually, that something else is a group of people they think they can oppress. But this is sublimation; usually, the oppression comes couched in words like “protection” and “safety.” The killings of women and protesters in Iran are in response to the death of a woman whose supposed “safety” was hindered by her incorrect hijab. The French government and now more European nations are somehow “protecting” women by not allowing them to cover up or wear the hijab as they wish. Are they protecting Muslim women from themselves or non-Muslim women from the threat of not seeing their bodies as commodities for commercial exploitation? Hmm. Or maybe it’s just flat-out racism and resistance to multiculturalism. In any case, nobody is being protected. They’re just being oppressed.

In the US, far-right candidates, pundits, judges, and elected officials are banning books on being black, gay, or anything other than their idealized. Leave it to Beaver’s fictional version of America to “protect” kids. Black kids might think they are oppressed if they know what microaggressions are! White kids might feel guilty if they understand the lived experiences of their black, gay, trans, or disabled peers! Trans and gay kids might expect basic human dignity and rights! Oh, noes! They might be able to discuss OBJECTIVE REALITY with one another and want to change things for the better!

Control, Mary. This is about control. Controlling the information our kids learn in school and controlling what is discussable and what isn’t—controlling our species’ means of production: people who make babies.

Every draconian law Texas has ever passed limiting access to abortion and family planning has been in the name of “protecting” women from harm. HB2, which I protested with thousands of other women in Texas, claimed that abortions are high risk (they are not) and that abortion clinics are unsafe (they are not). Women trying to obtain abortions already had to deal with hateful protestors, an invasive internal ultrasound, and read pamphlets full of misinformation about non-existent side effects. It was already fucked up. Now it’s just gone. Women in Texas cannot get abortions if they are raped, molested, high-risk, or have an unviable fetus. Women must travel out of state for a D&C if they miscarry or risk sepsis. It’s mind-boggling. Sarah Weddington, the attorney who successfully argued Roe v. Wade and served in the Texas Legislature, was a Texas woman. So were Ann Richards and Barbara Jordan. These women did not need the false protection of men; they fought for the rights and dignity of all people, helping society to see how it was failing and harming the most vulnerable. What happened?

Texas has one of the highest maternal mortality rates in the US, the highest in the developed world. Black women in Texas have a much higher maternal mortality rate than white women. Beyond the fact that this is incomprehensibly criminal, I think it’s safe to say that Texas legislators give zero fucks about women’s safety, whether pregnant or not.

Forcing children to give birth to their sexual abuser’s child is not about protecting anyone. It’s about ensuring the impregnator has more power than the pregnant person. Denying a person with a non-viable fetus or will soon be non-viable an abortion is life-threatening. It protects no one. It’s just about control. Denying Black women fundamental medical rights, pain control, necessary tests and procedures, or lifesaving interventions during birth is abhorrent. It’s about social control and sublimated fear based on 400 years of oppression.

Why do some humans seek to control other humans? Well, there are a few different answers to that. Some of it is economic. Creating a whole branch of fictional science about the genetic differences between dark-skinned and light-skinned people (essentially the creation of race as a concept) made America very, very rich. Slavery was the engine that drove our rapid expansion and eventual domination of the world economy. Its legacy persists in the high incarceration rates for Black people for minor offenses resulting in virtually unpaid labor. So more money for free labor.

Forcing people to gestate removes them from the workforce, impoverishes many, and risks the physical and mental health of the pregnant person and their family. But when you’re fighting for survival, it’s harder to fight for change.

But ultimately, this is all one giant self-own. Higher poverty rates mean less spending, which hurts the economy. Yanking women out of the workforce means a lower GDP. You can surf the wave of oppression and disenfranchisement for a little while if you are super privileged, but ultimately it erodes the fabric of the society in which you live, which will affect you too. Oppressive regimes always reach a tipping point where the population feels like they have nothing left to lose and fight back.

So no. Abortion bans are not about saving babies or protecting women. Book bans do not protect children. Mandating or outlawing the hijab protects nobody. Denying trans youth and adults access to medical care causes harm, not prevents it.

Under all this crazy lies one basic thing. Fear.

Specifically, existential fear – of death, illness, loss, and on a grander scale- of our survival as a species as we continue to fuck with the planet. This drives these increasingly pathetic yet deadly attempts at social control and power grabs from the local to the international level.

My dissertation research used defense mechanisms as an analytical lens to examine aggressive online behavior. So I have a lot of thoughts about how this plays out.

Sublimation is when we transform a fear (often repressed or unconscious) into something tangible we can project onto a group of people. It takes what we can’t deal with (childhood trauma, loss, etc.) and turns it into something tangible at which we can direct that energy. Hitler used this to great effect by making Jews the cause of all of Germany’s post-WWI loss’ ills. Jews had nothing to do with it, but they were a convenient and historically oppressed group, and blaming them gave form to the trauma that resulted from losing a world war and plunging the country into a deep financial depression.

We see this everywhere now. Everyone is the bogeyman. Trans kids. Feminists. Jews. Black people. Gay people. Parents of murdered children. Somehow groups of people with less power and less agency become the ones who have secret cabals that are controlling our minds with fluoridated water and space lasers. The WHO released a report that we need to drastically reduce our impact on the environment to avoid catastrophic global warming, but let’s just scream at each other about Kanye West instead. That should work out fine.

The purpose of defense mechanisms is to offload the stress associated with the repressed fear or trauma so we can function. In the short term and on an individual basis, it works. It may cause harm to those around you, but it discharges the energy associated with the fear or trauma for a little while and stabilizes your psyche. On a social level, it’s a fucking disaster.

We need to take a few deep breaths and look at the big picture. For our species to survive, we must stop victimizing each other and start using our collective frontal lobes to make major systemic changes to how we live in the world. We need to reverse population growth. We must remake our economic system as circular and self-sustaining instead of growth-dependent. We need to make sure all children have access to nutrition and education, and all people have access to family planning. We need to agree on and enforce human rights worldwide. Full stop.

This isn’t ideological; it’s survival. We are our own worst enemy and currently the planet’s worst enemy. We need all of us, not just a few unhinged billionaires, to work together to create a viable future for our species. We can do so much that is amazing. Can we stop reverting to our worst selves and put that energy toward peace, acceptance, and sustainable survival instead? Because that would be great.

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Aggression and Adaptation: A new working theory

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So I wrote my dissertation on the psychodynamics of online aggression. It was published in early 2017, just in time for the Trump Twitter phenomenon to start taking over the conversation about the power of social media to influence people. I was focused mainly on adaptive development.

My modest research showed a few interesting things:

Thing 1: If you agree with the premise that we are wired for adaptation (See the Freuds for defense mechanisms and George Vaillant for modern research on adaptation), then aggressive online discourse (arguing in the comments) may have a more significant developmental role, on both an individual and social level, than we have attributed to it.

Thing 2: At least in my sample at the time, which consisted of three discussions of a fatphobic YouTube video within the body-positive community (on three platforms), there were a lot of moderate distortions like projection and displacement, a smaller but significant amount of mature or adaptive behavior, and a statistically insignificant amount of psychotic behavior. In plain terms, many people wanted to argue about whether it was okay to be mean to fat people, but my sample of 150 comments across three platforms only included one violent comment. Given the attention paid to trolling and violent online behavior at the time, I concluded that we needed to pay more attention to adaptive behavior, as it was more significant and pervasive than truly maladaptive behavior.

Thing 3: This was the most experimental of my findings, but one pervasive theme that emerged from my analysis was the projected fear of death. People seemed motivated to predict fat people’s early demise to lessen their anxiety about existential realities like their own eventual demise.

Thing 4: (and this is where I just had an aha moment) There was a basic epistemological contradiction between a psychodynamic interpretation of online aggression and a sociological one. From a psychological perspective, people distort reality to partially, rather than fully, deal with it. Their psychological strength and experiences dictate how much they do this. Over time, they tend to distort less and deal with reality more as they grow in ego strength and experience.

On an individual level, displacement (projecting a quality onto a group of people) is more adaptive than projection (projecting a quality onto a single person) because it is more diffuse and less individualized. It’s less distorted. But from a sociological perspective, it seems like just the opposite. Prejudice is a pernicious bastard, and done en masse, it erodes society.

At the time, I couldn’t figure out how to reconcile these opposing viewpoints. How can what is good for individual development be shit for social progress, and vice versa? I’m more adept with developmental psychology than social psychology, so I just kind of sat with it and went, “huh.”

But the seven years since I finished my dissertation have been absolutely bonkers in terms of how the internet has grown, the growth of online communication, the spread of misinformation, and the sheer power of online discourse to affect the world. The weaponization of misinformation in this era has been breathtaking in the worst possible way. And in a truly frightening, chaotic era with both very real and imagined threats to our existence, many people have retreated behind the virtual walls of citadels of misinformation. A phenomenon that, from a psychodynamic perspective, looks like mass psychosis.

We are trying to grapple with pandemics, catastrophic climate change, and violent social unrest. Meanwhile, vast swaths of people are instead blaming vaccines instead of using them to protect themselves and others, targeting trans kids and their parents with harmful and fully debunked claims, and passing legislation to make teachers cease teaching anything that upsets middle-aged white men—and that’s just in the US.

So yeah, things have changed a bit since I wrote my hopeful, chirpy little dissertation. However, I’ve seen some synergy between how societies and individuals develop. There’s a saying in organizational studies, “Culture eats change for breakfast.” In organizational terms, that means that just because you hired a shiny, fancy CEO who made another company a lot of money, he or she may not be able to make shit happen at your company because the culture dictates what is and is not discussable and, therefore, executable. This is a thing I learned from my org development master’s, which I completed in 2007. When I was working on my Ph.D. I became rightly suspicious of a lot of the literature I’d studied in my previous program because it was super self-justifying of capitalism and mostly ignored any hint of structural inequality. We did not study Marx and grapple with the fact that capitalism is designed to extract maximum labor at minimal cost and pass the profits up to shareholders and executives. No, we sure did not do that thing. So while I still teach some organizational theory, I’m pretty sparing as I think a lot of it is willfully blind to how exploitative most industries are.

But back to “Culture eats change for breakfast.” What if it wasn’t just organizational cultures that did this? What if national cultures and ethnic cultured and religious cultures, and pop cultures did this too? What if social systems had enormous power to push or hinder individual development? I mean, it seems obvious now that I’m typing it, but what if we get stuck in a displacement loop, and we can’t break out of it because nobody around us can, and alternate viewpoints become undiscussable, just like they do in organizations?

So it’s the 1930s in Germany, and people are suffering after a grueling war, and there are these centuries-old, normalized (inaccurate) prejudices against Jews that turn into crazy conspiracy theories that make people feel like if they just follow the screaming mustachioed guy, all their suffering might go away because it’s easier to blame it on the Jews than deal with poverty and the horror of modern warfare?

Or it’s 2020, and the thing scientists said was going to happen any minute happened, and we have a worldwide pandemic that’s killing thousands of people a day. Still, it’s easier to blame the Chinese and Scary Jews and ignore established science than to wear a mask and wait for a vaccine and deal with how little power we have over the forces of nature that we have been fucking with at our peril. So our emotional immaturity leads to echo chambers of misinformation that feeds our immaturity and keeps us from working together to change for the better.

In the 1960s, Martin Luther King Jr. wasn’t successful at securing the right to vote for millions of Black Americans because he was a good orator. He forced white Americans to watch black children being savaged by police dogs and peacefully protesting Black men and women being beaten to death until white America had to face their prejudice and its impact on Black citizens and feel ashamed enough to support change. He and other activists disrupted the culture of white displacement (prejudice), at least partially, allowing for new laws and an end to some of the worst aspects of the Jim Crow era. Of course, prejudices still simmer under the surface and bubble up when people need someone to blame, but culture can be changed. It can push us back into our hindbrains or toward something closer to equity.

The internet is many things, and the one thing I have always believed is, like religion and governments and art, it is us. It is humanity doing human things. But I think I underestimated how networked mass communication changed things. I think the internet was disruptive, like the printing press or the wheel was disruptive, and we are still pretty fucking disrupted. I have no idea how this all falls out and how long it takes. I don’t know if we do ourselves in and the planet dramatically cuts our numbers down to a manageable level or if we figure out how to work together on a more inclusive, global scale. I know that the internet aids compassion and solidarity in many ways, just as it aids division. But I think it’s time to take a systems perspective on human development and recognize that while we are working on our individual development, other systems are working on us.

Our belief systems come from our cultural influences, which can determine whether we see another person as a sibling or an alien. I hope, for all our sakes, that we can break down some of the current mass displacement and projection and start to connect. But it will take courage. The courage to be uncomfortable, to feel guilt and shame, and to recognize that we are flawed. It will take the courage to make amends and then make more mistakes and make amends for those too. It will take the courage to stand up for those who are marginalized to those who have power. We can’t afford to hide behind easy-to-digest prejudices and misinformation anymore. We don’t have time.

The Summer Slide is Bullshit

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Brains need more than one thing to develop.

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My kid had a tough year in math class, so we sucked it up and got them a neurodivergent-friendly tutor. It was expensive. We paid $300 per month for one session a week for most of the school year – the company locked us into a six-month contract, which I had to make sure didn’t get re-upped since I didn’t want to spend the summer paying them $300 a month for my kid to not do math.

I couldn’t cancel online – I had to set up a call with a lovely lady who spent fifteen minutes trying to upsell me on continuing over the summer. This was just her job, and she was working from a script provided by the company. However, the summer slide fearmongering was just stupid.

I know there are lots of data about how kids “lose” learning over the summer. This has only gotten more hysterical since Covid and the perception that kids “lost” a year of learning/development/existence. It’s bullshit.

Kids don’t stop developing.

Unless your kid is seriously neglected, food insecure, or abused, they will continue to develop during the summer, whether going to camp, playing video games, biking around the neighborhood, or sleeping until noon. Brains need downtime to develop. Brains are not computers, and even computers overheat. During quarantine, my kid learned how to play a bunch of games with friends collaboratively, games that developed communication, strategy, and pattern recognition. They improved their reading by playing games that had major text components. They learned about the world around them and continued growing into their identity.

These same things happen during the summer, but happily now with more outdoors and face-to-face interaction. That said, just as I spent hours on the phone with my friends when I was 13, my kid will Facetime for hours with friends while watching videos or playing games, or doing art. ALL OF THIS IS DEVELOPMENT.

Development isn’t just what you can track with a poorly designed multiple-choice test. (Those tests are heavily biased towards neurotypical, affluent, white kids.) Development is kids’ brains specializing through neural pruning, their bodies integrating the effects of puberty, their growing awareness of the world in which they live, and their strengthening bonds with their peers.

Development happens whether or not you want it to, and you can mostly only fuck it up. We have this dated, disproven idea that kids must be programmed, molded, and shaped into people. As parents and educators, particularly of adolescents, it’s our job to give them the tools they need, support them, and mostly stay out of the way—not try to control everything they watch, eat, read, and do.

Next week my kid is going to run around in the woods with a bunch of other kids pretending to be demigods. Then they’re going to sleep for a week. It’s all good.

So if my kid needs to review a few math concepts in the fall, I’ll support them with whatever they need. But I’m not micromanaging their summer out of fear that everything they learned will magically fall out of their head. They’re too busy learning new skills, new ways of relating and discovering new interests and talents. Let them be.

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Gender, Sex, Kids, and Transphobia

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What grooming isn’t.

It’s hard to write something that hasn’t already been said about the insane spate of anti-trans, anti-gay, anti-drag, and generally anti-anyone-except-straight-white-dudes laws being passed in my state and many others. My lived experience informs how I’ve experienced these things in several ways. I’m a college professor in the human sciences in a red state at a public university. I’m the mom of a disabled gender-nonconforming teen in a red state at a public school. I’m a scholar of sociology, psychology, and the psychodynamics of online behavior. I’m a privileged white lady. I will try to write about these issues from each perspective and see what emerges.

So. First, I’m a mom. No, that’s not my primary identity, but it certainly colors how I experience the madness that’s taken hold in my state. My kid uses they/them pronouns. They’ve experienced very little transphobia – a few olds who don’t get it, and some medical people who sucked. Let me say having a nonbinary presenting kid is amazing. By the time I was my kid’s age, I had been sexually harassed, come on to, and creeped on many times by older men, had my body continually commented on by women, and had been harassed by older boys. I had a feminine body, and I’m generally a femme person, which signaled HARASS THE CRAP OUT OF ME to everyone around me. Also, it was the 80s, so feminism was over (hahaha), and we were supposed to be flattered when dudes exposed themselves to us. My kid has experienced none of this. They took a good look at gender and said, “No, thank you.” I love this for them. I love how they develop as a human instead of a girl or boy. I love their gender-nonconforming friends and allies. I mostly love their school and supportive teachers. Having a gender-nonconforming kid is a joy.

This is balanced by the mind-numbing fear and rage imposed on me by a state targeting kids like mine and parents like me. I have a bit of protection since I live in a liberal city (and am privileged). Still, most of the red states are creeping into controlling large, liberal municipalities and stripping what little protection we have. Our doctors are leaving in droves. Our teachers are leaving in droves. Kids who need transition medical care must leave warm, supportive communities and move to new states to survive. And that’s only if the families can afford it. The idea that we somehow maintain freedom and protect families by targeting a small and very vulnerable population of KIDS is nauseating. So let’s get into the science.

I teach a gender and sexuality class at a major university in Texas. Most of my classes have some sociological content, as I am in a Human Development and Family Sciences department, which studies the health and well-being of children and families. The basics of gender are this. Humans are not a particularly dimorphous species. This means that there are relatively minor biological differences between males and females. However, the species have many variations (we look many different ways and have different bodies). That said, species that rely on sexual reproduction need a sex that provides genetic diversity (males) and one that builds new members of the species (females). Not all members of the species can do either of those things. Whether you can fertilize an egg or grow an embryo has exactly nothing to do with who you are, who you love, what you’re good at, or what colors you like. Gender is psychological and psychosocial. It’s a thing we may (or may not) feel and a thing that is imposed on us by our social system. Over the last centuries or millennia, depending on who you talk to, the idea of gender has been used to create harmful and made-up hierarchies. This also applies to race, another idea created to justify exploitation and mass murder.

Some people heavily identify with a gender; others do not. Those of us who do may not identify with the gender associated with our genitals because GENDER IS AN IDEA, NOT A FACT. Some cultures assign roles based on how people function as adults or teenagers rather than on reproductive capacity. Some cultures don’t really define gender at all. What we associate with gender changes constantly, even in cultures as gender-obsessed as ours. Flight attendants and cheerleaders used to be male-dominated, masculine professions. Pink used to be for boys, and blue used to be for girls. All of this stuff is mutable and heavily monetized and marketed.

What we are wired for is connection. Humans are social creatures, and all these ways we create hierarchies around ideas like gender and race interrupt connection. Research shows that our ability to connect with our loved ones and our communities is one of the most significant correlates of longevity. Connection = health and well-being. Disconnection = unhappiness and shortened life span. Tell me again how targeting people for being too different from our made-up, exclusionary norm is better. It’s not. #science

I study things like aggression, trauma, and online behavior. The obsession with policing ourselves, each other, and particularly children has nothing to do with safety and everything to do with maintaining social control. Far wiser people than me have written about this extensively. I’ll summarize what I’ve observed, studied, and found most helpful. The dying ruling class of this country is power-grabbing under the banner of religion, freedom, and democracy while representing quite the opposite. Unfortunately, those of us with proximity to that class often collaborate with them to our detriment to maintain dominance over everyone else. It’s kind of a mass psychotic Tragedy of the Commons. The Tragedy of the Commons is a parable that shows what happens when people overuse shared resources — everybody loses. But when we perceive a shortage of that resource, we have to fight our individual instinct to hoard it and understand how that will ultimately doom us and our community. However, regarding the perception of power in our culture, it’s not enough to hoard it because you don’t want to lose it. We will actually vote against things that are in our self-interest to make sure nobody else gets them, either. That’s a special kind of stupid. Not run-of-the-mill, short-sighted human stupid, but really ugly stupid. This is why our healthcare system is a mess, we have massive poverty and inequality despite being one of the wealthiest countries in the world, and we have mass shootings on a weekly, if not daily, basis. Power and proximity to power seem to rot our brains.

One particularly insane bit of misinformation by the hang-on-to-power-at-any-cost population that has boggled my mind is using the word “groomer” to refer to LGBTQ people. A person who grooms a child manipulates them so they can sexually abuse them without being caught. Grooming is abhorrent. It has nothing to do with being gay or straight or trans or cis. The vast majority of sexual abusers are straight men. The institutions with endemic sexual abuse issues include the Catholic Church, the Baptist Church, and the Boy Scouts. The people spouting the LGBTQ grooming nonsense are equating sexual abuse — nonconsensual sexual activity between children and adults — with being gender nonconforming or gay.

THESE ARE NOT THE SAME THINGS.

Trans people, drag queens, and gay people are not pedophiles. They never have been. You can’t make your kid gay or straight, and you can’t make them cis or trans. They are just themselves. You can only make them feel terrible about being themselves or support them. LGBTQ kids have a much higher rate of suicide ideation than the general population, and that was before Texas and Florida and Tennessee and Oklahoma, etc. tried to legislate them out of existence. History will not look kindly on this era. Kids who sit at the intersection of multiple identities toiling under newly minted human rights abuses like anti-immigrant laws, book bans, and anti-DEI laws will be hit much harder still.

How did we get here? How did we reach the point where targeting children is considered sane and loving and supporting them is not? As a parent, a professor, and a scholar, I have lots of ideas, but really, I don’t know. I know that we have to fight misinformation. We have to stand up for everyone’s rights because “there is no such thing as other people’s children.” (Quote by Glennon Doyle) Your cis-presenting kid is facing similar stuff to what my nonbinary kid is — less protection against sexual assault, no access to reproductive health care, and less protection against racism, hate speech, and dumbed-down education. Kids of color are having their histories forcibly erased from school curriculums and removed from libraries.

Parenting is simultaneously the most joyful and terrifying thing I have ever experienced. All the time. I want a better future for my kid and their peers because that’s what we’re supposed to do. Give our kids a better future. Give them room to grow and develop and spread their wings. Provide a safe base when they need love and acceptance. Texas is making that harder for a whole lot of parents right now, and it’s wrong. Y’all means All. Protect trans kids, Black kids, disabled kids, and immigrant kids, and push back against the assholes who will trade our kids for one more second of useless power.

Kids and Gender

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Why “let kids be kids” is not the argument you think it is.

In the run-up to the election, the far right is attacking trans kids, their parents, doctors, and therapists in vile and dangerous ways. I’ve waded into some really ugly discussions on social media because I teach gender and sexuality and the amount of disinformation out there is bonkers and incredibly frightening. One of the main dog whistles I’ve seen is “you can do what you want if you are an adult, but let kids be kids.” This is not the argument you think it is. Let’s break it down, shall we?

Human male and female bodies are not very different. Sexual dimorphism, or the difference between the sexes in a species, is low in humans as compared to other species. The idea of the sexes being opposite is made up; it supports hierarchies where men are perceived as stronger and more intelligent, which is categorically untrue. On average, women live longer and have more robust immune systems than men. This makes sense as female bodies build whole new humans with their bodies. There is far more genetic variation between individual humans than there is between men and women. Unfortunately, most of the history of Western science has been dominated by white men who assumed they were the genetic ideal, giving rise to horribly inaccurate theories about the difference in women’s bodies (and non-white bodies) that have hampered both the study and practice of medicine. If you want to dive into this rabbit hole, I have a whole list of articles here. Enjoy.

We indoctrinate kids with made-up stuff about the genders from the time they are born. (Or before, if you think a gender-reveal party is a good idea.) How societies decide what is masculine and feminine is vastly different and is always changing. I was told I should put a scratchy headband with a pink fake flower on my (never sleeping) newborn’s head so everyone would know they were a girl. Why? Babies are just babies. Before puberty, kids are physically incredibly similar. Yet we tell them what colors they should like and dislike, what activities they should do and not do, and we pass on all the bullshit we haven’t unpacked about what is okay for boys and girls. This is indoctrination—not letting your kid self-express in whatever way feels best for them. I’m a pretty femme person, but I went through a tomboy phase. My androgynous kid had a princess phase. Kids should be allowed to play with gender roles or ignore them based on their needs, and parents and teachers should support that.

Play, which is vital to brain development, means trying on different roles, costumes, and ideas. Yet as a society, we constantly police kids’ behavior based on their genitals and tell them what kind of play is “natural” and “unnatural” for them. NOTHING ABOUT GENDER ROLES IS NATURAL. IT IS MADE UP. Some kids feel strongly feminine or masculine, regardless of their sex assigned at birth, and some don’t. This is normal. Forcing your kid who hates dresses to wear one or not letting your kid take dance lessons because they are male is indoctrination. It diminishes your kid’s confidence and joy. As a parent, even one who teaches the science of gender and sexuality to college students, I still run up against my social programming about gender. I work hard to unpack it and ensure that my indoctrination doesn’t become my kid’s trauma. My job as a parent is to help my kid grow fully into themselves, not force them into an arbitrary box that doesn’t fit.

So when someone says, “let kids be kids” I say yes! Let them wear what they want, do the activities they want, and explore their world and themselves without our bullshit, made-up ideas about what boys and girls are supposed to be like. Ultimately, forcing gender norms on kids makes them feel less-than or wrong because NOBODY totally fits what it is to be an ideal man or woman, no matter how hetero and gender-conforming we are. That is by design. It keeps us stressed out, controllable, and buying lots of shit we don’t need to compensate for our feeling of wrongness.

Unfortunately, the “let kids be kids” crowd assumes that gender norms are innate and that being trans is a trend. They are not, and it is not. Let me break it down.

FACT:

Gender-affirming care is medically sound. Every major medical organization and countless peer-reviewed scientific studies have shown that forcing a non-gender conforming child to conform to the gender they were assigned at birth (or worse, assigning an intersex kid a gender through nonconsensual surgeries) is incredibly bad for their mental and physical health.

FACT:

Gender-affirming care is lifesaving. One in four queer kids (that’s gay, bi, trans, nonbinary — anything that’s not cis-gendered and heterosexual) attempts suicide. That number goes up if their family and community try to force them to be straight/cisgender and down if they have gender-affirming family, friends, medical providers, and schools. So using a trans or nonbinary kid’s pronouns and getting them gender-affirming therapy and medical care is, quite literally, suicide prevention.

FALSE:

Most nonbinary or trans kids who take puberty blockers or hormone replacement therapy regret it. No. Somebody made this shit up and put it on the internet, so people believe it. It is false. Recent studies show that 99% of kids who medically (that means hormones, not surgery) do not choose to detransition. The main reasons trans and nonbinary people stop HRT (hormone replacement therapy) are cost, social stigma, or medical reasons. Also, it’s all reversible. It’s low risk, and it could save your kid’s life. If your kid says they are trans, find them a gender-affirming doctor and therapist and get them what they need.

FALSE:

Parents are amputating their kids’ genitals. No, they are not. Genital reassignment surgery is painful, invasive, and risky. Nobody does it before adulthood, and many trans people don’t do it at all. For an underage person to have top surgery (creation or removal of breasts), they have to pass a whole lot of psych and medical evaluations, and it’s very rare before adulthood.

FALSE:

Being trans is a trend or a “social contagion.” Once again, bullshit. Trans and nonbinary people have always existed. There are names for them in most languages, and every culture treats gender differently. Most of what we think of as feminine and masculine is socially constructed, varies widely by culture and time, and is constantly changing. Social contagion theory has been debunked many, many times.

___

Using trans kids as a punching bag for political points is abhorrent. As humans, we fear what we don’t know, and the current crop of far-right candidates play on that fear in a way that will continue to cost lives and cause irreparable harm to families and children. (Side note – it’s not just conservatives spouting this nonsense, they’re just the ones currently trying to trade on it for votes.) If you feel uncomfortable with trans or nonbinary people, or you feel really strongly about conforming to gender norms, that is a you thing. You may have a happier, fuller life if you unpack what makes you feel like deviating from the current norm is dangerous or wrong because those norms are always changing and rarely attainable. There is nothing more empowering for a kid than letting them be fully themselves. So yes, let kids be kids by letting them explore gender (or not) in whatever ways they want and wholeheartedly supporting them.

It was never about protection. It is always about control.

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How homophobic, transphobic, racist, and sexist misinformation persists.

people holding brown wooden signage during daytime
Photo by Alex Motoc on Unsplash

The world is on fire. In some places, quite literally. When things get scary, a big chunk of the human race decides that something else is the problem, and usually, that something else is a group of people they think they can oppress. But this is sublimation; usually, the oppression comes couched in words like “protection” and “safety.” The killings of women and protesters in Iran are in response to the death of a woman whose supposed “safety” was hindered by her incorrect hijab. The French government and now more European nations are somehow “protecting” women by not allowing them to cover up or wear the hijab as they wish. Are they protecting Muslim women from themselves or non-Muslim women from the threat of not seeing their bodies as commodities for commercial exploitation? Hmm. Or maybe it’s just flat-out racism and resistance to multiculturalism. In any case, nobody is being protected. They’re just being oppressed.

In the US, far-right candidates, pundits, judges, and elected officials are banning books on being black, gay, or anything other than their idealized. Leave it to Beaver’s fictional version of America to “protect” kids. Black kids might think they are oppressed if they know what microaggressions are! White kids might feel guilty if they understand the lived experiences of their black, gay, trans, or disabled peers! Trans and gay kids might expect basic human dignity and rights! Oh, noes! They might be able to discuss OBJECTIVE REALITY with one another and want to change things for the better!

Control, Mary. This is about control. Controlling the information our kids learn in school and controlling what is discussable and what isn’t—controlling our species’ means of production: people who make babies.

Every draconian law Texas has ever passed limiting access to abortion and family planning has been in the name of “protecting” women from harm. HB2, which I protested with thousands of other women in Texas, claimed that abortions are high risk (they are not) and that abortion clinics are unsafe (they are not). Women trying to obtain abortions already had to deal with hateful protestors, an invasive internal ultrasound, and read pamphlets full of misinformation about non-existent side effects. It was already fucked up. Now it’s just gone. Women in Texas cannot get abortions if they are raped, molested, high-risk, or have an unviable fetus. Women must travel out of state for a D&C if they miscarry or risk sepsis. It’s mind-boggling. Sarah Weddington, the attorney who successfully argued Roe v. Wade and served in the Texas Legislature, was a Texas woman. So were Ann Richards and Barbara Jordan. These women did not need the false protection of men; they fought for the rights and dignity of all people, helping society to see how it was failing and harming the most vulnerable. What happened?

Texas has one of the highest maternal mortality rates in the US, which has the highest in the developed world. Black women in Texas have a much higher maternal mortality rate than white women. Beyond the fact that this is incomprehensibly criminal, I think it’s safe to say that Texas legislators give zero fucks about women’s safety, whether pregnant or not.

Forcing children to give birth to their sexual abuser’s child is not about protecting anyone. It’s about ensuring the impregnator has more power than the pregnant person. Denying a person with a fetus that is non-viable or will soon be non-viable an abortion is life-threatening. It protects no one. It’s just about control. Denying Black women fundamental medical rights, pain control, necessary tests and procedures, or lifesaving interventions during birth is abhorrent. It’s about social control and sublimated fear based on 400 years of oppression.

Why do some humans seek to control other humans? Well, there are a few different answers to that. Some of it is economic. Creating a whole branch of fictional science about the genetic differences between dark-skinned and light-skinned people (essentially the creation of race as a concept) made America very, very rich. Slavery was the engine that drove our rapid expansion and eventual domination of the world economy. Its legacy persists in the high incarceration rates for Black people for minor offenses resulting in virtually unpaid labor. So more money for free labor.

Forcing people to gestate removes them from the workforce, impoverishes many, and risks the physical and mental health of the pregnant person and their family. But when you’re fighting for survival, it’s harder to fight for change.

But ultimately, this is all one giant self-own. Higher poverty rates mean less spending, which hurts the economy. Yanking women out of the workforce means a lower GDP. You can surf the wave of oppression and disenfranchisement for a little while if you are super privileged, but ultimately it erodes the fabric of the society in which you live, which will affect you too. Oppressive regimes always reach a tipping point where the population feels like they have nothing left to lose and fight back.

So no. Abortion bans are not about saving babies or protecting women. Book bans do not protect children. Mandating or outlawing the hijab protects nobody. Denying trans youth and adults access to medical care causes harm, not prevents it.

Under all this crazy lies one basic thing. Fear.

Specifically, existential fear – of death, illness, loss, and on a grander scale- of our survival as a species as we continue to fuck with the planet. This drives these increasingly pathetic yet deadly attempts at social control and power grabs from the local to the international level.

My dissertation research used defense mechanisms as an analytical lens to examine aggressive online behavior. So I have a lot of thoughts about how this plays out.

Sublimation is when we transform a fear (often repressed or unconscious) into something tangible we can project onto a group of people. It takes what we can’t deal with (childhood trauma, loss, etc.) and turns it into something tangible at which we can direct that energy. Hitler used this to great effect by making Jews the cause of all of Germany’s post-WWI loss’ ills. Jews had nothing to do with it, but they were a convenient and historically oppressed group, and blaming them gave form to the trauma that resulted from losing a world war and plunging the country into a deep financial depression.

We see this everywhere now. Everyone is the bogeyman. Trans kids. Feminists. Jews. Black people. Gay people. Parents of murdered children. Somehow groups of people with less power and less agency become the ones who have secret cabals that are controlling our minds with fluoridated water and space lasers. The WHO released a report that we need to drastically reduce our environmental impact to avoid catastrophic global warming, but let’s just scream at each other about Kanye West instead. That should work out fine.

The purpose of defense mechanisms is to offload the stress associated with the repressed fear or trauma so we can function. In the short term and on an individual basis, it works. It may cause harm to those around you, but it discharges the energy associated with the fear or trauma for a little while and stabilizes your psyche. On a social level, it’s a fucking disaster.

We need to take a few deep breaths and look at the big picture. For our species to survive, we must stop victimizing each other and start using our collective frontal lobes to make major systemic changes to how we live in the world. We need to reverse population growth. We must remake our economic system as circular and self-sustaining instead of growth-dependent. We need to make sure all children have access to nutrition and education and all people have access to family planning. We need to agree on and enforce human rights worldwide. Full stop.

This isn’t ideological; it’s survival. We are our own worst enemy, and we are currently the planet’s worst enemy. We need all of us, not just a few unhinged billionaires, to work together to create a viable future for our species. We can do so much that is amazing. Can we just stop reverting to our worst selves and put that energy toward peace, acceptance, and sustainable survival instead? Because that would be great.

What is my lane?

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One of the most important things I’ve grappled with as a teacher is how to be empathetic, caring, and supportive to students while not crossing ethical boundaries. My work in Trauma-Informed Pedagogy (TIP) has been a big part of this, as have my studies of pedagogy, psychology, sociology, leadership, and ethics. But it goes back even further—when I was an undergraduate voice student and later a young professional opera singer, most of the voice teachers I interacted with were super fused with their students in one way or another. They gave relationship advice, screamed at us, critiqued our bodies, and in some cases, had intimate relationships with us. This happened across the field also with conductors, directors, and other people in positions of authority.

I sometimes joke (but not really) that I got a degree in leadership and ethics because my former career had none. This is an oversimplification—what we often had was leadership in the absence of ethics. The “artist temperament” was used to gloss over things like psychological abuse, sexual assault, and sexual harassment. I witnessed many instances of highly effective, but totally unethical leadership in my first career. A talented conductor can still be an asshole and a sexual predator. A seasoned director can produce an amazing show and also be a cruel sociopath. They’re not mutually exclusive and they don’t cancel each other out. But we didn’t have HR departments watching for violations of statutes like the ADA, or the Civil Rights Act, or Title IX. We should have—but we didn’t.

I left opera because something was deeply wrong with the field and my growing awareness of this wrongness made it impossible to stay. While some of my experiences with singing were transcendent, it didn’t change the fact that it was mostly dehumanizing and awful. Auditions just sucked. Singing for a bunch of people whose job was to disqualify me, over and over again, sucked the joy right out of me. Being in a field where it is perfectly acceptable to be discriminated against for your beauty, size, height, race, and many other things that have nothing to do with your voice and musicianship was just ugly and demeaning. Having to explain to my voice teachers that emotional abuse was 1) unacceptable and 2) ineffective, got really old after fifteen years. Don’t even get me started on sexual harassment. It was so normalized that it barely registered on my radar. Decades later, in the wake of #metoo, I had to take a hard look at many of my experiences and recognize that they were often coercive and nonconsensual.

So a good part of the rest of my life (age 30 on) has been centered around figuring out who I am, what I’m good at, and what my lane is. There’s a lot of crowing about “staying in your lane” on social media or directed at artists whose opinions differ from their fans or whatever, but I mean it in a different way. Here are the big questions I’ve been asking myself over the last 20 years:

  • What am I really gifted at?
  • What makes me feel fulfilled?
  • What are the healthy limits around my assigned roles (such as mother, wife, teacher, and friend)?
  • What do healthy boundaries look like when I have a lot more power than the people I work with? (What are the ethical limits to my relationships with students? To my child?)
    • How do I support my child without diminishing or parentifying them?
    • How do I support my students but not attempt to take responsibility for problems I am not qualified to handle (drug addiction, eating disorders, mental illness, traumatic events)?
  • Where is the line between support and caring, and crossing into territory that needs to be handled by someone in a different lane, like a therapist, or nutritionist, or doctor? How do I hold that line compassionately?
  • How do I hold space for other people’s emotions and experiences while making sure my own boundaries are healthy and not fused? (If I experience secondary trauma from hearing about a traumatic event, how do I manage that?)
  • Where do I have the right to speak authoritatively and where do I not? (I piss off a very small percentage of white dudes each academic year who think that talking about the developmental effects of family child separation or racism is somehow not based in the science of my discipline. It is, but I am not an authority on many things and should not speak to them authoritatively. )
  • How does my positionality—my privilege and place in society, limit or increase the ways in which I should take up space?
    • When am I ethically obligated to speak out?
    • When am I ethically obligated to leave space for others to speak out?
    • When should I give up my space to others so they can be heard?

All of these questions have come up repeatedly during my academic teaching career. I’ve done a whole lot of ranting about the empathy gap among my colleagues, but some of that comes from our utter lack of training. College teachers are not taught how to teach. We’re not taught the ethics of teaching (and grad school is at least exploitative and often abusive so we don’t have good examples). We’re not taught to recognize how our privilege affects how we perceive our students’ struggles. We’re definitely not taught how to handle student trauma or crisis. K-12 teachers do certifications and ongoing education, but we are assumed to have everything we need because we know a bunch of stuff about one area of scholarship. We’re not taught how the ADA, Civil Rights Act, and Title IX affect our students and our jobs, beyond surface-levelˆ mandated training. So it’s somewhat understandable that my colleagues balk when I talk about understanding and responding to student trauma. Nobody told them that was part of the job—but it is.

I’ve gone about finding the answers to these questions in a variety of ways. I’ve talked to my therapists about things like processing secondary trauma and holding healthy boundaries. I’ve studied psychological theories that help me understand how and when unhealthy fusion and transference happen and how to avoid it. I’ve studied and explored many spiritual paths to understand what makes me feel centered and fulfilled. And I’ve studied ethics and leadership to understand the responsibilities that come with power. Most recently, I’ve learned about social justice, intersectionality, and the history of oppressions in the US in an attempt to better serve my diverse students and community and to minimize the harm I can thoughtlessly cause with my privilege. I’ve also leaned on my TAs, who are often from different backgrounds and have different knowledge areas. I still have to be aware of power distance—because I am their pseudo-employer—but recognizing that people with less status may have more experience or knowledge than I do in a given area has saved my ass many a time.

This is not a checklist for perfection. In fact, I think humility is possibly the best trait to cultivate if you have the ability to influence others. If you are in a position where you teach or parent or treat or manage other humans, you need to cultivate humility. I have fucked up on all of these things many times. But if I had fucked up, rationalized it, and moved on, I would have continued to do harm and I would be an unethical jerk. Unfortunately, those of us driven to learn all the things, like academics, or be the best at things, like artists, often resort to defensiveness rather than recognizing that we don’t know everything and our power gives us many opportunities to cause harm. The challenge of fucking up is recognizing that it is also an opportunity for growth. I know one more thing that I didn’t know before, and I can choose not make that mistake next time.

Early in my teaching career, I was having adult undergraduates build personal websites for a career development course. I required that all of them put good headshots on their home pages. One student kept avoiding it. I tried to explain that it was really important, but she avoided discussing it with me. We became friends after she graduated, and one night over cocktails, she told me it was because her culture doesn’t think it’s okay for a woman to put her picture on the internet, and her family would judge her. It had never crossed my mind that it was a cultural thing. It should have, but it didn’t, because I am super white and just didn’t think to ask. Now I do. I have my students do LinkedIn profiles with photos, but I also give them a pass on it if they tell me they don’t want to include a photo for any reason. So for the low, low price of apologizing to my former student for being an idiot, I learned something that positively affected all my future students.

When I taught people my own age, I would respond to overtures of friendship if I was interested and I was no longer their teacher. As I moved to traditional undergraduates, it became clear this would not work. There is too much power distance between a 45-year-old professor and a 20-year-old undergraduate. This doesn’t mean that my relationship with all my students ends when they graduate—I remain available to those that are interested, but in a mentorship role, not a friendship role. We chat over zoom about career stuff, they update me on their grad school admissions, or sometimes just ask for advice. While with adult undergraduates I had to prove my worth as an authority figure in their age range, with traditional undergraduates I have to break down some of the power distance in order to engage them fully in the material, but not to the extent that I pretend I’m one of them. I think of my role as “weird professor aunt” rather than “weird peer with specific knowledge.”

I figured all of this out on my own, and with the help of my own good professors, therapists, and friends. I learned by example, both good and bad, and I learned from my many, many mistakes. Parenting, too, is an endless exercise in humility, guilt, joy, pride, and frustration. Our society makes a huge mistake by discounting the experiences of parenthood on the workplace. I was a far less empathetic person before I had a kid and had to face my daily failures. I used to freak out every time I had to teach attachment theory because I was sure I had totally fucked up my kid. I was also far less forgiving of myself and others. Eventually, I realized that nobody does parenting perfectly because there’s no such thing. You’re different people and sometimes you don’t mesh. And sometimes you have to pass the ball to another person. When my kid was having anxiety after a couple of really scary life events, I got them a therapist because I knew that helping them work through the trauma was not something I could do on my own.

The same thing applies to my students—I’m a caring, responsible adult, but I’m not a doctor, psychiatrist, therapist, or nutritionist. I have a list of those people to refer them to when needed. And I have my own people for when I need the same help.

Anyway, I think this is the beginning of a larger body of work. I think knowing your lane is the heart of what I’ve tried to do and be in the second half of my life, and I think it can be helpful to others. How have you learned what your lane is? And how have you learned what it isn’t?

To my fellow educators at the end of another hard year of teaching

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We all need grace, and that includes our students.

Education has always been a difficult field in the US. It’s underpaid, under-resourced, and underappreciated. This differs between primary, secondary, and higher ed, but less than we often think. We hear stories about elementary school teachers having to buy their own classroom supplies because of funding shortages (or lack of regard for their value). In higher ed, we don’t have to deal with that, but we are not tenure track, we often make significantly less money than our colleagues in k-12 (fun fact!). The pandemic has worsened all of this; as a result, many of us are seeking an exit from a field where the work itself is deeply fulfilling, but the surrounding support systems range from woefully inadequate to exploitative and abusive.

Financial stress is a special kind of hell, as is trying to parent while teaching during a time of upheaval and stress. My K-12 colleagues in red states are under increasing pressure to dumb down their curriculum and avoid discussing important social issues like systemic racism or recognizing and supporting the gender and sexual identities of their students. It’s a bit more subtle in higher ed, but we also face censure if we piss off the wrong people by talking about objective reality in our country. It sucks, it’s stressful, and many of us are burnt out and disillusioned.

But this is what we’re not going to do: We are not going to take this garbage out on our students. I’ve written about the empathy gap in higher ed, and I will be reiterating some stuff from that piece and others I’ve written.

I have become increasingly alarmed by the lack of empathy and flexibility teachers are giving their students. In my state, this often takes the form of violating the Americans with Disabilities Act, and that’s just for starters. I know it’s been a rough few years. I know many of us are past our breaking points. But our students do not deserve to bear the brunt of our anxiety and frustrations. It is the systems that have failed us, not our students. They are often suffering worse than we are, if only we would stop and ask how they are.

It would take me half a book to catalog the stories of trauma I have heard from my students. And another quarter of that book to cover all the ways their teachers have ignored, debased, invalidated, or worsened their situations. At least in higher ed, where I talk to teachers regularly, there seems to be increasing rigidity and heartlessness when it comes to student trauma. So once again, I’m going to ask you some hard questions:

  1. What do you gain by assuming the worst of your students? Really think about it.
  2. What do you lose by offering students grace and flexibility? Does it change the nature of your class? (Hint: it shouldn’t if your class is accessible.)
  3. What do you risk by violating the ADA? (Hint – your job, your institution’s funding (especially in K-12), federal investigations, and lawsuits)
  4. How would you want to be treated by others if you were traumatized by the loss of a parent, or sexual assault, or chronic illness, or a cancer diagnosis? Are you affording your students the same level of care you would want from others? If not, why?

I’ve heard teachers claim that they can’t offer students with documented chronic illness the opportunity to retake an exam they missed because they were incapacitated. I’ve heard teachers say that they don’t offer flexible deadlines to students with documented disabilities because “it isn’t fair to everyone else.” This is the ableist version of “I don’t see color.” Yes, you do, Mary. We are all biased and prejudiced; that’s the point of the few laws that try to prevent rampant discrimination. Our brains are wired to generalize when we don’t have enough information to process something new. With our gigantic teacher brains, we can, in fact, ask questions and learn about what our students need and how to help them succeed. It just seems as if we don’t actually care.

We are all exhausted, and many of us are traumatized, many times over. Unfortunately, our field has it’s own brand of generational trauma that normalizes taking out our discomfort on our students and graduate students without any real thought about the ethics of such a use of our power. News flash: It’s not ethical. It’s just normalized.

So here are some things to consider as you wrap up the academic year.

  1. Flexibility is not anathema to rigor. I can not tell you how many times I’ve heard it framed as if it is. My students only get credit for the work they complete; I just give them flexibility on timelines if warranted and possible. It’s not rocket science.
  2. Accommodations are not unfair. Equity means giving all students access to the same resources, which means helping students who can’t access those things to get to them. A ramp for a person in a wheelchair does not make it unfair to people who take the stairs. Use your brain.
  3. Boundaries and empathy are not mutually exclusive. Many teachers have balked when I’ve explained the fundamentals of Trauma-Informed Pedagogy to them. “I don’t want students to tell me their problems.” You don’t have to invite students to share trauma (in fact, I don’t advise it because you are not a therapist), but you should know how to help them when they do. Which leads me to:
  4. Know your lane (and the law) and don’t take on stuff you shouldn’t. Sometimes students trauma dump because they are in distress. Have a list of good resources to refer them to for professional help, and seek it yourself if you experience secondary trauma. Compassion and empathy, however, are not therapy and are something you should be prepared to offer when possible. Your school’s Title IX office, ADA office, and Dean of Student’s office should have resources to help you navigate murky situations.

I recognize that this advice leaves out the lack of emotional, cultural, and financial support in our institutions and culture. We should not be expected to do so much with so little, but neither should our students. For me, while I am in this field, it is an ethical imperative that I recognize my responsibility toward my students as fellow humans. This does not absolve our institutions of their failures, but it also may help us break the cycles of abuse that have existed in our field for so long.

Anti-Fat Bias in Academia

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The monetization of self-hate in science.

I teach in the human development department, in the school of human ecology, in a natural sciences college at a major university. Yes, that is a mouthful. University>College>School>Department. This will be important to my story so listen up.

During my first year of teaching at this institution, I encountered a couple of instances of discrimination or prevalent fatphobia. As the years have progressed (5 of them so far), and I became more engaged with faculty committees and such, I have encountered many more.

Before I start cataloging the shit I’ve seen (and experienced directly) I want to establish some evidence-based facts. Fat bodies are not inherently unhealthy. Fat people often live longer than thin people. While some diseases are correlated with (not caused by) higher weight, weight loss does not cure them. Intentional Weight Loss (IWL), otherwise known as dieting, does not last, and almost always results in regaining the weight lost, and often more. However, anti-fat bias in healthcare can affect your health through underdiagnosis or misdiagnosis of symptoms. Exercise and a varied diet are both very good for your health but do not necessarily make you thinner. Healthism, or the idea that healthy people are superior to unhealthy people, is based in bigotry and prejudice. The roots of fatphobia are in white supremacy and racism, both in culture and in western science.

In essence, one’s appearance and weight do not determine their health, happiness, or lifespan. This is all well documented and researched, but is only starting to make its way into the public consciousness.

So back to my job. In my first semester, I taught a class on the socioeconomics of families and children. It was my first sociology-based class and it was pretty fun. I inherited a good syllabus from the previous teacher, and it included a formal research paper. Working late into the night to finish grading at the end of the semester, I read a paper about childhood obesity written by a Nutrition major. She claimed that the Body Positive movement was bad—because diabetes. I was pretty upset by this, as a fat woman and the teacher of the class. It felt pointed. I learned not to grade papers late at night when my defenses were low. I also learned (from other students) that the Nutrition department had a lot of students with untreated eating disorders and pathologizing fatness was very common. Nutrition is part of the School of Human Ecology (remember my flow chart?) so this comes up again later. The other departments are Textiles & Apparel and Public Health.

Next up, senior theses. I gained popularity as a teacher pretty quickly and my classes filled up. I was also asked to be the first or second reader (supervisor) on a variety of senior theses (these are research projects like master’s theses but for honors students in undergrad). When I went to my first day of presentations of these works, almost every single one was about the horrors of obesity and how to make fat people less fat. It was deeply uncomfortable. I learned to show up for my students’ presentations and then leave quickly.

There were a few other incidents in my first couple of years. I had a TA whose research was on how parents could make fat kids less fat, and she told me, to my actual fat face, that she had to be thin because she had to set a good example for her research. Yeah, that happened.

I need to backtrack for a second. When I was finishing my Ph.D. and freaking the hell out about how to pay it off, I looked at think tanks as possible places of employment. I found many of them doing research on the so-called obesity epidemic, but not any particularly interested in fat discrimination. That was my first clue that funding research that problematizes fatness is big money in academia. I already knew that the diet industry made tons of money off of people’s insecurity and fears, and that patriarchy was all about social control, but I hadn’t realized how monetized the research was. I was long past the point in my life where I felt like I had to perform self-hate while being fat, so this was pretty discouraging.

Anyway, back to the saga. As I’ve written about (and published!) when COVID hit online support became really, really important to my mental health. I met regularly with my Trauma-Informed Pedagogy peeps, who were very anti-fatphobia and pro-eating disorder recovery. That was awesome. I also started going to monthly happy hours with other teaching faculty, and then committee meetings as I became more engaged in university service. I don’t remember any weird moments in the early days, but over the last two years, I’ve noticed some really toxic stuff starting to spill out in these non-student groups. A shortlist of weird shit I’ve seen/heard:

  1. A discussion of the best pies before Thanksgiving in a committee meeting led to someone commenting that the person who liked baking pies was so thin and them talking about how they used to be fat.
  2. A breakout room in a faculty meeting about how to support students where a Nutrition faculty member told the rest of us how they performatively eat salad and use their Peleton during Zoom student meetings to “set a good example” but they secretly like cheese.
  3. A committee meeting where a discussion of favorite Easter candy was ended by a white male faculty member asking how many of us had diabetes (two of us were visibly fat).
  4. The same meeting – a teacher said that students got “soft and flabby” during quarantine and that was why they had sports injuries.
  5. I observed a senior colleague’s class in my department who discussed the health risks of ob***y including a diagram of a “healthy” thin body and an “unhealthy” visibly fat and conventionally unattractive body (both female) without any discussion about the flaws or variations in this research.
  6. A lack of accessibility for both disabled and larger bodies in many classrooms, roads, and building entrances throughout the campus.

On the positive side, my students and grad students seem far, far more aware of the dangers of diet culture than in the past. I see and hear many more discussions of the problems with diet culture and eating disorders than I hear fatphobia from this population, which is an encouraging, welcome change. That said, I’ve had many students confide in me about their EDs and seek treatment, especially during quarantine.

I spoke with one faculty member in Nutrition who was combating diet culture and anti-fat bias. This was because she was assigned a large class with a syllabus that demanded students count calories for a week. While she admitted to me she was in eating disorder recovery, she didn’t rethink the calorie counting assignment until some of her students told her it was harming their recovery. She removed it and started including more Health at Every Size information. I don’t know if she made much progress or not on that front, but at least she was supporting a student-driven change.

To return to the funding issue, consider this: the US government is prohibited by Congress from funding research into gun deaths and injuries as a public health issue, but there is copious funding for why it’s bad to be fat. The reason behind this apparent contradiction is the same: money. The NRA funds a good chunk of the Republican party and has insisted on the block on funding research on gun violence, in spite of it being one of the biggest public health risks in our country (especially compared to other wealthy countries). Meanwhile, continuing to support research that upholds constructed ideas like the “ob***y epidemic” and uses made up and thoroughly discredited measures like BMI to assess individual health is a veritable cash cow.

We cannot change public perception if we continue to uphold and recreate biased assumptions in scientific research design. Anti-fat bias in research intersects and complicates false assumptions about women’s bodies, black bodies, queer bodies, and disabled bodies, all of which are well-researched and deeply harmful. I have a non-exhaustive but significant list of articles and studies on gender and race bias in medicine and research that I share with my students, many of whom will have careers in related areas. It is my hope that my students continue to unpack these biases and critically consume research that upholds inequity in medicine as they progress in their careers.

My students give me hope for the future; unfortunately, many of my colleagues do the opposite. We must stop upholding the hierarchy of bodies if we want academia to be a less toxic place to exist if you are not a thin, hetero, cis-gendered, white man. And finally, we must consider the ethics of research funding. If your funding requires or allows you to build on false assumptions about a marginalized group of people, it’s not ethical.