Praise then darkness, and creation unfinished

I was on Size Acceptance 101 Friday night; that went pretty well, though not perhaps as focused as I'd have liked. I mentioned this to Adrian, who said that 101 panels tend to be like that. But I think we said some useful things, and nothing really stupid, and the audience seemed to think we were being informative. One of my fellow panelists did complain about an ex-coworker who walked every day at lunch and cycled to and from work, and seemed disdainful of the panelist for how fat she was; someone else pointed out how problematic it was to criticize someone else for her body choices (and cycling 20 miles each way to work is a serious distance but not an absurd one), especially in the context of that panel, and she backed off, saying it was about her interactions with that coworker. Still a little problematic, but we went on to other things. One of those other things was people's attitudes toward exercise, both in terms of how it helps us connect to our bodies, and the ways (good and bad) that others react to a fat woman exercising, or wanting to exercise. [The panel was all-female, as was the other I was on and I think two of the three I have attended; this is Wiscon.] We talked about some health things, including the destructiveness of weight-loss surgery and of insurance industry attitudes toward it: in particular, people who have had that surgery because the insurer would pay for it, and insisted on it as a precondition to paying for treatment they actually needed or wanted. I felt a little off balance right at the beginning, because the moderator asked us to talk about our journeys toward fat acceptance and where that had started, and I don't really organize/remember things that way. It's not an unreasonable question, even though I don't have a good answer for it; wild_irises suggested that if this happens again, on that or some other topic, I just say "I'll pass, that's not how my memory works," (Other areas I can see that coming up would include "how long have you been poly?" and "when did you realize you were queer?"; I can say things that might be relevant on either, but I suspect not briefly or as an introduction to the discussion.)

My other panel was "Would you let your daughter…?" which I had offered to moderate thinking it was going to be mostly about guiding children through choices of books, movies, etc, and the reasons for why we might advise children (from small kids through teens) to not read/watch certain things, or want to discuss the implications of the material, and which wound up having a bunch of more general parenting choices, and some parenting venting/pitfalls stuff (including feeling judged by other mothers). The audience wasn't much larger than the panel, and it wound up being a pretty open-ended discussion; at the end, I addressed the audience and said "Thank you all for agreeing to be on this panel." So, not what I expected or really planned (to the extent that I did plan), but I think successful.

"Revenge of Not Another F*cking Race Panel" was a lot of fun: six panelists, all women of color, answering questions on audience-posed questions in categories including "We Welcome Our Robot Overlords," "Apocalypse A-Go-Go," "_________ in Space!", "Khaaaaan!", Super Michael Jackson Ballerina, and "Sparkly Pony." Questions in the last included "tell us about your bad Mercedes Lackey fanfic"; about as serious as it got was "Tell us about a time when you adapted a recipe to be vegan or gluten-free and it went really badly, or really well." The ground rule was that the panel could/would discuss anything except race; a few times panelists said "or is that about race?" and got a pass. (The origin of this panel, I gather, was people complaining that if there was more than one non-white person on a panel, they would be asked to talk about race or about a writer of color, and that they were tired of it: not that we shouldn't be talking about race, but that they wanted to be asked about as wide a range of topics as the white panelists are.)

For related reasons, I went to a panel called "White to White," on ways white people can talk to/educate each other about race and racism. It was a lot about ways of pointing out when a statement or action is racist or problematic without eliciting the sort of defensive "am not! How dare you!" reaction that gets in the way of conversation: if someone reacts as if they've been accused of treason, they're not going to think about whether they should change what they're saying or doing. (A large part of what was suggested—and I agree it's useful, but it's far from sufficient—is to try to emphasize the statement/action rather than label the person, and if you're not sure, say that you find something problematic, rather than that you are sure it's racist.) This connects to stuff about choosing your battles; when do you say "that bothers me" and when do you say "How about that local sports team?" or "I need to go say hi to cousin Jay"? (There's no single answer to that; it depends on your energy levels as well as on the ongoing relationship if any.) They talked a little about the value, when listening/talking in a group, of making it clear that someone disagrees with the prejudiced statement: that even if the speaker doesn't change their mind, it's worth making clear that not everyone, maybe not anyone, agrees with it. And to remember that it's usually not a one-off: the person who dismisses an idea now may think about it later. (And that may connect to what I was saying above about often not being able to identify when, where, or how I started thinking about something.)