At my heaviest, I had two incidents, both with young women.

In the first, I was visiting my parents in Los Angeles for Thanksgiving. It was the first morning there, and I’d gone out to breakfast with my mother. When I went to the ladies’ room, the girl who was primping at the mirror changed the conversation she was having with a girl in one of the stalls to “how horrible it was that fat people left the house.” There was more about didn’t fat people know how much they disgusted others, and the girl in the stall, who, in fairness, couldn’t see me, kept agreeing and embellishing. I got out as quickly as I could. I was nearly in tears when I joined my mother in the parking lot.

The second one came during a yoga class. I’d been attending it for several months and was slimming down a little. The stretching felt really good.

Two new girls came in and started commenting on how embarrassing it was to be in a class with a fat girl who probably couldn’t do any of the moves and why did the fattie have to be in the front row (the answer to that was I couldn’t do yoga with glasses on.). I kept to my mat and tried to let the words wash over me without registering.

The teacher overheard. Rather than call them out, she began the class with a fairly complicated (for Level 1) series of hip openers. She knew me; she knew that I had very open hips and rarely had any trouble with those poses. The two misses who thought I couldn’t keep up, however, were panting and sweating and finally had to rest in child’s pose through the end of the series.

They came back to class, but never commented on the appearance or technique of anyone else again.

I thanked the teacher quietly after the class.

In high school, I was taking a Marine Biology class that was so tough, only honor students usually took it. The Blonde Fake-Tanned Head Cheerleader was also in it for some reason, but had crap attendance, zero work turned in, and generally talked to her friend through the entire class. For our final project, we had to give a class presentation on an animal drawn from a hat. Ironically, mine was the orca whale. Part of my presentation was demonstrating how whales used echolocation to hunt, via a game of Marco Polo. Head Cheerleader raised her hand when I asked who wanted to be it, and after I told her to come up and let me blindfold her, she responded with the following gem:

HC: “Are you crazy? It will mess up my hair!”

(You cannot make this shit up)

Me: (classroom laughing) “Well God forbid we mess up your hair.”

HC: “Well, god forbid you know how long it takes to do my hair, bitch.”

Me: “Well, not all of have the time to waste on our hair like you do since some of us, you know study. However if we all sucked cock for our A’s like some peo-”

And that’s when the teacher yelled at both of us, sent me to the office, and gave me an automatic C on my project. About two days later, I was walking in the hall and ran across HC and one of her cronies. She noticed me immediatly and as I passed, she loudly called out “Fat bitch!” I glided past her, turning around to flip her off and reply with “Bleach blonde twat” to her very surprised face. She and I would continue to glare at each other occasionally, but we never exchanged another word again.

It makes me kind of sad that I was this bold in high school, but ended up becoming a lot less self confident after leaving high-school. In fact the only time I can recall ever standing up for myself was when I was at a bar about two years ago when one of the cute but obvious douche-bags of the group I used to hang with got sloppy drunk. He made the offhand comment about how fat girls “took up to much space in bed and were only good at blowjobs ’cause they’re used to swallowing.” I was not the only large girl in the group that night, and the moment the words were out of his mouth, I stood up, threw my wonderfully delicious cosmo into his face and told him he could go “fuck himself gently with a chainsaw using a sandpaper condom”, grabbed my coat, and walked out the door. One of my guy friends chased after me, apologizing and saying that the guy was just drunk. “No,” I replied, “he’s just an asshole.” I walked the thirty-minute walk home, in winter, in a gorgeous (if impractical) dress-and-heels combo at two in the morning. I passed a couple of drunks, but I must have had my Crazy Face on since they didn’t hassle me. It also helps that my guy friend followed me home and he is 300lbs of muscle at 6’4.

I’m 5’3″, very petite and have a baby face, so even though I am 19 years old, people often think I’m 16 or younger. I am constantly asked how old I am and make other age-related comments, which are wildly inappropriate. I have been asked my age on multiple occasions by gas station/convenience store workers, notwithstanding that I wasn’t buying any kind of age restricted item, and that I had driven up in my car during school hours and paid with a debit card. At work, I am often asked (by older men) if I am old enough to be working, if I get paid, etc. I work in public service for my city! Do people honestly think that I am working in a government job illegally? No, they just want to make a comment about how young I seem to be.

That said, I know that being yelled at on the street for being fat is not the same; my mom is fat and I have been with her and seen people ask, “Are you pregnant?” when she is clearly not, or call her Mama Cass (which she loves, as she is a Mamas and Papas fan!!) and make choking motions. I just thought it was worth pointing out that this behavior is part of a larger trend of asking inappropriate and personal questions of strangers in public.