What does FA mean to me?

An interesting discussion at attrice's blog 123 has made me try yet again to put my finger on the the nub of what I find most alienating about FA. For me, it's the inability to question society's programming about being fat and losing weight and leave it behind.

I sympathise with feelings of no longer feeling part of FA, I too for very different reasons have similar feelings. This suggests to me that FA may be foundering by insisting on signing up to a whole set of arbitrary rules rather than concentrating on what we can, if anything, all agree on. This sometimes makes people feel that everything that anyone in fat acceptance says at any point in time-that they disagree with-is an intrinsic part of FA.

Being attentive and vigilant to assert and protect your rights-whoever said that the price of freedom is eternal vigilance wasn't wrong-requires some real basis of self esteem. In a sense, fat hatred shows how political low self-esteem can really get, you are less likely to assert, protect and defend your rights, if you hate yourself and feel you are a lesser being. It tends to make you more obedient and lack the confidence to put yourself on the line, as well as the energy.

The path that has lead to FA, amongst other things, was a process of recovering a fuller sense of who I was. I could no longer defined by 'obese', it came to overshadow everything, and represented nothing.

FA is far from fully formed as to the full implications of what it means to start from a point of self acceptance for fat people, how can it compromise before it has been formed? This is yet again the prioritization of the needs of others, they can't understand FA, so that is FA's problem which it has to bend and mould itself around those who ever demanded that all along. These are the same old tactics that got our civil rights under threat in the first place. People who sell compromise are forgetting that fat people have already done everything that was asked of us and more. That has lead us here.

I don't wish to attack attrice, but she seems to be going back where she's been after having had a nice rest from what caused her to need an exit in the first place.