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Check Your Sizeism

We’re cool but you have homework.

It’s summer and people are emerging from their pandemic hiding spaces into the social world. We had all disappeared so people didn’t notice that I had disappeared – even if I told them.

“Yeah I am also feeling isolated and frustrated I can’t go out” they would tell me. Or they would say, “everyone feels that way.”

“No. Mine is different. I can’t go out – even if I wanted to – even if there was no pandemic.”

My physical body had been disappearing too. I largely stopped eating. I have always been fattish-to-fat and now I’m skinny.

In June 2021, as we begin to emerge, I am a bit more stable and I can go out with the help of my partner. But, I am afflicted by debilitating anxiety about the social interactions that I know are coming: the complements on my body that are rooted in sizeism and fatphobia. So, I made this bookmark:

Hi,
I know you meant well but intention and impact are different.
You said one or both of these to me:

“You look so healthy”
This confuses weight and health. It isn’t true. I was healthier When I was fat.

  1. “You look great.”
  2. This reinforces a sizeist beauty standard – when that’s based on a white, nondisabled, upper-/middle-class norm.

I’ve lost lots of weight because I’ve been sick. I’ve neither been “healthy” nor “great.

I anticipated this interaction. It happened when I had cancer too. I anticipated it to such a frequency this time that I made bookmarks.
It is a bookmark because I’m giving you homework.

I don’t want you to get in touch and apologize. You said an ignorant thing – let’s move on.

I do want you to learn about fat politics.

Here are a couple places to start:
TheBodyIsNotAnApology.com (also a book)
Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia by Sabrina Strings
Everything You Know About Obesity Is Wrong by Hobbs and MacKay in Huffpost

This bookmark makes going out possible for me. I don’t go to places I think I will see people I haven’t seen in a while without it. I know lots of folks have learned the lesson “don’t comment on other people’s bodies” over the pandemic – but lots haven’t. And, some people have said to me “you have lost a lot of weight, are you doing OK” – that’s a very different kind of comment and, depending who it is, can be totally appropriate. The trick is knowing that it is appropriate for you to be one of those people – what if you are wrong?

Lots of folks have gained weight and are subject to sizeist remarks and jokes about it. That’s gross. It hurts people.

Feel free to use this bookmark, share it, adapt it to suit your situation. Here is the link to the printable PDF.

PS: don’t read anything into not getting the bookmark from me. It just means I didn’t give you the bookmark – not that you don’t need to reflect on your comments/are absolved. If you think we had a conversation that this applies to you about; if you think you have had a conversation that this applies to anyone about; or, if you think you have done the inverse (commented on someone getting fat, said they look bad, asked them if they have been sick because of it, etc.), embrace the bookmark.

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Fight to Win: Inside Poor People’s Organizing

My book about homelessness organizing and what we can learn about the government, homelessness policy and how power works is out!

Working from inside the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP), drawing on interviews with OCAP members, over 5,000 pages of freedom of information request documents and many other City documents, I interrogate homelessness policy in Toronto.

This book shows that poor people’s organizing can be effective even in periods of neoliberal retrenchment.

Fight to Win tells the stories of four key OCAP homelessness campaigns: stopping the criminalization of homeless people in a public park; the fight for poor people’s access to the Housing Stabilization Fund; a campaign to improve the emergency shelter system and the City’s overarching, but inadequate, Housing First policy; and the attempt by the City of Toronto to drive homeless people from encampments during the COVID pandemic.

This book shows how power works at the municipal level, including the use of a multitude of demobilization tactics, devaluing poor people as sources of knowledge about their own lives, and gaslighting poor people and anti-poverty activists. I also detail OCAP’s dual activist strategy — direct-action casework coupled with mass mobilization — for both immediate need and long-term change. These campaigns demonstrate the validity of OCAP’s longstanding critiques of dominant homelessness policies and practices. Each campaign was fully or partially successful: these victories were secured by anti-poverty activists through the use of, and the threat of, direct disruptive action tactics.

Click here to watch the book launch with Desmond Cole, John Clarke, Jennifer Jewell and Azeezah Kanji.

Click here for the book trailer.

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Losing for the Win: Government Spin and Dismantling Social Housing Stock and Calling it Progress

What Really Happened to 389 Church Street

The City just announced that it created NEW affordable housing at 389 Church Street. We are in a housing crisis and new deeply affordable housing units are desperately needed. But, like a lot the City does around housing, this involved the displacement of poor people, well-placed lies, and misleading statements. And when all is said and done, we have less housing than we did a few years ago.

Stop the sell-off of public housing!! The Toronto Community Housing Corporation is quietly proposing the sell-off of 326 apartment units and 45 single-family homes of public housing. We have entered a period of economic downturn when the need for decent and accessible affordable housing will be especially important. The City should be building new units and adequately maintaining its existing stock, not selling it off in order to pay for repairs. It is not enough to promise that the units will be replaced and tenants will be relocated. We need more social housing now! We need repairs for existing units now! Saturday May 23 11:30 am Rally and meal at one of the homes on teh selling block: 13 Trefann St. (North of Queen St, east of Parliament)
Stop the sell-off of public housing 2009 OCAP flyer

389 Church Street is a building located just south of Carlton Street in Toronto. It used to be housing for women and it was built in 1973.[1] In 2008, Toronto Community Housing planned to sell this building. At the time, the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty publicly decried and protested the move.

In 2015, City staff told Toronto City Council that the “housing form is out-dated.” It was structured like a lot of small rooming houses. There were 66 units with 247 rooms between them: each unit had a shared kitchen and bathroom. This was an average of 3.75 rooms per unit. The City claimed that the building was only at 30% occupancy because people didn’t want to stay there due to the model of housing. City staff were claiming in 2015 that the 78 tenants living at 389 Church needed to be evicted and the building needed to be renovated because it was so “out-dated [that it] has resulted in the building being under-occupied.”[2]

I remember differently. I remember two women who lived there coming to a meeting I was at, and saying they wanted to stay. They wanted our group’s help fighting the inevitable eviction from their building. They liked the model they lived in and they didn’t want to move, in part, because of that shared model. Shared accommodation doesn’t work for lots of people and, for those it does work for, it can go bad if they get the wrong person to share with. But, I contend and I think the evidence supports that at least 169 women would have wanted those spots – especially during a housing crisis.

This model was an example of supportive housing. It was women living together and supporting each other. I don’t use the term “supportive housing” in the clinical, institutional way in which people’s behaviours can be surveilled and managed and, within this logic, hopefully rehabilitated. This is what all three levels of government and groups that promote Housing First support – groups like the Canadian Alliance to End Homelessness.[3] They pathologize many homeless people as “chronically homeless” and then call for “wraparound supports.” In a recent Crackdown episode, Dr. Danya Fast, a researcher and supportive housing advocate, reflected on seeing what supportive housing actually means in the lives of people she knows: “I was recommending something that sounded really important in principle but I wasn’t thinking nearly closely enough about what it should look like in practice.” In these “institutional” settings, which one of her research participants calls “desolate,” harm reduction in supportive housing are used to control people.

Supportive housing gained a lot of popularity through Housing First ideology. Housing First individualizes homelessness and the solution is, therefore, supportive housing – not building social housing, rent control, raising social assistance and the minimum wage, ending colonial and white supremacist dispossession, stopping gender-based violence – things that require real social change.

It is my argument that 389 Church Street occupancy was suppressed, not that tenants did not want to occupy it. Around the time City staff said the building was 2/3 empty because people didn’t want to stay there, there were protests because shelters were full. There were about 173,000 people on the housing waitlist at that time, taking many years to get a unit. According to the 2015 staff report, 389 Church Street needed some repair. There was (and remains) a significant TCHC repair backlog, with many units needing major repairs.[4] Lack of repairs don’t keep TCHC building empty. It is my clear recollection that the tenants understood, and that other data suggests that, from when the TCHC added 389 Church to its list of buildings on the chopping block, TCHC did not rent the units at 389 Church in order to ease the off-loading of the building. This is why, by 2015, the building was only 30% occupied.

To be clear, it is my assertion that City staff lied that 389 Church Street was only about 1/3 occupied in 2015 because the building was “outdated.”

 Last week, Mayor John Tory announced 120 units of “new” affordable supportive housing, in partnership with several not-for-profit agencies at 389 Church Street. Purposely restricting units to keep occupancy low for years so a building can be renovated doesn’t make the housing new. Indeed, if the TCHC ever fixes its repair backlog, it won’t make those units new. Landlords are legally required to repair units.

What we have ended up with is a building that sat for 11 years, slowly being emptied out so it could be remodeled, and so that operations could be passed on to supportive housing agencies. 78 women were dislocated for this project.

We have a net loss of 127 rooms and no new housing units. Those units are counted as part of the Winter Plan for shelters. We have a repaired building, and that is good.

We need 10,000 social housing units in the next 3 years, not a Mayor who will put is name on anything and call it new.

I co-founded FactcheckToronto.ca recently to help hold the City to account for the many lies, half-truths and misleading statements that the City puts out about homelessness and housing. Some of the information here can be found there and there is additional information about the announcement of the “new” 389 Church Street housing available there.

[1] Shelter Support and Housing Administration, (2015). “EX7.17 Under One Roof: A Housing Solution for Women and Children at 389 Church Street.”

[2] Shelter Support and Housing Administration, (2015). “EX7.17 Under One Roof: A Housing Solution for Women and Children at 389 Church Street,” p. 1.

[3] I have written about this lots in my dissertation, Mapping Ruling Relations Through Homelessness Organizing; or, you can wait for the book which will hopefully be out this fall.

[4] Shelter Support and Housing Administration, (2015). “EX7.17 Under One Roof: A Housing Solution for Women and Children at 389 Church Street.”