Well done, Whiff, for losing so much weight. Larger people are often wrongly seen as lesser than slim people yet have so many qualities to give, the same as anyone else.
I had some online prejudice/racism a few months ago. I belonged to a Facebook piano teachers’ group, which had people from all over the world in it but with a large American contingent. Certain well-known pieces of music have titles that are “of their time” but on this occasion someone was asking whether The Irish Washerwoman was appropriate to teach these days. Everyone on this side of the Atlantic thought that this was somewhat bizarre to say the least but the Americans were very serious about the whole thing. Then one American woman decided that it would be funny to make a joke about the relationship between the Irish and the British, specifically about the English. I responded that, although I knew that she was joking, she should remember it was an international forum and that we get along fine now but some of our history was a touchy subject and that it was not a good idea to rake up old wounds. Her reply was to “tell that to my ancestor Grace O’Malley,” a more stereotypical Irish name it would be hard to find and the whole attitude seemed to be that merely by being English l had no right to a view. My reply was to reiterate that it was an international forum and that our histories are closely entwined and that many of us, myself included, have Irish ancestry anyway. I was trying to point out that history is not black and white, goodies versus baddies, but it obviously did not sink in. I left the group (lots of other silliness in that particular group and this was the straw that broke the camel’s back).
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