[281/365] Lindo
Oct. 8th, 2021 10:19 pmLong ago, back when people still wrote blogs, back when people first read blogs, back when RSS was more popular and Google Reader was a thing, I was introduced (via ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
mother_bones) to Notes From the Fatosphere, a feed of blogs about fat acceptance, body positivity before that got co-opted (as these blog posts told me it would, and lo it came to be just as they had said, and Health At Every Size.
It was the first step away from the anti-fat bias I'd been raised with and hurt by. It did me a lot of good. But then Google Reader went away and then people stopped blogging and everybody moved on to other things, me included.
But today, reading a book because of a podcast, both by someone who had to write pseudonymously in those old days, I saw a name in a list that took me back.
The creator of Health At Every Size was one of the names, and I merrily kept reading the list at first but then I went back to it. Lindo Bacon. I hadn't thought much about HAES in a long time, but there was something about that name... Is that what it'd been before? I asked myself. And...do I detect there an unusual masculine -o ending on what I vaguely recalled as having a more normative -a ending?
A quick google proved my suspicions correct: Lindo Bacon did change their name to make it less feminine. What an inspired choice! Their website prominently features an explanation of the name.
A decade or more ago when ideas like HAES were at their most new and important for me, I hardly knew any genderqueer people and rarely thought about my own gender. It's nice that new layers of meaning can pile up when we're not even looking.
mother_bones) to Notes From the Fatosphere, a feed of blogs about fat acceptance, body positivity before that got co-opted (as these blog posts told me it would, and lo it came to be just as they had said, and Health At Every Size.It was the first step away from the anti-fat bias I'd been raised with and hurt by. It did me a lot of good. But then Google Reader went away and then people stopped blogging and everybody moved on to other things, me included.
But today, reading a book because of a podcast, both by someone who had to write pseudonymously in those old days, I saw a name in a list that took me back.
The creator of Health At Every Size was one of the names, and I merrily kept reading the list at first but then I went back to it. Lindo Bacon. I hadn't thought much about HAES in a long time, but there was something about that name... Is that what it'd been before? I asked myself. And...do I detect there an unusual masculine -o ending on what I vaguely recalled as having a more normative -a ending?
A quick google proved my suspicions correct: Lindo Bacon did change their name to make it less feminine. What an inspired choice! Their website prominently features an explanation of the name.
That ‘a’ on the end doesn’t seem to line up with the person in the boat with him; the connotation of feminine beauty just doesn’t resonate. And then, he has an a-ha moment. “You’re Lindo!” he exclaims, masculinizing the noun in Spanish. And he’s right.The whole thing is worth a read, it's not long. Especially if like me you're always curious about how people end up with the names they do -- if they don't want to share that's entirely none of my business, but if they do it always delights me.
When he explains that meaning takes on nuance with the masculinized ending, reflecting more of a beautiful essence rather than physical beauty, it seems even more right. I like the way it messes with constructions of beauty and gender.
Lindo. Yes, I am Lindo. There’s continuity there, a specificity I recognize. I can still be the beautiful human my parents dreamed of; I can still be my history, me. Just not the feminized version, because I was never a girl. I was never Linda, not really. But Lindo? Lindo, I recognize. This new name — that’s not new at all, just slightly, rightly different — feels like home to me.
A decade or more ago when ideas like HAES were at their most new and important for me, I hardly knew any genderqueer people and rarely thought about my own gender. It's nice that new layers of meaning can pile up when we're not even looking.