Yes, I am a massive, amazing, fat, queer person
and I'm not going to go away.
Why are you dressed like a plonker?
Sorry, what's your name? BLEEP.
I'm shocked it's come from a person in a uniform.
I'm hoping this film will show you lot what it's like to
exist in a fat body.
My name is Scottee, I'm an artist.
I live in a small seaside town just outside of London
and I live in a house with my husband, James.
And I've been with James now for 14 years.
I do get a lot of attention for the way that I dress
and some of that attention is negative.
I'm going to go about my normal day-to-day life.
I'm going into town and seeing
if I can show you how the public react with me.
I often call myself fat, and I'm very open about that,
and I allow my friends and my family to describe me as fat
and when people first hear that for the first time,
they're always quite affronted by it, they're quite shocked.
There's a reason why I'm fat, do you know what I mean?
But it's not, like, we're sat at home eating cakes and biscuits.
We, like, we like to eat lot of good food, but just a lot of it.
Slightly apprehensive that my day-to-day experience
is going to be seen.
I'm really OK with taking up as much public space as possible
and, like, every time I leave the house,
there's a little bit of worry about what that day might bring.
I think some of the way that people interact with me is often confusion.
Hello. Why are you dressed like a plonker?
Why are you dressed like that?
Sorry, what's your name? BLEEP.
I think it's extremely offensive that you've just come up to me
and said I look like a plonker.
Is that how you're trained to talk to people?
It's how I talk to everyone. Do you? Yes.
In which case, I will be putting in a formal complaint.
You can do a complaint.
The arrogance of that as well, there's no apology.
If you've taken offence to that, I apologise.
Way more people have got issue with me
where they think they can just come up to me and tell me
what they think of me because they are in a position of power.
When I look back, I actually hear myself as a confident person.
I hear myself go, "No, this isn't right."
I can hear these women laughing behind me, so I turn and look
and they stop laughing.
You all right?
Sorry, I just noticed that you were laughing or something.
Oh, cool.
I am shocked there are more women because when I'm there,
I think, in my head, I just used to think it was just men.
And then a couple of teenagers go past on a bike
and they are so transfixed that they're looking at me
on their bike whilst they're driving across the road.
What some people might see as, like,
"Oh, it's just a couple of kids looking back at you on a bike,"
it's, like, that's the 30th or 40th person
that's done that to you that day.
Can I get two haddock and chips, please?
Two haddock and chips? Yeah. Over on the table?
On that reserved table, yeah.
When fat people eat in public, people judge them.
People look at what they're eating, sometimes people say things like,
"Shouldn't be eating that."
Food's on the way. Thanks.
All right, babe?
This constant policing of other people's bodies
and what I'm asking for is body autonomy.
I'll live my life and have the body that I want to have,
and you have the body that you want to have.
There's a sort of disapproval of taking up public space
and eating, and you become very conscious of that as a fat person.
I'm going into town, doing a bit of shopping.
There's a couple who are sort of... looking and not looking,
sort of looking, a little bit looking,
"Don't look, don't look any more."
Then there's somebody who does -
this is one of my favourite responses in public -
"I'm going to pretend you're not there."
I think I've always been fat.
People made me feel like I was the size of a house.
I grew up in quite a poor area of London, a place that was one of the
largest council estates in our area,
and so with that came a lot of stuff.
There came a lot of, like, togetherness,
but it also meant that I was picked on.
It's not full of happy memories, shall we say.
I remember quite vividly being sat quite near here, actually,
on a wall, and them all deciding
that I couldn't play football with them.
Then we started to climb up some scaffolding.
I couldn't get myself up onto the roof and, to mock me,
they all started raining down spit on me.
My current health is very good.
I've just had a medical, which was for the adoption.
So we have these workshops every week with our social worker
and she comes to our house, she asks us a list of questions
and we have to write them up.
And one of those questions is, when are you going to lose weight?
She has to ask me this question, so I say to her,
"Well, that takes the position that maybe there's something wrong,
"because all of my health data tells you I'm all right."
But I sit on a BMI chart as being obese.
I'm tired of other people's opinions of the way that I lead my life
and it can be exhausting.
I've learned that I don't ever look at people.
I look at buildings and shops.
I walk around with my head
metaphorically and actually in the clouds.
I like the person that I am, inside and out.
I don't think I'd change anything about myself. Why should I?