Dear Prudence: I'm Older Than I Look

[minoanmiss]

Prudence wants help with this one. I also need help tagging this.

Sometimes even Prudence needs a little help. Every Thursday in this column, we’ll post a question that has her stumped. This week’s tricky situation is below. Join the conversation about it on Twitter with Jenée jdesmondharris on Thursday, and then look back for the final answer here on Friday.

Dear Prudence,

I have some complicated feelings. I am petite, to the point of being diagnosed with proportional dwarfism and protected under the ADA against discrimination because of it, (less than 4’10” and my highest body weight has been 96 lbs., think “living doll”) and because of this, I look between the ages of 12-to-17 depending on my outfit/makeup of the day, despite being 23. I often get comments like “wow, you’re so short,” “I thought you were somebody’s little child,” or even the “M-word” screamed at me across the street, and I’ve even been denied alcohol purchases despite having my legal, valid ID, without any question or comment from managements. I usually kind of just blink at the people, let them marinate in their stupidity of “you literally just said that to another person.”

But it gets so much worse with my partner. They’re 6’6”, extremely tall, and look their age of 30. When we’re together in public, we’ve had people physically touch us to separate us and ask how old I was. On a recent vacation together, they left to go to the bathroom as I was standing in line for caffeine, and a TSA agent approached me and asked if I knew them and was safe, regardless of my partner handing me the rolling luggage to keep and me not showing any typical signs of trafficking, even talking to the family in front of us on their way to Disneyland. This has happened several times, from doctors to shop attendants to just people on the street. I usually brush it off, get slightly annoyed, or just don’t even react anymore. Should I start causing scenes and crying “discrimination,” or keep silently seething?

— Short Fuse is Getting Shorter

Comments

[melannen]

"People are acting like this is a major issue" and "This is actually a major issue that they are behaving proportionately to" are, unfortunately, not the same thing.

Not to downplay that trafficking is happening! And it certainly depends on what you mean by 'trafficking'. But the classic idea of someone being forced into bondage, while it does happen, is still quite unlikely to look like what people are taught to 'keep an eye out for' that might catch LW. We're in the middle of a bit of a moral panic about human trafficking that's making dealing with actual traffickers harder.

(In fact the biggest story I was seeing about flight attendants being trained involved a case where they tried to separate mother and daughter because the daughter was mixed-race and the mother wasn't.)