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1:54pm May 14, 2013

➸ My Manifesto on Health Care for Fatties

Here’s the thing: I can accept that my weight might exacerbate my back problem. The problem comes when I internalize my body’s limitations as a moral failing and start to decide that it means that I don’t deserve good health care. I mean, if I was naturally very thin, I wouldn’t decide that having osteoporosis was something I did to myself and hesitate to get treatment.

I feel like I need a manifesto — so damn it, I’m going to write one.

Fat people deserve comprehensive health care that doesn’t stop at the “well, you’re fat” line. Fat people deserve health care that addresses them as whole people and not just a collection of fat cells. Fat people deserve equal treatment by doctors and other medical professionals. No person should believe that they are somehow so “bad” that they don’t deserve to feel good. Every body is a good body, and every body deserves proper care. Fat bodies, thin bodies, broken bodies, whole bodies, tall bodies, short bodies — all bodies.

Why do I get so weirded out when people start talking about “bodies” this way. Like everybody, that makes sense, that word. But when we start about what care “fat bodies” and “thin bodies” get it just throws my brain off the track completely. I love this post otherwise. But I’ve seen a lot of people use that phrasing, like talking about people, but calling us bodies, like saying disabled bodies, or queer bodies, or black bodies, or something like that, instead if disabled people, queer people, black people. And while I’m extremely connected to my body, I can’t call myself a body, it just feels very wrong and off. I mean except like when you call yourself somebody or “a body has to…” Or that kind of thing. But this is different. It virtually only happens in conversations like this one. And Idk WTF is going on.