as small as a world and as large as alone

1:28am December 8, 2013

thisisthinprivilege:

Thin privilege is people who claim to “care about fat people’s health,” but don’t care (or approve of the fact) that fat stigma often leads to those same fat people not getting treatment or getting inadequate treatment for the medical conditions that they do have - which, in some cases, endangers their lives.

I think this proves that people aren’t “just concerned for our health.”

I had a conversation once with someone who insisted she “just cared about fat people’s health” and that the only reason a fat person would disagree with her is that “this stuff about fat and health has been linked to self-esteem in a way it doesn’t have to be”.

But I sensed something really weird about the whole situation.

Like… some kind of tension that showed she didn’t really care about our health at all.

And eventually, after a lot of discussion, she finally said that the deeper issue wasn’t actually that she cared about our health.  It was that she was disturbed by having to touch us on public transit, and that since it “wasn’t feasible” (in whose world!?!?) to make the seats larger, fat people would just have to lose weight so we wouldn’t accidentally touch people who didn’t have to be touched.

I get the sense a lot of people have things like that beneath their “concern for our health”, but few of them are willing to admit it.

Of course, fat people on public transit aren’t the ones who take up the most space at all.  That would actually be, young thin white men.  But oh well.

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