Took a little break from the internet and touched some grass and it was great. Wander back in here after my hiatus and what do I find? Just a thread with a bunch of fatphobia.
Cute.
For a community that is incredibly careful about protecting its users from the -phobias and the -isms, there sure is a hell of a lot of unchecked fatphobia here basically any time fatness gets brought up.
It’s something I’ve noticed on the left in general as well. The leftist org I’m in has almost no fat people in it and something tells me that’s not because there aren’t any fat leftists out there.
Fatphobia is rooted in anti-Blackness and ableism.
I’d highly recommend the “Maintenance Phase” podcast with Michael Hobbes and Aubrey Gordon, as well as Aubrey Gordon’s books “What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Fat” and “You Just Need To Lose Weight.”
TL;DR: There’s mounting evidence that anti-fat bias in medicine is more to blame for poor medical outcomes in fat people rather than just the fat itself.
Diet and exercise don’t result in long-term weight loss for something like 95% of people. As a leftist, are you really gonna sit here and blame this on individual choices rather than systemic issues? Are you really gonna try to convince us that 95% of people are just lacking willpower?
Please note that this thread is not an invitation to convince me I’m wrong or share your own personal anecdotal story of successful long-term weight loss with the implication that others can do it because you did it. This post is a request that any thin person (or thin-adjacent person) reading this who wants to argue about how being fat is bad for your health do some research and some self-crit. This post is a request that this community rethink the way it engages with discussions about fatness, diet, fatphobia, and anti-fat bias.
Anti-fat bias literally kills people.
Not my experience. People will have a clear positioning on where they generally stand on trans issues, but what that actually means when we're talking about human bodies is often lackluster even among our trans comrades. Recognizing that trans women in sports actually isn't a complicated issue or that gender affirming care is a human right doesn't mean you can't have brainworms about what a woman is supposed to look like, even if you are a woman who is affected and harmed by that every single day. The brainworms run deep and ridding yourself of a lifetime of cishetnormative, misogynist, ableist and racist body propaganda is a fairly demanding task.
I need to stress that i do not mean this post (or my previous one ITT) as a callout. I'd say that you actually can't just shoot the cop inside your head, it's more like slowly strangling that fucker. It's a process, it takes time, and i try to be generous here. But you need to start somewhere and you don't do that by babystepping people, you need to make it clear that some stuff just doesn't fly.