Altering metabolic function also has the capacity to affect, relieve and shift mental and physical health in general, regardless of its effects-either way-on size.
The crusade's injustice isn't just pathologizing of humanness, it's the denial of potential routes of healing, preferably out of the hands of the professionals.
That's hardly like sexual orientation.
For "obesity related" read, human related. If weight causes health problems, then all weight causes the health problems anyone at that weight has. All weights get the same health problems, though perhaps in slightly different proportions, in the main. If fat people create this so do all humans. And that would make us all equally "guilty." Recrimination needless.
It's the shifting of all this onto fat people. The lack of this being extended to others shows this is deliberately and selectively punitive. Scapegoating of fat people for human frailty is at issue. The demands of gay people and fat people are rather different. We're under attack by the new order of medicine which is surreptitiously occupying the space being vacated, at least for some, by religion. In a way it's a hangover from the past, passing a potential foretelling of the future.
For the secular left of centre especially, but this influence is everywhere. It's a modern concern. Fat people are slowly taking the place of gay people and others who are marginalized, demonized and/or pathologized in the collective mindset.
I am a thin woman, and my partner is fat. In the seven years I’ve loved her, I’ve been struck by a contrast: While many on the left have fought for equality for LGBTQ people, fat people are experiencing more stigmatization. This trend is puzzling, because anti-fat and anti-queer oppression are so similar.I wouldn't say it's puzzling that gay people should feel the urge to try and download what's being perpetrated on them, onto fat people. Everyone else is trying it. Feminists offload misogyny onto fat women. Black people offload racism, onto Black fat people. Progressives and the bourgeoisie offload classism onto fat people. Working class people offload the prejudice against them, onto working class fatz and on it goes.
When something's seen to be good about being human, indeed, humanity itself, it's increasingly perceived through slim people. And when something's seen to be bad about being human, it's perceived through fat people. Sexual orientation wouldn't have any reason to stop anyone getting caught up in that.
To be fair, how many heterosexual fatz have not lost any sleep over what gay people have had go through and are still going through? Have fat hetero's been particularly prominent or disproportionate in assisting gay people?
There's a stereotype of fat bible thumping conservatives with virulent homophobia. Though this may or may not be unfair. Is fat acceptance going to call them off?
As queers, we’ve long been told there’s something wrong and disgusting about who we are; fatphobia may seem to save us from that pain by giving us a way to say that someone else is those things. But at what cost? Do we want a feminist queer movement that is lean, mean, and free of fat folks? Or do we want a movement for everyone?Well if humanity is located primarily in slim people then a spoiled identity might become a tad irrelevant, possibly even harmful. It would seem harder for fat people to visually put across humanity when they represent that being undermined. Certain types of advocacy deal in total process, including image.
I don't say anyone's (obviously) throwing fat people out. Just um, know your place. The one assigned to you by the crusade. Fatness may well be undermining the value of fat people's advocacy in this way.
I'm also wondering how much of a vehicle queerness is for recovering a sense of fat people's autonomy. Fatness is too often overrun and submerged by slim people's confident assertion of the value of and sense of themselves. They tend to get very defensive about this, when fat people are perceived to be trying to re-gain ours. I find wherever slim people dominate, fat people's delicate attempts to restore or even acquire the same tends to falter and become distorted to mean different things.
It's a shame because it would be great if there was some corner for an outside perspective. I don't wish to be discouraging. I welcome Anna Mollow's voice.
But a hostile erasing dominance and policing by slimz is not an atmosphere's conducive to fat people's restoration and re-centering of their sense of autonomy.
I should point out though to those who responded to the article, a polite no to the proposition would have sufficed. And yes, I'm aware that a lot of the haters responding to the piece weren't gay people.
Regardless of sexuality though, slimz need to grasp that disregarding personal testimony as intrinsically valuable, invalidates their own. Don't expect to keep telling other people, they don't know their own lives and take for granted that you'll be taken to know your own. Your credibility is the same as fat people's and vice versa.
And seriously, you can get away with this divide for a time, but why would anyone presume that precedent will catch (back) up with you? No? That's not anything to do with the absolute overwhelming credibility of your personal testimony is it? You really feel the realness of that, in your heart, in your marrow, in your very soul, don't you?
Take a seat..............
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