#fatphobia is just a subset of ableism!!!!

[giantkillerjack]

You'd think that even if being fat WERE inherently unhealthy, the medical industry would still provide us the means to survive and to treat illness and injury.

You would THINK that the idea that fat people are inherently unhealthy would lead to more medical equipment being made in big sizes. Tell me why I can't find a knee compression sleeve in a big enough size? Knee pain is like THE thing that people blame on being overweight. And my legs aren't that fat honestly, I feel like a curvy woman who's not fat could have a similar size leg. My legs are not where I carry my weight. It's so frustrating that everything is made for people who carry no "extra" weight at all anywhere.

[erismourn]

its weird to talk about like, attractiveness bc like. attractiveness is a social construct that is largely based in white supremacy (and fatphobia and ableism which are really just subsets of that but I digress) but also like genuinely a lot of problems i've had throughout my life could have been solved or alleviated if I was attractive. like people literally don't respect you if you're unattractive and it's so fucking wild. the combination of fatphobia and being mid to look at means that half the time people don't even acknowledge my presence when i walk in a room. it is WILD to just not exist to most people

[caffeineandsociety]

Speaking of that Twitter thread about people treating insights as hard and fast rules-

That's really the core of a LOT of bad politics. Like, the overwhelming majority of authoritarians, regardless of any other leanings, start there.

"I, and many other people I know with similar circumstances, need structure or else we just fall apart and don't know what to do with ourselves" - a true and valid insight - turns into "EVERYONE needs structure, particularly xyz structure that works for me" turns into "society MUST be structured for xyz and if anyone can't fit into it THEY'RE the problem that must be fixed."

Hell, you want an extreme example? Just look at incels.

Incels have a lot of meaningful insight on the privilege of conventional attractiveness. Incels have a lot of insight into how conventionally attractive people often get away with shit that others can't...whether it's something the conventionally attractive person shouldn't be doing, OR it's something the conventionally unattractive person SHOULD be allowed to do. Incels are often more aware of fatphobia than skinny leftists are. All of this ties pretty deeply into ableism and racism - some incels even acknowledge the way these things intersect.

The problem is, that when any of these insights stop being treated as insights and start getting treated as hard and fast rules, and combine with a heavy dose of misogyny that ALREADY treats gender roles as hard and fast rules, what do you get? You get a fucking death cult, is what you get.

This is why some people try to reclaim that one fucking comic, isn't it? It's easy to see the true and meaningful insight - fatphobia exists, double standards exist, some people's threshold for what constitutes sexual harassment is "a fat person flirted with me or even just said hi to me while being the 'opposite sex'" (though in my experience it's far more likely for that to be an attitude of men than women, I'm just saying...) - but...the punchline is still "women will make false reports of sexual harassment just because a man exists near them while being 'ugly' because they're just that shallow", like a poison pill hidden in that insight.

Similarly, this is how we get a lot of radfem talking points, whether terfs or "trans-inclusive" - they're born of real, valid, feminist insights. Men are broadly treated by society as naturally stronger and more competent than women of otherwise the same demographics (...usually; transness tends to complicate this because society gets confused about who to treat as dangerous aberrant men vs. gross failed women with us so it more or less evens out even when it looks different). Men are culturally encouraged to see women as property and sex as an act of conquest. Humans have relatively slight but, at least on average, noticeable sexual dimorphism, and a lot of things we value (particularly in sports) are things that play to strengths that cis men are more likely to have (and women are even discouraged from having, for that matter). A lot of misogyny is aimed at the "female" reproductive system; physical ease of access isn't the only reason that external reproductive anatomy is pretty well understood while gynecology has barely advanced beyond the myth of wandering wombs causing all ills. Society at large insists on the gender binary being a force of nature with almost if not outright a religious fervor.

All of these things are true!

But what happens when you let them turn from insights into hard and fast rules?

You kill intersectionality, no matter how much you pay lip service to it. You get the idea that that there are no men in the world who are oppressed, and that there certainly is no such thing as a way the misogynistic idea of male hypercompetence is weaponized against "aberrant" men; there is no unique gendered way that racism, ableism, fatphobia, queerphobia, or hell, sure enough, even "ugly-shaming", may manifest when aimed at men or people presumed to be men. That there's a subset of trans people - whether man, woman, nonbinary, AFAB, AMAB, intersex, whatever - who are functionally equivalent to white cis men in both life experience and the eyes of society. Either trans women are predators trying a sneaky strategy to conquer and rape women and trans men are either being driven to tragically denying themselves for a futile chance to be allowed to live as human beings, or traitors trying to be at the top of the privilege hierarchy, OR trans women are heroes for "choosing the right side" in the face of unspeakable danger and trans men are DEFINITELY evil misogynistic traitors if they don't constantly apologize for the very real male privilege every single one of them definitely has in all aspects of life. Intersex and nonbinary people, if valid, are still little more than a rounding error.

Hmm. Something's not right here, now is it? But that started from an ostensibly pro-equality stance! So what happened? Turning those insights into rules turned into gender essentialism, is what!

So, what makes anyone else's leftist insight any different? Any fairer to turn into a hardline black and white rule?

Nothing. Nothing is what. Your insights are not rules, and trying to make them so...well, that itself is an insight, so let's just say it's a VERY dangerous game and leave it at that.