#fat discrimination

I have been seeing a lot of posts about how bottom/top surgeries have BMI limits. I looked into it a little bit and it does indeed exist for many providers (I've seen a limit of 32 BMI for top surgery, for instance). Trans folks, there is no medical justification for BMI limits for top or bottom surgery beyond the pearl-clutching surgery centers do about offering fat people any kind of surgery (like that fat people have a greater risk of infection/bad wound healing, are harder to safely anesthetize, etc).

I'm married to a medical doctor and posed the question about what could justify BMI limits for top or bottom surgery, and my spouse replied, "The only justification I can think of is that most anesthesiologists lack training in putting fat people safely under and surgery centers and surgeons don't want to take on the extra risk for legal reasons. There's no special reason top or bottom surgery would be riskier for fat people."

If you want to get your stomach amputated as a fat person you can find a willing surgeon and trained anesthesiologist anywhere, any time of the week, heck, your doctor has been probably dying for you to ask them to get stomach amputation surgery and has a half-dozen options ready and waiting.

But fatness is used as a barrier to getting gender-affirming care because having any surgery as a fat person is risky something something. It's straight discrimination, using fatness as an extra hurdle to prevent fat trans people from accessing important and possible life-saving gender-affirming care.

This is what activists mean when we say that intersectionality matters. You can't pick and choose your allyships. We are all connected. If you support trans folks then support fat folks and vice-versa.

If you stop being a part of a minority and immediately turn on the remaining minority who supported you while you were part of that minority many people will experience you as untrustworthy and shallow and a danger to most social groups going forward like idk what to tell you?

TRANSCRIPT (From tumblr user skoople)

I think because we talk about body image and fatphobia together so much, we sometimes forget those are separate things; and it is actually exhausting being someone who talks about anti fatness frequently to have those conversations be misunderstood and derailed into being about body image.

When I am talking about systemic anti fatness, I'm not talking about how I feel about my body.

I love my body with the best of them, but I cannot love my body out of employment discrimination or medical discrimination.

I can't love my body into equal pay or equal access to healthcare.

Fat people live in a world that pays us less, charges us more, denies us healthcare, openly ridicules and excludes us, and then tells us the solution is to love our bodies.

But it's not.

The solution is to give fat people access to the same rights, resources, and services that thin people get without question.

curvysurfergirl

It’s easier for some people to believe my surfing is photoshopped than to accept I can surf.

There are very few things that people can write in the comment section that bother me at this point.

Almost everyday on one platform or another I hear:

• “you're fat” • if you lost weight you’d (fill in the blank) • You’re too skinny to be curvy or plus size • you look like a whale/ island/ hippo / cow • she has diabetes or will • Now that you’re done surfing go get your McDonald’s

But the one that never ceases to amaze me is when people say my surfing videos are faked…

Like oh yea let me just spend a cool several thousand dollars to go through a Hollywood production to fake I can surf…

It blows my mind that people would rather accuse someone of faking surfing than to accept that a woman with my body type or bigger can surf.

While these comments baffle me more than they cause any actual harm to me, I take heart knowing we are actually making change.

I’m rather certain for the better part of the last several decades people used hurtful words like these to exclude women like us from surfing in surf breaks around the world.

Outside of the workplace, the trend of educational and economic elites marrying, befriending and socializing with one another — assortative matching and mating — is also a marked characteristic of our time. Elite homogeneity has a look and the look is thin. So when women say that it is better to be sick and thin than healthy and fat, they are perfectly rational."

Meanwhile airplane industries:

I’ll be damned if I let history repeat itself and die in my mid-60s and leave all my little grandchildren because fatphobic shitty asshole doctors. I love you Nana.