The Way We Talk About Our Bodies Is Deeply Flawed
By: Your Fat Friend
Tags: Body, Equality, Identity, Body Positive, Women

The Way We Talk About Our Bodies Is Deeply Flawed

Words like ‘fat’ and ‘thin’ ignore a vast spectrum of size and experience

Photo: Rawpixel via Getty Images

I made a mistake.

A friend recently asked me what I was writing about next. I told her I was planning an essay on medical neglect: the way that doctors think of and treat patients who are very fat — patients who, like me, are classified as “super morbidly obese.” In the process, I referred to this friend, a size eight, as thin, and realized my mistake immediately as I watched her bristle and hiss.

“I’ve been quite heavy,” she snapped, voice thick with condescension and sharp with defensiveness and something else — fear? “You just didn’t know me then. I was fat.”

Surprised, and more than a little ashamed of myself for making such a basic mistake, I asked after her experiences as a fat person.

She feels that I have erased her experience; I feel that she has appropriated mine.

“I was almost plus-size,” she tells me. “I was wearing a size 12, and people started telling me to diet.” I feel myself bristle before quickly repressing my own hiss. I feel stalagmites rise up from my floor, hard as rock, jagged and unforgiving. She is, of course, referring to the time when she was her fattest. I am, of course, referring to an experience that is largely unique for very fat patients: doctors’ outright refusal to treat us at all. She is talking about her feelings about her skin; I am talking about the way individuals and institutions treat me, regardless of what I say or how I feel about myself. I abandon the conversation before it begins. Like a trailer that gives too much away, I already know how this exchange ends.

It is an exhausting and common routine, and one for which, in this case, I only have myself to blame. She feels that I have erased her experience; I feel that she has appropriated mine. We are now both entrenched and wounded, struggling to move past our own body trauma to have a more concrete conversation.

But in moments like these, I struggle to know how to refer to thin people in a way that recognizes their privilege but doesn’t trigger this woundedness, this defensiveness, a drawbridge raised with a moat to ford.

As a fat person, the world feels clearly divided by a bright line: people who wear plus sizes, and people who don’t. My experience as a fat person — a size 26, just shy of 350 pounds — isn’t just a matter of feeling fat, it’s a matter of being actively excluded and underserved because of my size. For me, being fat isn’t about how I feel about myself, it’s about how the world reminds me, sometimes violently, of my own inferiority, and the ways in which even basic needs are withheld from me.

But despite the certainty of that experience, the lives of our bodies are much more complex than a simple, tempting binary. Size, like so many things, is a spectrum. But that spectrum doesn’t progress smoothly or evenly. There are harsh drop-offs within it: the moment when you are forced into the “plus-size” or “big & tall” section of a department store. The moment when even those sections no longer fit, and you need to shop exclusively online, because no brick-and-mortar establishment carries clothing that will fit around your body, regardless of whether it fits well. The moment when a doctor stops making eye contact, stops listening. The moment when your size means you won’t be hired, won’t be promoted, or will be outright fired. The moment when strangers begin to shout at you on the street, throwing trash or mooing as you pass.

These moments, abrupt changes in the quality of that size spectrum, deserve to retain their integrity. We’ve got to be able to name that the experience of a size eight differs dramatically from that of a size 18, which differs, too, from that of a size 28, who may not be able to fathom the experience of a size 38. That will require self-awareness of all of us, a willingness to acknowledge our own hurt and stretch beyond ourselves to grapple with someone else’s.

But without the language to name our bodies, none of this will be possible.