Commonalities are not similarities

[firecat]

This post on riotsnotdiets.com promotes the notion that fat people should adopt a disabled identity. That's too simplistic.

http://riotsnotdiets.com/post/4058647475/fat-disability

fat people—just like all people with devalued, non-normative bodies—are disabled. NOT because our bodies can’t do things, but because we live in a world that STOPS our bodies from doing things.

I am all in favor of coming up with an analysis of the sociopolitical experience of "people with devalued, non-normative bodies."

And I think there can be common cause between disabled activism and the fat activism. Some societal changes would benefit people who identify as disabled, fat, or both.

But I definitely don't think being fat, in and of itself, counts as being disabled, and I think it does damage to fat people and disabled people and people who are both to conflate them.

I'm saying this as someone who has been fat all my life and who has developed some mobility and pain problems over the past five years. Having both things going on is way different for me from having only one of those things going on. And the not-fat people I know who are disabled don't have the same experience of the world that I do.

Comments

[originalpuck]

But I definitely don't think being fat, in and of itself, counts as being disabled, and I think it does damage to fat people and disabled people and people who are both to conflate them.

Yep. I'm fat and a person with disabilities, and I agree with you on this.

Yeah, there are some intersections between the communities, but that doesn't mean that the TAB fat community should be appropriating the label of PWD. My fight as a poor person often intersects with my fight as a PWD, too, but that doesn't mean TAB poor folk should appropriate the label, either.

Here's the thing: as a fat woman, I'm constantly fighting my doctors tooth and nail to get them to understand that my fatness is not the cause of my disabilities. I'm constantly fighting family and friends to get them to understand that I won't magically get better if I can equally as magically figure out how to lose weight. Having the fat rights movement appropriate the label of disabled (not talking about fat PWD claiming the label that is appropriate for them) would make that work that much harder.

And that work? It's one of the things that effects how I'm treated as a PWD. It effects what treatment options are open to me, what sort of funding I can get, how my family reacts to me, and how society as a whole understands me. That work, that fight, can mean the difference between pills and no pills, between check-ups and no check-ups, between surgeries or no surgeries.

I'd love to live in a world where that wasn't so. I'd love to live in a world where fatphobia didn't mean I have to come in with pages of studies showing fatphobic doctors that they're wrong (and still not getting anywhere), in a world where being a PWD means that people will automatically give me whatever accomodations I need (HA!). But that's not the case.

In the end, I feel that there are ways to work together without appropriating another community's identity.

[firecat]

That work, that fight, can mean the difference between pills and no pills, between check-ups and no check-ups, between surgeries or no surgeries.

Yep.

If you find that world, I'll be on the spaceship heading there right next to you.