Good Reporting. Well Done.

This article in the Telegraph is a total trainwreck. Two (unscientific) polls of pregnant women have found, unsurprisingly, that commuters don't generally give up their seats to pregnant women.

From there, the surveyors seemingly extrapolate (and the Telegraph unquestioningly repeats) the conclusion that the reason commuters aren't relinquishing their seats is "because they are uncertain if women are really pregnant or not."

From where did this assertion—important enough that the subhead of the article reads "Pregnant women are being left standing on public transport because commuters are too afraid to offer their seat in case they are simply overweight, researchers claim"—actually come, if the people polled were pregnant women and not people who refused to give up their seats?

The way the article is written, it appears the "researchers" simply pulled the explanation out of their asses, and I'm not sure they didn't. (The Daily Mail article, which the Telegraph cites as a source, is, naturally, no help, either.)

Anyway, irrespective of whence came the claim, there it is: People don't offer their seats to pregnant ladies, because they can't tell them apart from fat ladies (I like how those are mutually exclusive categories in this framing, btw), and they don't want to risk the embarrassment of accidentally offering their seat to a fat lady who they assume will axiomatically be offended.

There's so much shit wrapped up in that, I don't even know where to begin.

I will say this, though: The fat woman who gets loudly offended on public transit because someone has offered her a seat thinking she's pregnant strikes me as the straw-woman star of an apocryphal tale.

I took public transit twice a day for 10 years during Chicago rush hour, and I never once heard anyone offer a woman a seat by explicitly saying it was because she was pregnant. "Would you like my seat?" That's how it happens. I offered my seat to pregnant women dozens of times, and never once did I reference their pregnancy in any way.

The legend of the fat woman who gets loudly offended on public transit because someone has offered her a seat thinking she's pregnant only works if the offerer somehow communicates "I think you're pregnant," which is improbable, at best.

Almost as improbable as a fat woman making a scene that calls attention to a humiliation related to her fat. (Not that being mistaken for a pregnant woman is objectively humiliating, but someone making a scene about it would clearly regard it so.) Fat women who suffer humiliations related to being fat don't generally cause huge public fusses about it (even when we should), despite what slapstick exploitation comedies starring men in female fat suits would have us believe.

So color me dubious that there are legions of people who've experienced offering their seats to a fat woman who gets loudly offended on public transit because someone has offered her a seat thinking she's pregnant. I strongly suspect she is a conjured figure, used to justify keeping one's ass firmly planted where it is, her existence never questioned because we are so used to telling lies about fat people to make them our scapegoats for a host of social ills and inconsideracies.