Fatsronauts 101

Fatsronauts 101 is a series in which I address assumptions and stereotypes about fat people that treat us as a monolith and are used to dehumanize and marginalize us. If there is a stereotype you'd like me to address, email me.

[Content Note: Fat bias; body policing.]

#18: You can diagnose fat people's health issues by looking at them.

No.

I kind of want to just leave it at that, ahem, but I feel obliged to note that even this myth has embedded within it another myth—that all fat people must have health problems. Which: Also no.

And even when a fat person has a visible health and/or mobility issue, it is, as I have observed many times previously, bad math to axiomatically presume that the issue is caused by fat. Sometimes they are unrelated. Sometimes, in cases where they are related, weight gain may have been a result of the health and/or mobility issue, rather than the other way around.

When you look at a fat person, all you can fairly conclude about them is that they are fat.

Anything else is prejudice.

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Previously:

#17: Fat people's choices are always dictated by their fat.
#16: You are helping fat people by shaming them.
#15: Fat people hate having their pictures taken.
#14: All fat people are unhealthy.
#13: Fat people looooooooooove Twinkies!
#12: Fat people don't like/want to see media representations of themselves.
#11: No one wants to be fat.
#10: Fat people need you to intervene in their lives.
#9: Fat people don't know how they look.
#8: Fat people don't deserve anything nice.
#7: Fat people are permission slips for thin people to eat what they want.
#6: Any fat person eating a salad or exercising is trying to lose weight.
#5: Fat is axiomatically ugly.
#4: Fat people eat enormous amounts of food.
#3: Fat people are jolly/mean, and fat people are shy/loud.
#2: I can tell how someone eats all the time, because of how they eat around me.
#1: Everyone who is fat is fat for the same reason.