Fat Women Shouldn’t Exist

October 3, 2011

Fat Women Shouldn’t Exist

From a Jezebel piece (originally on First, Do No Harm) on troubles getting an abortion because the anesthesiologist doesn’t do patients with a BMI over 40:

So not only are fat women not meant to be attractive to men and not meant to have sex, and not be able to get pregnant, when we do get pregnant we are apparently putting our baby at risk because we are fat and if we don’t want to continue with the pregnancy, we can’t get abortions either because we are fat.

…and really? Fat women DO have sex. With men, even. Fat women DO have children. But that’s reality, and reality is “messy”. So much better to have a world where fat women just go away.

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Anti-fat bigotry, Sex

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Living 400lbs

I blog about what it’s like to be live life at about 400lbs. :)

15 responses to “Fat Women Shouldn’t Exist”

faycinacroud

October 3, 2011 at 12:22 pm

People often think I’m being overly paranoid in my thought, but the societal dehumanization of a given group of people is a slippery slope. This is what was done in Nazi Germany and it allowed for enslavement of an entire race. I fear that unless we as a society are able to teach tolerance the future for people over a certain size is not going to be pleasant. We are already scapegoated and despised.
There are many campaigns to end the hateful stigmatizing of homosexuals, and THIS IS GOOD! But people are still allowed to stigmatize large people with no consequence. In fact the large people are often blamed and told if they would just lose weight they would not have to endure this.
I also love the argument that our size is a choice. Because I would surely choose to become a member of a despised subclass. Yep, I’m just a masochist that way.
Keep writing. Sometimes words from people like you keep those of us that aren’t so strong hanging on.

Reply
1. Living 400lbs
  
  October 3, 2011 at 10:03 pm
  
  Yeah. It’s freaky how much of this is sometimes is “practicality” too.
  
  “It’s not practical to have scales that go above 350lbs.”
  “It’s not practical to learn to do anesthesia on larger patients.”
  “It’s not practical to have larger chairs.”
  
  Sometimes I just want to scream.
  
  Reply
Phyllis Jeans

October 3, 2011 at 12:44 pm

Fat women shouldn’t exist. I tried to write about my mother in law and her treatment of me but I can’t do it without sobbing. And that is wrong. Totally wrong. Nobody should be treated in such a way. She understood what she was doing. She hated me. Now she is in her declining years and she has started to understand that my husband and I are the only ones who will take care of her so she has started to be very nice to me. My memory isn’t fading though. The pain is still there. I am trying to forgive but…..

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1. Living 400lbs
  
  October 3, 2011 at 10:05 pm
  
  It’s funny how people change when they get older. In a lot of ways, the father I had 10 or 20 years ago wasn’t the father I grew up with…now that he’s dealing with dementia he’s yet another person.
  
  Reply
2. Emerald
  
  October 4, 2011 at 12:22 am
  
  My late mother (who was thin, and despised fat people, and in my case, didn’t hesitate to show it to my face) did the same ‘making nice’ thing when her health started to fail. I have absolutely no doubt, though, that had I moved 200 miles and given up my job to be her 24/7 carer like she wanted, she’d have been just as verbally and emotionally abusive as she was for all those years. I was lucky that my brother, her golden boy who could do no wrong – also a big chap, but in her eyes men were ‘allowed’ to be big, women had to be ‘dainty’ – stepped up and told her where to get off. There’s a lot of coverage these days for the neglect of elderly people, and pleas for a return to respect for old age – rightly so, in many cases, but it makes it very hard to talk about those elderly folks who can be nasty and manipulative.
  
  Reply
synna1

October 4, 2011 at 3:11 am

I always lolsob at the fact that there is no problem with anesthetics for WLS, but it’s a problem for any other form of surgery…..

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1. Living 400lbs
  
  October 4, 2011 at 9:55 am
  
  Yes. I’m sure part of it is that someone specializing in weight-loss surgery is going to look for anesthesiologists who specialize in fat folks, but still.
  
  Reply
2. tehomet
  
  October 9, 2011 at 5:00 pm
  
  Excellent point.
  
  Reply
AcceptanceWoman

October 4, 2011 at 6:15 am

This is also related to fewer abortion providers, and less experience doing abortions. It reminds me of how advocating for abortion rights intersects with fat acceptance.
Thanks for the reminder, and thanks for writing such short posts packed with valuable information (I wish I could be less ramble-y myself).
You always rock, BTW. Thanks for being such a great voice.

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1. Living 400lbs
  
  October 4, 2011 at 10:07 am
  
  Yup. Also that fewer anesthesiologists are going to want to assist with abortions.
  
  What does it say that WLS is more socially acceptable than declining to carry a child one can’t care for, or that one can’t carry to term?
  
  Reply
The Well-Rounded Mama

October 4, 2011 at 8:39 am

Thanks for covering this. Someone alerted me to the story and I was going to write about it, only to find you’d already covered it. Thank you.

This has a lot to do with training anesthesiologists, I think. I don’t know how medical schools can justify not teaching their students to deal with such a considerable proportion of their potential patients. I understand and appreciate that general anesthesia *is* more risky and difficult in patients of size, and that you don’t want to force someone into attending a patient he/she doesn’t feel trained enough to deal with….but it’s just a fact that larger people are going to need anesthesia too, just like smaller people do. Why aren’t they more aggressively trained for that fact? Why can’t they see the medical ethics issues of not doing so?

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1. Living 400lbs
  
  October 4, 2011 at 10:09 am
  
  Indeed! Hello, we exist.
  
  Reply
crookedfinger

October 5, 2011 at 11:55 pm

Over 40 bmi? Really? They had absolutely no problem putting me out earlier this year when I needed my gallbladder out! Surely SOMEONE knows how to do it right…they need to share the knowledge around the medical community, apparently!

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1. faycinacroud
  
  October 6, 2011 at 9:41 am
  
  -I’m actually more susceptible to medications, including anesthetics, than many people, including people who are a lot thinner than I am. Some doctors are surprised to find that I literally need only one mg of Valium to help me sleep. More than that and I feel groggy and stupid. Unfortunately I can’t take it every day because it builds up in the system and then by the end of the week I feel groggy and stupid! I have trouble finding medications that I can take because I’m so sensitive to them.
  
  Reply
tehomet

December 25, 2014 at 4:24 pm

One of the many things that bugs me about the attitude of fattist persons is that they freak out about the so-called obesity epidemic and yet it’s ‘not practical’ to provide products and services that suit people who are fat. Either there’s loads of us or there’s not. Make up your mind, bigots!

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