Joffi's Stuff

sandersstudies:

My sociology professor had a really good metaphor for privilege today. She didn’t talk about race or gender or orientation or class, she talked about being left-handed.

A left-handed person walks into most classrooms and immediately is made aware of their left-handedness - they have to sit in a left-handed seat, which restricts their choices of where to sit. If there are not enough left-handed seats, they will have to sit in a right-handed seat and be continuously aware of their left-handedness. (There are other examples like left-handed scissors or baseball mitts as well.)

Meanwhile, right-handed people have much more choice about where to sit, and almost never have to think about their right-handedness.

Does this mean right-handed people are bad? No.

Does it mean that we should replace all right-handed desks with left-handed desks? No.

But could we maybe use different desk styles that can accommodate everyone and makes it so nobody has limited options or constant awareness that they are different? Yes.

Now think of this as a metaphor. For social class. For race. For ethnicity. For gender. For orientation. For anything else that sets us apart.

(via tkot)

• 26 Aug 2018
• 70930

jaggedlittlepills:

a lot of women have hard childhoods too but u don’t see women committing violent crimes against men in large numbers every day. i literally cannot name a single woman who has tortured and raped a man off the top of my head but I can name countless men who’ve tortured and raped women and a lot of them never went to prison…this world hates women so much more than we are all comfortable admitting

(Source: medievalfolkhealer, via lagoble)

• 21 Jun 2018
• 27

thinfatfit:

“Diet and beauty culture thrive on guilt. Guilt over that delicious dessert. Guilt over that dress size. Guilt over those wrinkles. They teach you guilt and then they sell you the solution. Please, never feel guilty for existing. You are allowed to eat. You are allowed to take up space. You are allowed to age. You are allowed to exist in the body you have right now without spending all of your time, money and self worth to change it.”

— Megan Crabbe, Bodyposipanda (via monstersinmirrors)

(via flummery)

• 28 Mar 2018
• 10113

sonthechest:

thelittlestastronaut:

clatterbane:

agreekdoctor:

lady-yomi:

thisisthinprivilege:

mainstreamqueen:

loverofbrownsugar:

bigfatscience:

tribvtaries:

fattyatomicmutant:

viergacht:

sinthiasweet:

thecrazygeek-rant:

thisisthinprivilege:

I work at a daycare with infants.

One of our baby girls is fat, in the 99th percentile for her age. She is super cute and sweet. Lately, she has been sick with various breathing issues, so she has been reluctant to take her bottles. Normally, she’ll take 4 ounces of formula at lunch and 8 ounces in the afternoon. Today, I was lucky to get to her take 5 all day.

There was a substitute covering a lunch break in my classroom today. We emphasized to her that we need to keep trying to get the baby to drink her bottle until she finished it. She said, “Why are you guys so worried about taking her bottle?”

My coworker replied, “That’s where all her nutrients are. She needs the nutrients and the water.”

To which the substitute replied, “But she’s so fat. She doesn’t need it.”

Thin privilege is a small, pretty baby getting better childcare because the caretaker doesn’t think she’s too fat to be allowed to eat.

This reminds me of a cousin of mine who ended up with her kids being taken away from her by social services for a number of reasons but mostly for nearly killing her baby daughter. How?

By starving her. She insisted that her baby was ‘too fat’ and had an aim to remove any and all ‘chubbyness’ so her baby would be thin. She’d already been warned by her doctor about the baby not getting enough food, but insisted she knew best.

After several months of this her baby passed out cold one day and was rushed into hospital where the doctors found her to have severe malnutrition, a low body temperature and low pulse rate. They asked my cousin what she’d been feeding her daughter and she said “one bottle of skimmed milk a day. I don’t want her growing up fat.”

Even after nearly killing her daughter my cousin maintained her view that fat = bad and ended up with all her kids taken from her because she was starving them and neglecting them.

When your fatphobia leads you to starving your own children then you’ve got serious problems.

(Note. She still, to this day, maintains the view that she was right and the doctors were wrong. “They just want fat kids so they can keep employed treating them for all those diseases that being fat causes.” = her actual words.)

My mom had me dieting with her when I was eleven. She had me eating less than 600 calories a day because she was worried I was going to “get huge.” She even grounded me once because she found out my friends were bringing me lunches! I ended up passing out, going to the ER, and getting two IVs at once BC I was so goddamn dehydrated. Soooooo surprised they didn’t call child services… And looking back, this was the root of my anorexia. I’m nearly 22 and still fighting it. Please don’t starve your fucking children.

For fucks sake babies are SUPPOSED to be fat, what is wrong with people? It’s just stored energy, and growing children need stored energy - an 11 year old is just about to hit some major growing years. Damn. 

Fatphobia

Is

Real

and it kills

This is no joke. people will literally starve their own babies cause they don’t want them getting fat. A parent brought in their six month old baby who was having breathing issues and kept getting sick. the parent was asked if the baby was eating regularly and the parent straight up told the doctor that they only feed the baby once a day. ONCE A DAY. A FUCKING BABY. they even had the nerve to say because they didn’t want the baby to get fat. people like this are real. they would rather have a dead baby than a fat one.

My youngest son is a very big boy and has been since he was born. When he was 10 months old I took him for his well-baby check and vaccinations. The nurse noted his weight and said, quite casually, “He is in the 99th percentile for weight so he is at risk for obesity. You may want to keep an eye on that.” I said, “He is exclusively breastfed. He refuses to eat any solids yet.” What did she expect me to do? What would it mean to “keep an eye on” an exclusively breastfed baby’s weight? 

She backed off saying, ‘Well he looks fine!” – proving once again that weight bias is not truly about health – But I know many other parents who are not as informed as I am about weight science and size diversity would react to this interaction by policing their child’s food intake, if not as an infant, then when he was an older child. This is exactly the type of seemingly-inconsequential interaction that starts the ball rolling on a lifetime of dieting, disordered eating, negative body image, and weight-based abuse for too many fat people.

Years later when he was five, another doctor measured his weight and height and commented that he is off the charts on both, but “at least he is in proportion.” And if he was not “in proportion,” I am sure I would have been advised once again to “watch his weight.” 

I no longer allow healthcare providers to weight my children unless it is absolutely medically necessary. They are unable to control their weight talk, which is a known harm for children.

We need to completely eliminate weight talk from medicine, especially when it comes to children. Even the smallest exposure can have terrible consequences.

Wtf…

A friend from college had been going to the doctor because she was having trouble breathing. She was told to lose weight. Over the course of several years, she went back to the doctors time and time again, telling them that she’d been sticking to the diet but because of her breathing problems she had been unable to even walk for more than 20 minutes at a time. The doctor got her into an exercise programme and told her that she just needed to really try to lose weight because that was clearly the reason for her breathing problems. By the time they found the tumour on her lungs, it was inoperable. She only lived three months after diagnosis. She was 25. She’d had the tumour for over five years. The doctor was so focused on the fact that my friend was “fat”, that they refused to look for any underlying cause. They killed her.

Weight-first treatment KILLS. Fatphobia KILLS.

I have 2 scary stories to share about fatphobic doctors & parents harming their childs/patients’ health:

1. The 4 years old daughter of a friend of mine came to our house to spend the weekend. She gave me a letter from her mom that said that the child was in a glutenfree diet because she was getting ‘awfully fat’ when eating cookies or bread (my celiac ass; who gets dhiarrea and loses a scary amount of weight whenever I eat something with gluten was like ’???’).

You can bet that I went to the supermarket with the kid and told her ‘go & take whatever you feel like eating’ and the poor child came back smiling with her arms full of biscuits and cupcakes.

She didn’t got sick (as a celiac would get) and told me later that she hated the diet her mother made her follow; because her cousins didn’t had to pass through that.

And what’s the scariest thing about this story? Her mother was a NURSE. A fucking nurse who didn’t have a clue of the harm that she was doing to her daughter’s body!

2. My little sister started to feel fatigued and dizzy at 9 years old. She felt nauseated at the sight of food and had abdominal pain that increased with physical activity.

Mom got her to the ER and the doctor dismissed it saying: ‘she’s fat and probably is feeling ill after eating too much burgers, get her to make some exercise and she will be better in no time’.My mom didn’t felt ok with the diagnosis and took my sister with a second doctor who also told her that ‘the child was just fat’.

My sister’s skin was starting to get yellow as the days passed and the abdominal pain was getting awful so my mom (heaven bless her!) got her to the ER for the third time:

SHE HAD STAGE 4 HEPATITIS AND WAS ABOUT TO DIE.

She survived after a long and painful recovery who involved being in bed for a whole year (remember that we’re speaking of a 9 years old child). Luckily they saved her liver and she didn’t went through a transplant… but let this sink:

If it weren’t for my mother, fatphobia would have killed her. Fatphobia kills kids and teenagers, fatphobia kills inocent people everyday. It treats human beings as lesser than others and hurts them in their most vulnerable times.

It’s a real shame that we all have so much stories to share about this issue. A REAL SHAME.

Future doctors, interns, and residents following me:

FUCKING TAKE NOTE OF THIS!

Don’t let bias against your fat patients kill them!

(#and this is just when we actually go to the doctor and tell them we have problems #how many of us just give up #or won’t mention anything that seems like too much of a ‘fat’ problem)

i’d really like my thin followers to reblog this if you can. fat people are already here for each other, we need you guys to help us out too. this is something i never see anyone actually talking about in-depth, and it’s disappointing. be there for your fat siblings, too.

Eleven-ish years ago I was very ill with what turned out to be gallbladder disease but at the time all I know was I would suddenly be in terrible pain and then feel really awful afterwards. I was also losing weight at this time to try and improve my PCOS (polycystic ovarian syndrom) symptoms but I was still a big woman although a fit and active one. Finally an attack that left me throwing up blood and black bile and in wrenching agony sent me to the hospital (I walked there though something the paramedics found amusingly ridiculous when they later found out) There I had this absolute dick of a young male doctor who refused to treat me before everyone else waiting despite being triaged by the nurse as needing to be first to be seen (due to ascending stomach pain radiating up into my shoulder and chest) he told me I was making a fuss about nothing and that I was trying to get attention on such a lovely summer day when I should be out getting some exercise because I ‘needed to’. He didn’t listen that I had lost two stone or that I had rung my doctors surgery and they told me to go to a&e - or that i had experienced attacks like this before. He was rude and cruel and decided I was a time wasting fatty who thought she was in pain when she wasn’t because fat people make a fuss about things - his words. Luckily there was a nurse in who thought given my elevated heart rate and high temperature that I needed seeing and while the shitty young doctor was busy got my bloods done and passed them on to the a&e head consultant when they came back because of what the results were. The head consultant came in to see me and apologised and got me set up with pain meds and told me I was going to be admitted. Then, bless him, he called in the young doc and tore a strip off of him - firstly making him read my blood results (which he went pale at) and then explaining to him that two of the nursing staff had complained about his treatment of me and that he seemed disinterested in providing me with the care he was charged to, that i was someone clearly ill, in agony and scared and that he had behaved unprofessionally towards me. He then made him apologise to me several times. I ended up being in hospital for over a month had gallstones, a liver infection, pancreatitis followed by septiceamia and nearly died twice. The a&e consultant visited me on the ward at one point and told me the last person he had seen with liver readings like mine had been in the emergency room had died and if the young doctor had got his way and sent me home like he had wanted to I would have not made it through the night. He would have sent me home to die because of his fatphobia.

Testimonials.

(via thisisthinprivilege)

• 17 Jan 2018
• 305317