This is how misogyny works: take a hierarchy, any hierarchy, and use it to derogate a girl or woman.

feeling insecure makes sense in a world set up to undermine you. We feel insecure because, in being fat or trans or queer or disabled or otherwise nonnormative in a bodily dimension—that which Harrison calls “Ugly”—we are made to be insecure in our very embodiment.

Namely, they are saying, or at least implying, that we are weak-willed, gross, lazy, lax, and stupid. They are saying that we are destined to be not just unhealthy but unhappy. And that we are responsible for our own ignominy. In this way, the label “unhealthy” works as a dog whistle in the discourse around fat bodies—much as the terms “inner city”

Fatphobia can be defined as a feature of social systems that unjustly rank fatter bodies as inferior to thinner bodies, in terms of not only our health but also our moral, sexual, and intellectual status.

But, ultimately, it felt like a confession of a sin that was less mine than a completely predictable product of the social world I lived in.

Health is weaponized against fat people: The gospel of fatphobia says you’re unhealthy and it’s your fault, so you don’t deserve care and compassion. There’s an ingrained cultural myth that links wellness to goodness, so what’s perceived as poor health—fatness, chronic illness, or disability—is a result of poor choices and thus poor character.[78]

It is indeed an example of what we might call the “harder-better” fallacy: that which is the most difficult to achieve is judged the most praiseworthy, regardless of its actual desirability or value.

Regardless of how this shakes out, here are some things we do know, which should be at the center of this conversation: the health risks of fatness have frequently been overstated; a person’s weight is typically highly resistant to deliberate change, at least in the long term; there is currently no known reliable, safe, and ethical way to make fat

Even if these interventions were perfectly safe and costless and painless—which they’re currently far from being—I would still find them objectionable at a social level of analysis. For they flatten out difference, in the form of human bodily diversity, which I believe we ought to value. They flatten out such difference not at random, moreover, but