Walking my puppy just now, a man shouts at me from his balcony if I want his workout DVDs. He said, “I guarantee in two months you’ll be slimmer than that. You won’t even walk that way.”

I walk the way I do because I’m disabled.

This encounter is exemplary of how: fat femme bodies especially are considered public property, to be commented on; we are imagined to be fat bc we are just not doing enough of the ‘right’ things; we are expected to want to not be fat & constantly be laboring towards thinness.

Undoubtedly, this man, like all other strangers who have offered unsolicited weight loss advice to me in my lifetime, thought he was doing mr a favor. He was being ‘nice.’ Performing good cultural citzenship under neoliberal frameworks that frame our bodies as projects.

This is why I get so frustrated with compliments on my looks, my confidence, or my accomplishments, as if they could counter the ubiquity of fatphobia. Why fatphobia is so much more than body image or self-esteem. To the majority of the public, we are merely bad. They let us know

And why conversations on the intersections of fatness and disability are important, instead of merely their similarities. Some of us embody both, which become conflated, as if disability is a consequence of fatness that can be exercised out of. Bullshit.