Something I learned replacing my broken office chair a few weeks ago is that most chairs are only really rated for a 220-250 pound person... which is about how much I weighed when I was 15

10% of the US population can't safely sit in most chairs

Everyone hates those park benches with the arms in the center to keep homeless people from sleeping on them, but I actually can't even sit on them. They bruise my pelvis.

When you're fat, all architecture becomes hostile architecture. The world is built for smaller people.

Even when seating is sturdy, it's often not wide or deep enough. Jutting arms crush your body. Diner booth seating digs into your belly. You bang your knees on the supports under tables. You have to actively work to keep from falling off too narrow a seat.

And seating is important. It's everywhere.

Hopefully you know what it means to fly while fat; to self-minimize to avoid thin complaints, to emerge aching from being bunched up for hours.

But that's also my bus experience. Public transportation is only for SOME of the public.

Even in a private vehicle, I bruised my shin on our road trip the other week because it rested directly against the console with my seat pushed all the way back. For some folks, the steering column intrudes on their bodies, making it difficult to drive. Seatbelts may not reach.

Vehicle safety tests assume a much smaller person. Vehicles are designed to save the lives of much smaller people. It is literally less safe, as a fat person, to go anywhere, by any mode of transportation.

Public buildings are only for some of the public.

When you go to the DMV and take a number, the thin people get to sit and wait, but the fat people have to stand.

When I get called in for jury duty, I spend hours with my butt falling asleep, trying not to fall out of the pews.

When I was in middle and high school, there were certain classes I did badly in *purely* because the desks weren't big enough; I would be hanging with half my butt in the aisle for the whole 50 minutes, sucking in my guts so that the writing surface didn't dig into me.

I've turned down beautiful, affordable apartments because the tiny toilet was shoved into a narrow nook. Because if I got in the stall shower and closed the door, I would not be able to move my arms.

Like all other kinds of marginalization, being fat means less adequate housing.

(That road trip we took? I had to search through hundreds of hotels to find one with a room with a bathtub that could comfortably fit me. I hadn't otherwise taken a bath since I was 16 and anorexic. And now I'm stress-dreaming about obstacles to taking baths. )

Above a certain weight, most walls are no longer solid. If you lean on them or bump them the wrong way, you might go straight through them. Safety railing may betray you. The handrail of every staircase is suspect.

Because again: Spaces are designed to be safe. But not for you.

And, you'll have to take my word for this, thin people stand in the dead centers of hallways, totally oblivious to the fact that you can't get by. They move half an inch when asked. They spread out to take up whatever space they like; they expect you to minimize down to nothing.

(Being fat during pandemic isolation is a nightmare, because most straight-sized people simply don't respect us enough to give us 6 feet of distance, or to leave us space to navigate around them safely. It's all the usual spatial anxiety, in hyperdrive.)

Fat people are used to moving through the world with grace and awareness, because of all of the hazards carelessly left for us, but also because, if we fail to get out of a clueless thin person's way and they bounce straight off of us and fall, it's *our fault*.

We are expected always to cede space, to personally account for the ways the manufactured environment fails us, and quietly avoid its many traps, and accept bruised thighs and discomfort as penance, so that straight-sized people don't have to think about any of it.

But we NEED ya'll to think about it. And to think about us, when designing these spaces. When occupying these spaces.

It's so frustrating to be invited over to someone's house, only to realize their rickety porch is a danger, or that they don't own a chair you can sit in.

And what allyship looks like through all of this is active awareness: When you check out a new venue, make a note of whether a larger person would be comfortable there, so you don't invite us to places hostile to us. Ask employees if there's sturdier seating available somewhere.

Don't make us hippo ballet our way past you. When you're with us at a party, offer us the bigger armchair or a seat on the couch instead of lounging on it. Leave broad footpaths through your home.

Just a modicum of awareness from straight-size people would make our lives *so* much easier. It would take the responsibility of accounting for discriminatory design off of us.

Maybe some day, spaces will be built for everyone.