Lauren

“But our insecurities don’t stop at our own skin. The ways in which straight-size people see fat people are increasingly limited by their own insecurity. In body positive spaces, for example, thin people will often struggle to hear fat people’s stories of discrimination. The concrete, external harms of anti-fatness are often reframed and reinterpreted as insecurity by thinner people, especially women. After all, thinner women simply aren’t subjected to the same levels of societal prejudice, harassment, bullying, and overt discrimination as fatter people. As such, feeling insecure is among the worst things many thinner women can imagine, so many interpret fat people’s stories of explicit, interpersonal, or institutional anti-fatness as insecurity. The phenomenon of repackaging a fat person’s discrimination as a more palatable, more understandable kind of internal struggle with body image is one I’ve come to refer to as thinsecurity.”
― Aubrey Gordon, What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Fat