Tagged: pseudohealth
Stealing babies: your classist, ableist, racist trifecta
[Content note: pregnancy, nonconsensual medical treatment]
Chris Miller and Sarah Wilson have both done a fantastic job blogging on this story, so I thoroughly recommend reading what they have to say.
Recap: an Italian woman in Britain had a mental health issue. She was pregnant. The state, for reasons so far unknown, performed a C-section on her without her consent and put her child in care. This is approximately every level of fucked up.
But now, because more details have become clear, it sounds like a lot of progressive people think it’s not as big a deal, because it was doctors who made the decision to perform the C-section which has now led to this woman’s child potentially being permanently adopted without her consent.
I have a question.
What the fuck are you even doing?
Even the most able-bodied in-full-health no-medical-issues-ever progressive should be able to comprehend that doctors are not gods, and are not infallible, and are certainly capable of making fucked up decisions for fucked up reasons.
Like Dr Joseph Lee who refused to prescribe contraception to a young woman because “his conscience” told him to lecture her about The Duties Of Women instead.
Like the numerous doctors who refuse to perform basic diagnosis on patients who are fat. (Degenerative spine condition?
Like the doctors who performed the Unfortunate Experiment on New Zealand women.
[EXTREME TRIGGER WARNING for abusive medical practice, genital mutilation] Or Dr Graeme Reeves who deliberately mutilated women’s genitals while performing surgery on them.
How about the amount of research which shows doctors are more likely to label people of colour as “non-compliant”? Or prison medical staff coercing incarcerated women to be sterilised?
This isn’t an argument that all doctors are evil and none are to be trusted. Just as pointing out the utterly shitty culture the NZ Police have towards victims of sexual violence, especially sexual violence committed by members of the NZ Police, isn’t an argument that all police officers are rapists.
But frankly, enough of them are that you should not feel comfortable just assuming that doctors – or police officers – are acting with integrity. Especially when the person on the receiving end of their treatment has the black marks of mental illness, migrant status, and gender against her.
Fuck you, Louise Thompson: I AM FAT
I think the worst thing about this column in the Herald is that its writer thinks she’s being helpful with tips like:
“I’m fat” is a lie
It’s not a useful description of a permanent characteristic, like “I have blue eyes” or “I’m 5 foot 4”
What is far more accurate and empowering is “I have fat”.
Here’s the thing, Louise:
I am fat.
It is a useful description.
Height and eye colour aren’t necessarily “permanent characteristics” either.
And there is absolutely nothing more harmful in my eyes than telling people to disown parts of their bodies.
That’s the whole fucking problem with our fatphobic weight culture. It’s a culture of body-hating. It’s a culture which drives people, especially women, into a cycle of self-hatred and judgement and constant fucking anxiety. It feeds billion-dollar industries peddling snake oil and lies. It distracts us from living our lives as beautiful unique sparkleponies meat popsicles human beings. It buys into a (not really) shitty Judeo-Christian/Enlightenment/Descartian mind-versus-body dichotomy which is basically the root of a hell of a lot of oppressive systems (short version: we’re constantly sold the lie that our minds are all that matters while being oppressed via our delicious meaty bodies).
(Note: the same linguistic fuckery plays a role in the oppression of people of colour, people with disabilities, and trans people, but that’s a lot more complex than I’m qualified to speak on.)
No self-hate required.
This is the greatest lie of all. You can’t tell people to divorce themselves from their own physical existences and then say they shouldn’t hate themselves. That’s basically the fucking definition of self-hate.
Oh, and a final note to the sub who put this under the headless-fatty image used to illustrate the article:
The phrase; ‘I’m fat’, is not a body positive statement
I’M FAT, AND YOU BETTER BELIEVE THAT’S A FUCKING BODY-POSITIVE STATEMENT.
TLDR:
Kevin Hague jumps aboard the fat-hating bandwagon
It is not a surprise to me that the Greens, for all their good solid liberalism and appreciation of the complexity of economic and environmental issues in some areas, are massive morality-policers on others. (See also recent discussions on The Egonomist about Greens in Wellington local government (about 47 minutes in).) And I’ve posted before about their fat-hating food-policing ways. But this week Kevin Hague stepped up to beautifully illustrate the problems with fatphobic policy-making. You see,
Apologies to Dan Carter, whose BMI is only 29.7
First off: obesity is not a disease. You are invited to imagine other blog posts Hague might write which label basic characteristics of people’s bodies as conditions. Almost all of them will be racist. But to the well-marbled meat of the issue:
“We simply can’t afford the cost of obesity related disease to keep rising; hitting the one million mark should be a huge wake up call to the Government,” said Green Party health spokesperson Kevin Hague. … “At this rate we are going to be hit with a tidal wave of diabetes and heart disease that will cripple New Zealand’s health system.
Any day now, right, Kevin? And we’ll absolutely be able to distinguish the healthcare costs associated with Stupid Fatties Who Don’t Eat Fruit from the healthcare costs associated with poverty (another thing obesity is correlated with!) and an ageing population (another thing obesity is correlated with!) right?
“The Minister of Health has committed $60 million a year to diabetes and obesity prevention, which is an almost 30 percent decrease in funding since 2008; all the while obesity and diabetes rates soar,”
[citation needed] Literally, citation needed. Because after scrounging around the Ministry of Health website, the Diabetes New Zealand website, and several google searches, you would not believe how difficult it is to find a basic run-down of historic diabetes rates which clearly distinguishes Type 1 and Type 2. Much less takes account of changes in the NZ population over that time. But the fact is, Kevin doesn’t need statistics. Because everyone knows that fatties Don’t Eat Enough Fruit, and everyone knows that Being Fat Gives You Diabetes, and everyone knows that we need condescending “traffic light” labelling so people can more easily judge their neighbours’ purchases at the supermarket Make Informed Choices. Oh, and because I know you’re going to ask (Herald link):
The report defined obesity as a body mass index (BMI) of 30 or more, calculated by dividing a person’s weight in kilograms by the square of their height in metres.
Which is why this post is entirely illustrated with pictures of obese New Zealanders, promoting their disgusting unhealthy lifestyles.
The three things I will never stop saying about fatphobic policy-making:
- BMI is a completely unscientific metric
- There is literally no proven, sustained way to make naturally fat people thin
- Lack of access to “healthy” food is a fuckload more complex that price and “education”
[Daily Blog reposts] The new prohibitionists
This post was originally published at The Daily Blog on 11 April 2013.
Above all else, there’s nothing I hate more than someone who lies about their intention. It’s the one redeeming thing about, say, rabid antichoicers who accept that people who get abortions should be imprisoned for murder: their beliefs are reprehensible, but at least they’re consistent, and don’t try to pass laws saying, say, “we just want to regulate the evil babykilling industry so it’s safe!”
Which is basically the line Peter Dunne is trying to sell in this media release about “legal highs”:
Today is the beginning of the end of an unregulated legal highs industry, and young New Zealanders will be the safer for it
Because you see, the problem is that a lot of whacked-out shit is getting sold in party pill format, and it’s untested, and this can end badly, and as someone just catching up with season 1 of Banshee I have no real disagreement with that premise.
But dig just the teensiest bit deeper?
The Bill will replace the temporary class drug notice regime that has been in place since August 2011.
“It has done its job very well, taking 33 substances and as a result, more than 50 products off the market, but it was only ever a holding regime until we could get this law in place.”
Now, I may be completely missing the point here, but I was personally under the impression that you regulate things so that the unsafe things are taken away and the proven-safe things are permitted to be sold, albeit perhaps limited to grown-ups. But for some reason, Peter Dunne’s press release doesn’t talk about how many substances have been tested or evaluated, just how many have been taken off the market, as though that’s the real measure of success.
And that is, in fact, a pretty different kettle of fish.
I mean, I’m not at all surprised that Dunne’s real focus is the killing off of all fun, I just wish he wasn’t co-opting ideas about sensible regulation and liberality in allowing adults to make informed choices to sell it.
Government to use private thugs to force sick people into work
You’d think that would be the headline, wouldn’t you? Instead of “Govt will pay to shift mentally ill into work“. That makes it sound far nicer. It’s just a shift! Not a private-sector jackboot up your ass if you’re evil enough to have messy brain chemistry issues.
I’ve seen a lot of people point out that this is basically what the government has tried to do in the UK, with predictable, horrific, corrupt results.
I just have a few questions.
What magical powers do these organisations have which mean for a mere $12,000 they can find suitable fulltime work for a mentally unwell/non-neurotypical person – which WINZ isn’t able to find them?
Or is it just convenient to get a private provider – who is presumably not subject to the OIA – to kick vulnerable people onto the streets so there’s no official paper trail of why and what happens to them?
Who are the companies making $12,000 for each ill person they force into work? Who owns shares in them?
What are the criteria used to determine if a job is a good, sustainable job? Or don’t we give a fuck?
Do they have to give any of the money back if a mentally ill person kills themselves? Or do they get a bonus?
It shouldn’t need saying – #IAmNotADisease
We’ve been here before, people.
Now the American Medical Association has decided that obesity is a “disease”.
some doctors and obesity advocates said that having the nation’s largest physician group make the declaration would focus more attention on obesity.
Because you know, we as a society spend no time at all on the topic of weight and health and how disgusting and evil fat people are.
The first technical problem is that there’s no single definition of what a “disease” is – so sorry, fat-haters, you don’t really get “but SCIENCE!” free rein to keep hating on people whose bodies you dislike. From the article linked above:
To some extent, the question of whether obesity is a disease or not is a semantic one, since there is not even a universally agreed upon definition of what constitutes a disease. And the A.M.A.’s decision has no legal authority.
The second is that the AMA contradicted its own committee of experts on public health:
The report panned body mass index as a proxy for obesity, saying it’s limited as a stand-alone. Furthermore, calling obesity a disease may undermine prevention efforts and will do little to impact its treatment, the report said.
“Without a single, clear, authoritative, and widely accepted definition of disease, it is difficult to determine conclusively whether or not obesity is a medical disease state,” the council told the AMA’s policy-making House of Delegates. “Similarly, a sensitive and clinically practical diagnostic indicator of obesity remains elusive.”
The third is all about following the money, because the initial report above clearly states:
And [the declaration] could help improve reimbursement for obesity drugs, surgery and counseling.
i.e. could make it a lot easier for fat people to pay for drugs which don’t work, undergo dangerous surgery which doesn’t work, and be convinced they need therapy for their existence.
The weight cycling industry in the US alone is worth $66 billion a year. And yet it has not delivered a significant decrease in fatness in the US population. If someone were making $66 billion a year and only returning illusory results to its investors, we’d call it a Ponzi scheme and throw people in jail for it.
But the overwhelming issue is, of course, that my body is not a disease. Being fat is a characteristic of my body, like my eye colour, like my hair colour, like my skin tone. It is strongly influenced by genetics, just like my foot size (not a disease) and the shape of my ass (way too awesome to be a disease).
People always want to say “but I’m not talking about you, it’s just that obesity is linked blah blah blah”.
You’re lying, people. Maybe you’re lying to yourself, too, and do honestly believe that you’re a judgement-free snowflake whose only flaw is caring too much. But you’re lying nevertheless.
As has already been covered on far too many occasions, height is “linked” with plenty of health issues. Different ethnic and geographic backgrounds are linked with health issues – and we don’t say “let’s declare “spending your childhood in New Zealand” a disease” in order to “focus more attention” on iodine deficiencies.
We are, in many (but not all) other spheres, quite able to treat health issues on their own without demonizing the associated characteristics of the people who have those health issues. We do it for fat because we’ve accepted the idea that (a) fatness is controllable (despite reams and decades of scientific research to the contrary) and thus blameable, and (b) the “links” between weight and certain health issues is rock-hard and invariable, as opposed to the “links” between height and Alzheimer’s disease, which are just random, blameless flukes of nature.
When you talk about “obesity”, you’re talking about my entire life. Because the only way I will ever be not-fat, ironically, is if I am sick and that sickness, or the cure-or-kill-you treatment for it, causes unnatural, damaging weightloss which will reverse itself once I’m not sick – yep, being healthy would make me gain weight again.
You don’t “cure” obesity without killing me, and everyone else who’s fat. You don’t call obesity “a disease” without labelling every single fat person as inherently sick. And we’re not.
~
Mandatory links because I just know you’re out there waiting to whinge about “but SCIENCE!”: Big Liberty’s Truth Behind Fat page. Dr Charlotte Cooper spins it on its head to say Yes, I am a disease.
Family First and Dr Miriam Grossman are still lying about sex ed
Well, another lethal blow to my ego: no one in the mainstream media reads my blog.
That’s the only reason I can think for them breathlessly covering a “report” from Family First – who, let’s all remember, were de-registered as a charity, in part because all their “research” is baseless propaganda – which dishonestly covers much the same ground I did nearly a year ago.
That is, the dark, seedy underbelly of New Zealand’s sex ed websites.
If only I’d published my post as a “critical review” under the banner of some vocal, extremist Christians, then the mainstream media might have taken me seriously published my opinions as though they were fact.
Anyway, you should totally go check out my original post, if only because there are balloon animals fucking each other in it.
Hat tip to Kevin Hague, Frank and Gay NZ for fighting the good fight on this one. As Kevin says,
Our problem in New Zealand is not that the resources produced by great organisations like Family Planning and Rainbow Youth are wrong. It is that we know what works but have failed to ensure that every school uses a sexuality education approach consistent with these criteria.
And one of the obstacles in our way is extreme conservatives trying to force a ludicrous Mad-Men-if-you’ve-never-actually-watched-Mad-Men style of morality on us.
The Greens hate fat people, too
I was trying to summon the willpower to really engage with and critique the Greens’ food policy, but really, I’ve said enough about our demonisation of fatties and I just lack the spoons to point out in detail how the science around nutrition and diet is so far from settled it’s a joke, or to explain with pretty diagrams just how utterly corrupt a lot of the science around nutrition is.
Let’s just say, I think we should be thankful no large proportion of the NZ agriculture industry is dependent on corn. And now, I ramble a little.
Seriously, @thelemonofpink was entirely on the money:
I… Am not sure how I feel re Greens’ unhealthy food labelling policy. Gut reaction: food policing bullshit.
And … yeah, pretty much. The policy is a paint-by-numbers “fat is bad, sugar is bad, sodium is bad, kids don’t know where apples come from” bullshit.
It’s really disappointing to me because the Greens are simultaneously pushing a “people deserve to be informed” policy, yet ignoring the fact that study after study shows that pushing “healthy” foods and “lifestyles” on kids does fuck all to change their weight. Ignoring the fact that any policy which treats weight as a symptom of poor choice not only doesn’t work but invariably leads to bullying and stigmatisation. Ignoring the fact that in a culture as weight- and lifestyle-obsessed as ours, it’s really hard to fucking fathom how anyone could not have heard a million times before breakfast that they need to eat less, move more, buy whole foods, learn to cook, count calories, cut the fat, 5+ a day.
It comes down – as it always comes down – to the idea that being fat is a moral failing and if only the poor stupid fatties could be told that bacon is a sin and apples are a virtue then they’d just stop being fat!
We reject this kind of bullshit when we’re talking about poverty, and the Right insist that the poor just make bad choices and thus deserve to live in damp, dark homes, or that people choose to live on the dole because it’s so much money, or solo parents on the DPB just don’t want to look for work. When it’s food, and fatness? Suddenly personal responsibility is everyone’s favourite card to play.
And all of you queuing up to tell me that this kind of discussion isn’t eliminationist?
The Green Party envisions an organic nature where:
… New Zealand is a healthier nation without epidemics of obesity, type 2 diabetes or other food-related chronic health problems.
Yep, there we go again labelling people’s bodies as a disease.
I expect the Green Party to be better than this. But they’re not. Because fatness is certainly not “the last” acceptable form of prejudice, but it’s certainly one of the last where otherwise-liberal, anti-discrimination people drink the “but it’s scientific!!!” Flavor Aid.
I am become fatpocalypse: eliminationism
At some point in this saga, I used the phrase “eliminationist”, and was promptly told off because the person I was arguing with never used that word.
I suppose it’s a bit like how someone can’t be misogynist just because they refer to all women as bitches, because, um, unless they use the word “misogynist” their behaviour can’t be described as misogynist.
Anyway, for people genuinely interested in the concept, the canonical post on it is at Shakesville. I paraphrase:
When you talk about eliminating obesity, stopping people getting fat, waving a magic wand and making everyone a “normal” weight, you are talking about eliminating me. Because I’m a fat person. I’m never going to be a thin person – because diets don’t work. Because there is no scientific evidence to support the idea you can make a fat person eternally thin.
To actually attain your dream world where no one is fat? You need to find a way to get rid of me.
And given how we know – from PEER REVIEWED SCIENCE!!! – that weight cycling damages people’s health, that “weight loss surgery” damages your life expectancy if you survive in, and that the medical profession will let you die because they’d rather diagnose all your health problems as being about your weight and not your ovarian cysts or your depression or your multiple sclerosis?
I think we can take a good, informed guess as to how that magical fat-free world is meant to come about.
I am become fatpocalypse: the apology
I’m sorry, everyone.
I’ve been spreading misinformation on Twitter. Dangerous, subversive misinformation.
I started off with the radical notion that obesity isn’t a health problem. In the same way that being red-headed or having A+ blood isn’t a health problem. Those things may be “linked” statistically with certain conditions or illnesses or levels of mortality … that doesn’t make them illnesses in their own right.
Of course, people may say “oh, I didn’t mean individual health, I meant overall health”. Obesity is still not an illness. It doesn’t have a diagnosis, it doesn’t have a cure. It has some incredibly vague and imprecise alleged measurements, and a hell of a lot of very profitable yet completely unreliable suggested treatments. But I choose not to see that as the same thing.
Also? BMI or amount of body fat are weak predictors of longevity, and being “overweight” is associated with greater longevity, especially for the 55+ age group; obesity may have a protective factor for people with type 2 diabetes, hypertension, cardiovascular disease and chronic kidney disease; obese people are more likely to survive a coronary bypass.
But clearly, I was wrong. My ass is an epidemic. My boobs are the plague. Despite my lack of actual health conditions like high blood pressure or heart disease or diabetes, I am fat, and ergo sick.
I pointed out that height is more affected by environment than weight.
Okay, okay, you got me. I was wrong. Because weight is 70-80% heritable, and height is 60-80% heritable. Or it’s 75-85% versus 90-95%. Either way, the lesson is clearly that I was wrong, and weight is totally something individuals can control, unlike their height, which is fixed by God.
I apologise.
I said fat people do not exercise less nor eat more than thin people.
I was basing this statement on studies which show things like activity-based programmes to reduce children’s BMI consistently fail.
I read Junkfood Science, and learned:
Professors and clinicians David Garner, Ph.D., and Susan Wooley, Ph.D., reviewed 500 studies on the long-term treatment efficacy, the biology of weight regulation, and health outcomes of weight loss, and confirmed that multiple researchers, using a variety of methodologies, have continued to fail to find any meaningful or replicable differences in the caloric intake or eating patterns of the obese compared to the non-obese to explain obesity.
And I discovered this study shows that there’s fuck-all difference between “metabolically healthy” obese people and thin people.
But look, it just makes sense that fat people are lazy gluttons. Science said so. Just not here.
I said that no diet works if you study its participants over 5 years.
I am at least smart enough to know that individual studies can be flawed, but I was truly taken in when my research found that meta-study after meta-study after meta-study shows weight loss programmes failing. If they bothered to follow the subjects for longer than a year. A lot didn’t. Probably for totally innocuous reasons.
See the “Also?” link above?
Long-term follow-up studies document that the majority of individuals regain virtually all of the weight that was lost during treatment, regardless of whether they maintain their diet or exercise program. Consider the Women’s Health Initiative, the largest and longest randomized, controlled dietary intervention clinical trial, designed to test the current recommendations. More than 20,000 women maintained a low-fat diet, reportedly reducing their calorie intake by an average of 360 calories per day and significantly increasing their activity. After almost eight years on this diet, there was almost no change in weight from starting point (a loss of 0.1 kg), and average waist circumference, which is a measure of abdominal fat, had increased (0.3 cm).
You know what does work to actually improve people’s health? The Health At Every Size approach. Which doesn’t result in weightloss. (It’s even been … PEER REVIEWED!!! More on that in a later post.)
But it’s probably all just a scheme so fatties can feel good about themselves and justify eating more doughnuts.
I said that successive generations are getting taller, that height is correlated with some illnesses, and that it thus surprises me (note: it doesn’t really) that no one runs around panicking about a tallness epidemic.
This was then presented as me actually arguing that height is a health problem. At this point I probably should’ve stopped, because I was clearly arguing with someone who had no intention of engaging honestly, but I am a glutton for doughnuts punishment sometimes..
What I tried to clarify – and of course, Twitter is a bad medium for anything more complex than one full sentence – is that fatness is not sickness, and our social responses to sickness are ineffective and oppressive.
Like diets. Oh, said the other person, I never mentioned diets. Nope, he just talked about “controlling” body weight. Because there are totally safe predictable sustainable ways to do that which aren’t “diets”, right?
*crickets*
What there actually are are a lot of studies (PEER REVIEWED! SCIENCE!!!) which show that it’s seriously, seriously hard to permanently alter people’s weight. In either direction. And despite the constant panic-mongering over THE OBESITY EPIDEMIC, life expectancy continues to rise and the population is getting healthier – in actual measurable things.
There’s the way that messages about THE OBESITY EPIDEMIC have led to increased discrimination against fat people – including discrimination in the medical professional which has almost certainly killed people.
The 70-80% heritable link above? Also notes that stress has a major impact on body weight. Gosh, I wonder if underprivileged, poor, oppressed minorities, who are so often the Scary Fat People Who Will Eat Your Babies, might be under some stress that Good White People From Nice Schools don’t experience?
The “Also?” link above? Notes that:
Most prospective observational studies suggest that weight loss increases the risk of premature death among obese individuals, even when the weight loss is intentional and the studies are well controlled with regard to known confounding factors, including hazardous behavior and underlying diseases
So clearly the answer is to be born thin, to thin parents. But not too thin, obviously.
I apologise, people. I’ve been wilfully leading you all down a garden path to obesity. I will not rest until we all look like that fucking creepy vampire Pearl from Blade. Probably because I’m a jealous bitch, or something. (Well, I’m sure the more kindly fathaters will pretend to look on me with pity.)
I’ll stop worrying my little fat ladybrain about this now.
Until tomorrow’s post.
Hat tips (and seriously recommended reading): the Redefining Body Image resources page; Shapely Prose’s immortal FAQ; Dr Linda Bacon, the appropriately-named goddess of HAES; Big Liberty’s Truth Behind Fat: References; Junkfood Science.
Ideologically Impure 