This sounds like the plot of post-apocalyptic fiction but sadly, it's actually pre-apocalyptic non-fiction. One hundred years ago, in many big cities in the United States, it was illegal to be ugly.

Let's take Chicago as an example. According to the Chicago Tribune, in 1881, Alderman James Peevey decided he'd had enough of the eyeball-assaulting horrors of other people's misfortune, so he introduced an ordinance to ban people who were "diseased, maimed, mutilated, or in any way deformed, so as to be an unsightly or disgusting object" from the streets of Chicago, where they might make people uncomfortable. If you were deemed too ugly to be in public, you had to pay a fine of $1 to $50 (which was a decent sum in those days) or go to the poorhouse, which was kind of like an insane asylum for poor people.

After World War I, when veterans returned home with missing limbs and other disfiguring battle scars, public opinion toward the disabled started to change, but ugly laws remained on the books and their enforcement continued up until the 1950s. Chicago's ugly law wasn't officially dropped until 1974.

Now we'd love to say we're way more enlightened today but fat-shaming is still a thing, so collective enlightenment is perhaps still forthcoming. But at least fat-shaming isn't written into law.