The whole “if you don’t like it, change it” thing is the single most annoying argument I’ve ever heard on this subject because it’s all about victim-blaming and it was the one I heard most from my parents when I’d tell them about the fact that I was being bullied. They’d use it as an opportunity to try to motivate me to lose weight, something that never worked and just made me more and more excluded from the kids at school and my family.

And this is still seen as a reasonable solution. I was watching food network (fucking FOOD NETWORK) today and on a competition show called Chopped, they featured 4 people who had lost a ton of weight as part of a special “healthy” episode, and you know what their stories were? One person, according to her account on the show, while fat and living a poor lifestyle, suffered from diabetic ketoacidosis and nearly went into a coma, then, in response, altered and policed her diet so intensely that she is now off her insulin. However, not only is she now rail-thin, but when she ate a raw piece of bitter melon (a fruit that, in terms of flavor, is essentially inedible raw due to it’s named bitterness) she thought it tasted good. Her diet has destroyed her palate and I doubt that’s the only thing it has hurt given the way she described the intensity of her diet. Of the three left, I don’t know the fourth person’s story, but the two other guys only really had one thing to say, and it was this BS argument about how growing up they were bullied for being fat, and eventually they “decided to do something about it” and now they aren’t fat and are also “healthier”.

Never mind all the problems with this kind of dramatic and rapid weight loss, and never mind the ableism and the “health” stuff that has nothing to do with being fat, but this ridiculous victim-blaming of fat people as being the ones responsible for their bullying? I can’t stand it. It’s like telling a person who is being mocked for a big nose to get a nose job (if people with big noses were also facing societal discrimination for it).

And the worst part is that some people who face that kind of bullying, whether for a big nose or for being fat, will internalize that shame and hatred and actually will go out and get work done or alter their life in some significant and often damaging way just so the bullying will stop, which is their right, but is completely ass-backwards when it comes to fixing the problem. And then afterwards the people who lost weight will feel better because thy’ll be treated better, and they’ll go on preaching the joys of weight loss and the cycle of self-hatred continues.

It’s a bad argument, a bad philosophy, and a vicious circle that only breeds more fat hatred. I can’t think of any other physical trait that’s the subject of so much bullying and societal stigma, that someone could say “just change it so you aren’t that anymore” and think that’s okay.