I just wanted to clarify a point - I’m honestly not trying to troll, just trying to genuinely understand the difference. I’ve read some submissions from your site where ‘derailing’ (well, I’m thin, and I have that problem, too) is considered enough to close the argument.

The thing is, though, that I’ve also seen some submissions where health issues are hand-waved away with 'well, thin people can have that problem, too, so stop trying to put me on a diet’.



Are these not essentially the same argument? Yes, some thin people experience the same problem/have the same affliction, but overwhelmingly the issue is because said poster is overweight. They just seem like the same thing to me.



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The reason it is considered derailing is because this is a space to talk about fat experience and how it relates to thin privilege. Talking about privilege doesn’t mean specific situations never happen to thin people but there are systemic and institutional oppression that values thin people over fat people.

What we see are people trying to disprove how fat phobia / stigma are supported and promoted through social institutions using straw man arguments through personal instances which are not systemic or institutional. For those arguments to be valid, we would have to live in a society that values fat bodies over thin ones and we currently don’t.

Examining privilege is about removing power dynamics found within systemic forms of oppression by placing them into real life situations for us to deconstruct and better understand. It isn’t about proving that those situations are not valid because some people with privilege may also experience similar situations but instead is about examining how those social institutions create a lived experience where certain groups, thin people, experience more access to power than other groups, fat people.

Giving examples of where health issues impact thin and fat people is nowhere near the same, because that is about deconstructing stereotypes and challenging normative beliefs about fat people.

Overall derailing happens when someone, more often than not a person with privilege, enters a space to redirect or change the conversation to one that supports privileged thinking or ideals. It is about stopping conversations about oppression and in this case by trying to disprove or stop our blog from deconstructing fat experience.

-FBP