I don’t get sick very often, however when I was in college and living in a cesspool of germs, I did occasionally come down with something that required me to visit the health clinic. After coming down with a bad case of strep, I went to the on-campus health clinic to get a quick lab done and a prescription for antibiotics.

As soon as I was in the room with the nurse practitioner, she took one look at me and got this look on her face that I had seen many times before on other doctor’s faces. I was poor and uninsured for many years and in the various free or low-cost clinics I’d had to go to, I had seen this look on almost every doctor or nurse’s face. It was that “my god she is fat” look.

After asking me my symptoms and some other routine questions, she reviewed my file and immediately asked me to fill out a family history form. I had done this two years before when I had been accepted to the university (it was part of the required health information they gathered along with vaccine information) but filled out another anyway while she waited. I checked the “blood clot” box under family history and she immediately got this panicked look on her face when she scanned the form. I explained that my father had a knee surgery many years ago and had a blood clot and had one again a few years ago after another surgery. I told her that both of these were after a medical procedure and after he was lying down for long periods of time. My father is in his 70s and takes blood thinning drugs as a precaution. Besides these two times, he has never had a problem with blood clots in his normal everyday life.

The NP apparently decided that I had a genetic blood clotting disorder, flagged my medical file and denied all of my future birth control refills. She did this without consulting me, testing me, or taking any other measures. She never even wrote a diagnosis in my file, just something about me having a blood clotting disorder in the past. She just assumed that because I was overweight and on a form of birth control which can increase the risks of blood clot, that I was at high risk without taking a single blood sample. For months after I had to argue with the campus pharmacy to refill my birth control prescription and eventually was forced to have an IUD inserted which ended up expelling a mere 30 minutes later, leaving me in excruciating, nauseating pain for the next 36 hours until I was able to get it removed (I had it inserted on a Friday and had to struggle to get a late Saturday appointment). I spent hours in a waiting room, crying in pain and thoroughly embarrassed because this woman denied me medication I had been using with no side effects for over 5 years. After that I had to drive nearly 40 miles to the closest Planned Parenthood to fill my prescription, where I was never questioned about my choice of method of birth control. All because of one fatphobic doctor whom I paid a health fee to every term made assumptions about my health without ever once testing me for anything more then strep throat.

Thin privilege is never being denied contraception based on your weight. Thin privilege is not having to justify your reproductive choices to a doctor.