Episode Details

While places that serve the public (from transportation, to food service, to entertainment and especially healthcare) should be set up to accommodate everyone in the public, unfortunately, that is not always the case. This can create a situation where we may want/need to ask for access/accommodations. This can happen to people for any number of reasons - size, disability, neurodivergence and more. For those with multiple marginalized identities, this can occur more often and asking can be more difficult. For this piece, I’ll be focusing on accommodations for fat people, though these techniques can be helpful in any situation. I also want to acknowledge that, while the size at which someone may need to ask for accommodations can vary, lack of accommodation does the most harm to those at the highest weights and/or multiply marginalized fat people.

Asking for accommodations can bring up a lot of emotions – stress, embarrassment, shame, fear, anger, guilt.  I think that one massive problem is that we’ve been told that asking for accommodations is asking for some kind of favor or special treatment above and beyond what everyone else gets. This stems from weight stigma. Unfortunately there are people who believe that fat people don’t deserve healthcare and, thus, that if a lack of accommodation is due to fatness, then inequality is acceptable. It can also stem from capitalism. If you can make the people you haven’t accommodated blame themselves (and/or get others to blame them) for the lack of accommodation, then you don’t have to invest resources to fix it.

In truth, there is plenty of evidence to show that people are a variety of sizes for a variety of reasons which are not necessarily within their control and that we have no proven method to change size over the long term.  More importantly, it doesn’t matter why someone is fat or even if it was possible to be thin.  We have every right to exist in our bodies as they are, and we deserve to be accommodated, including in healthcare. Fat people exist and they deserve to be accommodated in the bodies they have now, not at some hypothetical future date when they might look different.

Another issue with accommodation for fat people is some people believe , and we are often actually told, that we should simply get thin so that we don’t need the accommodations. Perhaps the most cruel version of this is when people suggest that we use someone else’s failure to accommodate us as “motivation” to change ourselves. Even if this was appropriate - and it’s not - and even if it was likely to work – and it’s not – it doesn’t help someone who needs to fit into an MRI and get the scan they need right now, nor does it help someone fit into a too-small chair with arms for the office meeting they’re required to attend, or into the too-small theater seat to watch their kid’s performance or the Broadway show they spent a ton of money on.

Also, asking a healthcare facility, business etc. for accommodation is not asking for special treatment, it’s asking for what everyone else is already getting. When the hospital opened to provide healthcare to the community they were aware that the community includes fat people; so they should have ordered armless chairs, large blood pressure cuffs, gowns, larger beds etc. so that all patients could have access to the same experience, and if they failed to do it when they opened, they should have done it at some point, and if they failed to do it at some point, they should do it now. Regardless, fat people who want a properly-sized blood pressure cuff (or a seat that accommodates them on a plane for a single fare, or a seat they can sit in to go with their expensive theater ticket) aren’t asking for something special, they are just asking for what thin people are already getting.

So what can you do about a failure to acco