From a really early age, we are taught opposites as a way of categorizing things in our brain. Humans are conditioned to put things into filing systems based on what they are not, more often than what they are.
While this is a helpful skill for visual and spatial discrimination in our early development, it can turn into social discrimination and hardline rigidity in our adult lives.
The systems of binaries we create for the purpose of more convenient categorization don’t actually match up with the realities of our diverse world. There is more to us than just fat or thin, straight or gay, black or white.
An example that we struggle with as a society right now is the acceptance of non binary gender identities.
Even in the area of orientation (an identity entirely separate from gender), we are doing okay but could be better. I struggled with my identity from the beginning of my adolescence until maybe the second year of college. I identified as bi to my friends and for all intents and purposes, to myself, but never really became fully comfortable or felt “in place” around guys.
When I came out at 19 to my mom, I told her I was a lesbian–but I knew it was more expansive than that. I have since opted for the term queer; an umbrella term that sits comfortably in the middle of non-hetero identity.
A lot of bi people experience bi-erasure; this notion that a person can’t be truly bi, but that either they are just needy and greedy or “not a real” gay/lesbian person.
And there are certain merits we give to people who cosmetically conform to the binary identities we have, even while they exist outside the margins with as little visibility as possible. Lesbian women can be lesbians on their own time, but must perform and exist as women (mostly by paying their dues to the male gaze) in the outside world. But often, fat people, trans people, and many others don’t have the same set of performance privileges (Vade & Solovay). The further into the margins you get, the less flexibility you have to be yourself; even behind closed doors.
This kind of dichotomizing happens both outside and within the queer community, and its a way of labeling that asserts a moral superiority that is just as socially constructed as the identities themselves.
It also does nothing to resolve the issue of breaking down the gender binary, and plays right into the harmful gendered stereotypes that non binary people find themselves having to apologetically aspire to in order to be perceived as “real” men/women. But guess what? Their very existence makes them “real”.
Binary thinking not only limits our relationships with each other, but also limits our realities, language surrounding those realities, others’ realities, and everyone’s understanding and empathy towards those realities.
And even with the added factor of gender, food gets moralized even more deeply along with body image. (Cis) women are taught to aspire to thin bodies, and made to apologize for non-thin ones. At the same time, nobody seems to care what size trans women are because the binary tells us that they are and should remain invisible.
We can do our best to combat this by uplifting the voices of those who are non binary, fat, of color, differently abled, and who have different realities and experiences than those who are in set norm populations altogether.
For my recovery, one of the most dangerous dichotomies of all is the one that moralizes food.
All food serves a purpose, and it doesn’t exist to be labeled “good” or “bad”. It exists to be enjoyed, to provide energy, to serve as a backdrop for social gatherings, and so much more.
It took me years to unlearn the patterns of thinking that told me that eating Oreos or skipping a day (or two or three) of working out made me a bad person. I did a lot of work to start seeing my body as my friend, and using food for whatever purpose it had in context. Sometimes, I eat cake because I want to. Sometimes I eat broccoli because I want to. Now that I don’t exist in binge cycles and eat with my brain in deprivation mode, I eat any and all foods that I enjoy because I want to.
Lately I have also been battling with the idea that I am not allowed to feel full, that it’s bad to feel full, and that if I do start to feel full I must exercise to “get rid of it”. These are tried and true eating disordered thoughts that our culture has turned into normal patterns of behavior.
It’s considered normal to avoid foods you like because they’re “too fattening”.
It’s considered normal to exercise so that you can “earn” dessert or even a meal.
It’s considered normal to be inundated by calories printed on the menu when you order out at restaurants (at least in New York).
It’s considered normal to want to aspire to not look like that fat girl you know.
Thin has been considered normal for a long time, and statistically speaking we are getting new standards here in the good old United States. In this country, a size 14 woman is considered the average. But our attitudes haven’t caught up with us yet, because we still give an incredible amount of privilege, status, and deference to thin people.
There are unspoken policies that pit fat people against the thin and create fatphobia and weight stigma, which cast fatness into a moral problem (Huff).
The same good/bad attitudes about foods are extended to bodies, depending on what bodies are consuming the “bad” food.
In order to be seen as trying, credible, valid, fat girls have to be eating salads at their desks alone at work–aspiring to be smaller.
If a fat girl eats a donut, it’s seen as an eternal “gotcha”–“that donut and all the other ones you probably eat are why you look like that!”
If a skinny girl eats a salad, she’s doing the right thing; participating in the maintenance of her thinness (which is like, more than 70% genetic, most likely, unless she has an eating disorder or a hyper-metabolic health issue).
If a skinny girl eats a donut, no one has a damn thing to say about the space she takes up, how that space is related to that donut and how it justifies hurling prejudice at her until she changes her habits.
Our need to categorize things in such rigid ways can turn into real time, unfiltered, and really-hard-to-unlearn-as-adults prejudice. Fat people bare the brunt of this in their everyday lives all the time. I learned this the hard way when I tried explaining HAES to my mom and she just completely told me that I was flat out wrong…
Even though there is empirically tested, scientific research that weight stigma is actually more of a pre-cursor to health issues than weight itself; and that causality and correlation are not the same thing when it comes to health conditions that have been considered to be caused by a person’s weight or fatness.
Our first step is to change our attitudes about split thinking before we can ever hope to change policies that affect the lives of LGBTQ+, fat, differently abled, or any other marginalized group. The “us” and “them” is what creates stigma, oppression, marginalization, and even policy that furthers the disparities among us.