Sofie Hagen Battles Trolls on the Internet
Have you ever posted something on the internet and people completely change the topic? Is that normal?
It tends to be the ‘norm’ in the plus size community, when discussing happiness. People love to bring up your “health.” That’s exactly what happened with Sofie Hagen, author and speaker to the plus size universe.
Sofie took to Facebook to address the trolls. If you can’t read her awesome response, we’ve got it below:
‘But what about health?’
I’m on a press tour in Denmark to talk about the Danish translation of Happy Fat and SURPRISE SURPRISE, everyone brings up health at any given moment. Journalists are so incredibly predictable and unimaginative. The book has a whole chapter about health. Fat activists have answered the health-question ‘but what about health’ hundreds of thousands of times since the 1960s. If people really cared about health, they would have listened, just one of those times.
Very simply put:
🍑 Fat people (like all people) have autonomy over their own bodies, we can do whatever the fuck we want with them.
🍑 If it worked shouting ‘YOU ARE UNHEALTHY’ at fat people, everyone would be thin by now.
🍑 Discrimination and oppression leads to a rise in cortisol levels which can lead to heart disease and diabetes WHOOPSIE RING A BELL?
🍑 Even unhealthy people and sick people deserve to be treated like human beings.
🍑 People who suddenly ‘care’ about fat people never have the same passionate concern for people who smoke, do drugs, drink every weekend, do extreme sports, don’t see a therapist when they should, bungee jump OR…
🍑 WHEN THIN PEOPLE EAT UNHEALTHY FOOD OR NEVER EXERCISE THEY ARE NEVER SCRUTINIZED IN THE SAME WAY.
🍑 You cannot look at a person and see what they had for breakfast or why they look the way they do.
🍑 SOME PEOPLE ARE JUST FAT. It’s GENETICS.
🍑 If you really care about health, you’d fight against poverty and make sure that healthy food was cheaper and more accessible to the working class, that people didn’t need to work themselves to death to feed their kids.
🍑 My friend had anorexia and almost died. She was complimented for looking healthy. She finally got better and thus gained some weight. She was told she looked unhealthy. STOP EQUATING HOW BODIES LOOK WITH THEIR LEVEL OF HEALTH.
🍑 Dieting, exercise and food restriction can be massively triggering and uNhEaLtHy to people with eating disorders — BECAUSE it’s drenched in weight loss rhetorics.
It’s simple. But I will be asked this again and again, because as long as we talk about health, we don’t talk about the real enemy: capitalism and the patriarchy. THANKS, THE MEDIA.
Here’s Sofie’s page so you can follow her!
And, here’s her site:
