The United Airlines passenger rant shows the agonising reality of taking up space as a fat person

As a fat black woman, I don’t have the luxury of forgetting exactly how my body does or doesn’t fit in with the world around me, and comments from people like that passenger are exactly why

For the average person with the average bank account, the words “luxury” and “flying” are pretty much incongruous.

If you’re not desperately smushing your most coveted liquids into entirely too small zip-lock bags for fear of having them mercilessly snatched away and disposed of, you’ll probably be rewarded with an overfriendly, or worse, unbearably antagonistic seat buddy later on.

Travelling in such close quarters with people you don’t know, and have no intention of getting to know, can be awful. But for the most part, we tend to accept it as a necessary evil of travelling abroad. It’s annoying, yes; uncomfortable almost always – but it’s far from the end of the world. Unless of course, fat people are involved.

A couple of days ago, a woman on a United Airlines flight thought it appropriate to chastise the two passengers sitting either side of her for that very reason.

“Oh my goodness, I don’t know how I’m going to do this for the next four hours,” the woman exclaims, in footage of the ordeal, “this is just impossible ’cause they’re squishing me. Like, friggin’ just unbelievable.”

Visibly disgusted at having to share space with the two larger passengers – one of whom, registered nurse Norma Rodgers, filmed the incident and posted it to Facebook – the woman unashamedly refers to both Rodgers and her partner McKinley Frink, as “big pigs”, as other passengers chime in to support the targets of her abuse.

There are numerous examples of incidents like these. Some reach viral fame, others remain solely on the radar of those involved, but in most of these cases, the most immediately obvious source of the abuse is the fact that a fat person has had the audacity to take up space in public.

“How dare these people, with their oversized bodies and insatiable appetites, use planes, buses, trains? Don’t they know how much of an affront to my wellbeing their existence in the world is?”

That’s what these outbursts seem to suggest, leaving people like me, who know what it means to have to silently make apologies for their body, wondering: “well, what would you suggest we do instead?”

There’s almost never a clear answer to that question. Most would earnestly offer advice like “lose weight”, or “eat a salad” as solutions, as if the reason for people’s overweightness everywhere is solely down to stubbornness and laziness. And even if heavier people do welcome those so-called remedies for fatness, what should they do in the transitional stages of slimming down? Stay inside? Confine their bodies to their own private vehicles so as to appease people who consider inadvertent body-to-body contact as big an offence as using seats as foot rests for dogs**t-covered shoes?

Weight loss isn’t instant, and it isn’t always the right solution for everyone either. Shaming people about things they can’t make immediate adjustments to won’t do anything to give you that extra inch of space you think you’ll die without. Not to mention the fact that studies are forever encouraging overweight people to take public transport in order to shift pounds.

More importantly, however desperately you think you need to let that fat person – who I promise you, is well aware of exactly how fat they are – know that you find their body offensive, it never actually needs to be said. Because nine times out of 10, the intention is to make that person feel bad, to repent for having used a seat that they’ve paid for, or to squeeze their bodies tighter than they probably already have, just to make it clear who the deserving party in the battle of the armrests really is.

As a fat, black woman myself, I don’t have the luxury of forgetting exactly how my body does or doesn’t fit in with the world around me. For people larger than me, and for disabled people especially, these issues are even more pronounced.

Still, at my size, in my skin, I know what it feels like to be met with huffs and puffs for taking a seat on the Tube; to be barged into submission, elbowed, trodden on, shouted at, as punishment for being outside, or on planes like Rodgers was.

My mental health, like so many others, has taken a hit because of constantly being seen as a grotesque inconvenience, not only through the outbursts of others, but in many aspects of moving through the world. Public areas like planes are riddled with accessibility issues, not just for fat people, but for anyone whose body doesn’t fit the “standard”. By ignoring that, and placing the blame on those whose bodies can’t slot neatly into areas that haven’t been built for them, what we’re really saying, is that these people deserve nothing more than just to put up and shut up.