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Healthism is itself a facet of ableism, the web of beliefs, behaviors, and institutional practices that marginalize disabled people. Our cultural perceptions of health and beauty have long been rooted in the rejection of disabled people. For example, in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, municipalities across the United States passed so-called “ugly laws,” banning the public appearance of disabled people. According to Canada’s Eugenics Archive, “ugly laws were concerned with more than appearance, prohibiting both the activity of street begging and the appearance in public of ‘certain persons.
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Aubrey Gordon ("You Just Need to Lose Weight": And 19 Other Myths About Fat People (Myths Made in America))