When Your UX Only Fits Two Sizes

A few years ago, right before the pandemic hit, I was trying to buy clothes online. Nothing fancy, just basic stuff, trying to get rid of my old "nerdy" t-shirts and work on different styles. "Queer Eye" got me with all those tips, you know the drill. And while I looked at the outfits, I started to notice a pattern across multiple stores: the navigation had "Men's Clothing" with dozens of subcategories, "Women's Clothing" with even more subcategories, and then, sitting there on the menu, separate from everything... "Plus Size." Just "Plus Size". No gender. No subcategories. As if being above a certain weight, or having a body out of the norm, erased everything else about me. According to these stores, I could be a man, a woman, or just... fat. Someone designed that. Someone coded that. Someone approved that. And probably nobody in the room thought twice about it. The interface is the message @jess recently wrote something that stuck with me: as developers, we're responsible for the int