What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Fat

by Aubrey Gordon

Americans have long prided ourselves on a sense of self-reliance: with a little elbow grease and a lot of effort, we can be whatever we want. We tell ourselves that the United States is a classless society, defined not by some rigid class system but of the willingness of individuals to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. America is a meritocracy, we insist, defined by hard work and tenacity, the hallmarks of a true Protestant work ethic. Bodies become a symbol of that work ethic, the American exceptionalism that we have long believed defines Americanness itself. Fat bodies fly in the face of the work ethic that distinguishes us.

Making room for fat women’s experiences in feminist spaces is straightforward. It requires simply adjusting our understandings of sexual violence to exist beyond the framework of desirability (even though we already insist that it is about power, not about sex). But for all of us, thin and fat alike, expanding our framework would require acknowledging an axis of experience that we tend to think of as both organic and earned. Even among the most socially conscious of us, fatness is considered to be a moral failing and well within our control. As such, thin bodies have earned their reverence and fat bodies have earned their natural consequences: public shaming, denial of healthcare, and a grisly side of sexual violence. Fat people have chosen to neglect our bodies, the thinking goes, so we are not owed any deeper thought or sympathy.

This is among the greatest triumphs of anti-fatness: it stops us before we start. Its greatest victory isn’t diet industry sales or lives postponed just until I lose a few more pounds. It’s the belief that our bodies make us so worthless that we aren’t deserving of love, or even touch.

I believe that I deserve to be loved in my body, not in spite of it. My body is not an inconvenience, a shameful fact, or an unfortunate truth. Desiring my body is not a pathological act. And I’m not alone. Despite the never-ending headwinds, fat people around the world find and forge the relationships they want. There is no road map, so we become cartographers, charting some new land for ourselves. We live extraordinary lives, beloved by our families, partners, communities. Fat people fall wildly in love. Fat people get married. Fat people have phenomenal sex. Fat people are impossibly happy. Those fat people live in defiance of the expectations set forth for them. Their fat lives are glorious and beautiful things, vibrant and beyond the reach of what the rest of us have been trained to imagine. Let’s imagine more.

END THE LEGAL, WIDESPREAD PRACTICE OF WEIGHT DISCRIMINATION In forty-eight of the fifty US states, it is perfectly legal to deny someone housing, employment, a table at a restaurant, or a room in a hotel just because they’re fat.1 State and federal judges have repeatedly upheld the right of employers to discriminate on the basis of size. At the most basic level, banning anti-fat discrimination and ensuring equal pay will be essential to helping fat people survive and thrive. We’ll need to ban workplace weigh-ins for cocktail waitresses and flight attendants, to end pay bonuses for weight loss, and to stop workplace weight-loss competitions. We can work to establish meaningful laws and impact litigation to end weight-based discrimination.

REALIZE THE PROMISE OF HEALTHCARE FOR FAT PEOPLE Fat people deserve responsive, competent healthcare and access to the same diagnostic tests and treatments that thin people get. As it stands, hospitals are not required to have equipment on hand that accommodates fatter people, from exam tables to MRI machines. Doctors are free to set weight limits on the patients they’re willing to see, and some do. The FDA doesn’t require testing of drugs on fatter people, which means that crucial drugs like emergency contraception have significantly reduced effectiveness on people who weigh more than 165 pounds.2 Transgender people faced weight-based barriers to accessing lifesaving medical care, including gender affirming surgeries. We can end these unnecessary restrictions and barriers by passing a fat patients’ bill of rights. We can require that healthcare providers undergo weight bias training as part of their existing schooling and continuing education requirements, and insert into training curriculums more information about the social determinants of health and the toll that discrimination and shaming can take on any marginalized patient—including fat patients. We can insist that the medical field catch up to its own research and acknowledge that fatness isn’t a failure of personal responsibility but the result of a complex set of factors that may include our environments, our genes, our existing physical and mental health diagnoses, and the shame and marginalization we experience...

INCREASE ACCESS TO PUBLIC SPACES We can ensure that public spaces, from restaurants to airplanes, state buildings to new housing, are accessible for fat people and disabled people. We can make sure that our spaces have chairs without restrictive armrests, tables and booths that aren’t bolted down, and that we have seating with weight limits of five hundred pounds or more. We can advocate for federal bills that seek to regulate minimum airplane seat size and ensure that disabled people and fat people can fly safely, with our dignity intact, and without worrying that regressive policies won’t leave us stranded far from home, without refunds or recourse. We can win airline seating that’s safe and comfortable for all of us, regardless of weight, height,...

END ANTI-FAT VIOLENCE There is a casual violence that too often comes with living in a fat body, and that violence warps and multiplies for fat people of color. Anti-fatness and racism conspire to scapegoat and harm fat people of color, as in the case of Amber Phillips, a fat Black airline passenger whose seatmate, a thin white woman, called the cops on her.3 Fat people—especially fat women—have written time and time again about the dangers of fatcalling, a kind of street harassment that uniquely targets fat people and often includes threats of physical and sexual violence. Like thin people, fat people are frequently the targets of sexual harassment and assault, and the violence that faces us is often supercharged with a sense of entitlement to our bodies and the belief that we should be grateful for any sexualized attention at all. While sexual violence regularly targets fat people, we are significantly less likely to be believed or taken seriously than our thinner counterparts.4 Fat people are far from the only ones who experience sexual violence, but anti-fat bias means that our experiences are less likely to be believed, investigated, prosecuted, or pursued at all. Developin...

END THE APPROVAL OF WEIGHT-LOSS DRUGS WITH DANGEROUS—EVEN FATAL—SIDE EFFECTS Diet drugs and supplements aren’t just the products of junk science—they put lives at risk. People of all sizes who take diet pills have experienced major health complications and, in many cases, death. While diet drugs and supplements impact people of all sizes, fat people are under a unique, constant, and unyielding pressure to lose significant amounts of weight immediately. Standing up for fat people will require us to increase federal regulation of products claiming to aid in weight loss. It will require us to build in checks for the sensationalist, false claims of people like Dr. Oz,5 and to counter those baseless assertions with the real-life harms of diet culture.6 It will require us to hold a simple line: diet pill manufacturers (such as Hydroxycut, Alli, Fen-Phen) and diet food purveyors (such as...

STAND UP FOR FAT KIDS In most states, size is not a protected class, which means that states with anti-bullying laws often don’t extend those protections to fat children and teens. We have to recognize that fat hate starts young, that its trauma can last a lifetime, and that early intervention will be essential to raising a generation of more compassionate people. We’ll need to end the strikingly common practice of state-mandated BMI report cards. And we’ll need to develop campaigns for children’s public health that don’t b...