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

by Aubrey Gordon

I have always been fat. Not chubby or fluffy or husky or curvy—fat.

At a time when overt bias is frowned upon, fat people continue to bear the brunt of a proud and righteous kind of prejudice, whether it be under the banner of healthism, ableism, racism, or classism. Whatever its roots, anti-fat bias is only increasing over time, despite a growing body of evidence illustrating the substantial harm it can cause. But instead of confronting our own biases, even when faced by a mountain of evidence to the contrary, we choose to reaffirm them. When we see fat people, we loose all those biases on their bodies and their character. And in the war on childhood obesity, we have made children the site of so much public abuse.

The study’s results were staggering: after their extreme televised dieting, every contestant’s body burned fewer calories at rest than it did at the beginning of the competition—and one contestant was shown to burn eight hundred fewer calories each day than expected for a peer of the same gender and size.58

Now, thanks in no small part to the war on childhood obesity, that shame cycle—and its accompanying isolation, health risks, and trauma—starts earlier than ever. If we aren’t going to be thin, at least we’ll be ashamed.

Thinner people conquer fatness by distancing themselves from fatter people—through street harassment, food policing, and voicing constant judgment so that those around them know that they’re not that fat, not that bad, not that slovenly, not that careless.

In this way, thinness becomes a system of supremacy—a way of organizing the world around us and once again casting ourselves in a graceful light. At every turn, thin people are defined by their virtue: the restraint and vigilance to stay thin, the tenacity and dedication to monitor their bodies at every moment, the goodness to spread the gospel of thinness to wretched fatter people, and the restraint to stop short of death threats.

Concern and choice are seductive. Concern tells thinner people that they are doing me a favor by ignoring my feelings, experiences, boundaries, and needs. Choice tells you that any harshness, judgment, and withholding is warranted—after all, I brought my body on myself, which means I asked to become a scapegoat. Concern is built on the foundation of choice. If a fat person has brought their own ill-fated body on themselves, if she has chosen fatness, then her boundaries simply don’t matter—including asking those around her to withhold their concern. No matter how much a fat person protests, no matter how cogent her arguments or how urgent her pleas, her requests are always belied by choice and overridden by concern.

But whatever the explanation, whatever the caveats that follow such intense and constant judgment, pressure, rejection, and discrimination, a simple fact remains: the way that thinner people treat fatter people is abuse. Choice whispers to thinner people that they wouldn’t hurt me if I didn’t make them. It tells them they’re doing me a favor—more than that, that they’d be doing a disservice if they didn’t express deep contempt for bodies like mine. Like so much abuse, its cruelty disguises itself as something not only benign, but beneficial. But the truth is that concern and choice are cover for a convenient and tempting set of stories that establish a hierarchy of people by establishing a hierarchy of bodies. They are judge and jury so that every thin person may play executioner for any fat person. But by every measure, choice is false and unfounded, and concern isn’t helping. If thin people are just concerned with our health, they can tackle the bias that is hurting fat people much more than our bodies themselves.

In order to acknowledge fatcalling and sexual violence targeting fat women, thin feminists would have to acknowledge that bodies like mine should not be publicly shamed. Thin feminists would need to return to the radical root that insists that no survivor of sexual violence deserved what befell them. None of us are asking for it—certainly not for daring to live in the only bodies we have.

Making space for an emerging constituency in any movement is a straightforward, albeit difficult, task. Its ingredients are simple: listening, believing, adjusting, and collaborating. But sharing power has never been easy, and, like acknowledging other axes of oppression, making room for fat women within feminism will require some discomfort of the thinner women around who it has been historically centered. It will require their willingness to entertain the idea that their bodies are not accomplishments and that fat bodies are not failures. It will call upon the willingness to believe that they themselves might become fat someday and might still need feminism then. And it will rely upon those feminists’ willingness to sit with the discomfiting knowledge that, despite the relentless, whipping winds of misogyny all around them, their bodies have still afforded them some shelter that others don’t have.

To build this world, straight-size people will need to learn to think of their own experiences and internal struggles in precise terms, no longer universalizing insecurity or bad body image the way they so long have.

Straight-size people will need to acknowledge that their raised consciousness is only useful to fat liberation and body sovereignty insofar as it leads to meaningful, risky, and sustained action.

Straight-size people will need to trust fat people enough to believe us, and they’ll need to believe us enough to advocate with us.

Fat people will need to honor that trust with risk.

We’ll need to take on the painstaking work of building a movement that is both tender and radical, caring and visionary.

Stop waiting to do the things we love until we’ve lost ten, twenty, fifty, one hundred pounds.

Even when faced with data and personal experiences that illustrate the troubling depths of anti-fatness, we are too often told that these systemic problems are a result of our individual decisions. If we were just thin, we wouldn’t experience all of this. In the bizarre logic of anti-fatness, fat people are to blame for our bodies, our experiences of marginalization, and even our own abuse.

We need a world that insists upon safety and dignity for all of us—not because we are beautiful, healthy, blameless, exceptional, or beyond reproach, but because we are human beings.

As it stands, the law is silent on many issues facing fat people—and where it’s not silent, it often upholds our oppression and 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

Fat people deserve responsive, competent healthcare and access to the same diagnostic tests and treatments that thin people get.

We can ensure that public spaces, from restaurants to airplanes, state buildings to new housing, are accessible for fat people and disabled people.

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.

While sexual violence regularly targets fat people, we are significantly less likely to be believed or taken seriously than our thinner counterparts.4

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.

The policy, cultural, and institutional change goals listed here are only a beginning, but they will take decades of concerted research, organizing, advocacy, and movement building to accomplish. Their outcomes will be modest: Offer bullied fat children the support and protection we offer to thinner targets of bullying. Create basic pathways for legal recourse for employees who are fired solely because of the way they look. And regulate diet drugs the way we regulate anything else. For thin people, these aims may seem too low. But for fat people, they may save our dignity, our self-determination, and our very lives.

That fatness is not a failure and, subsequently, that thinness is not an accomplishment. The size of our bodies is largely beyond our own control, and even in the few occasions when it isn’t, thinness cannot be a prerequisite for basic respect, dignity, provision of services, or meeting basic needs like getting a job or finding food.

That anti-fatness isn’t the exception; it’s the rule. Anti-fat bias is not the work of a few bad apples or a marginal group that decides to harm fat people. Anti-fat bias is a cultural force that simultaneously shapes and is expressed through our most commanding institutions: government, healthcare, education, and media.

Anti-fatness is not the result of an active choice to wield it, like some biological weapon. No, anti-fatness is a passive default. We are all its carriers. We breathe it in every day.

There are no prerequisites for human dignity. For that reason, there can be no caveats in body justice or fat justice.

Retraining ourselves to guide our actions with these basic principles is deceptively simple but will be difficult. Building a new w...