II’ve been fat all my life and I discovered fat activism in the early 2000s. It opened my eyes to how badly fat people are mistreated and subjected to widespread discrimination: in education, employment opportunitiesAnd healthcare, just to get started. But many of my liberal and progressive peers just haven’t gotten it: the kindness we preach doesn’t seem to extend to people living in larger bodies.
It’s not just my impression: hard data supports how deeply entrenched fatphobia persists in society. When it comes to race, skin color, disability, age and sexuality, both conscious and unconscious bias against marginalized characteristics appears to be decreasing, according to research conducted at the Harvard Department of Psychology. There is one notable exception: body size, which was the only form of unconscious bias that is actually increasing. And the conscious preference for taller people appeared to decline the slowest of all categories examined.
As a child, I often dealt with fatphobia, being bullied, teased and ostracized because of my size. I remember sitting in a circle of children, eating our lunch in a grassy playground, when a prepubescent boy took turns pointing at each of us: ‘skinny’, ‘medium’ or ‘fat’, he casually pronounced us . I was the only girl who was declared fat, and on that basis I was teased mercilessly. Today, this kind of taunting is still all but guaranteed when I write about such topics in a public forum. And even academics who learn that I am working on the topic of fatphobia often quickly change the subject and turn away in embarrassed silence.
So why are we getting better at most forms of prejudice, while as a society we are arguably becoming even more fat-phobic? Part of the answer has to do with the fact that, unlike many other forms of marginalization, fatness is seen as a choice. But careful attention to the evidence on this topic paints a different picture. Numerous factors – of ours unequal food environment to economic injustice tension trauma to common health problems and medicines – dictate our size, and a combination of these has contributed to an increase in fatness in both US and the Britainincluding in recent decades.
The moral panic over a supposed explosion of fatness is not just stigmatizing: the change is often ignored classification standards for fat bodies. Our genes also play a major role in determining body size genetic factors good for more than 70% of the variance in body size across the population. To put this into perspective, this makes weight slightly less heritable than height about 80% hereditary.
What these factors all have in common is that they are generally unchosen. It’s true that many people can lose a modest amount in the short term through diet and exercise. But virtually every long-term diet study to date shows that the weight comes back for the vast majority of people. Many, if not most, people end up heavier than when they started.
Wherever you land on the question of the health risks of fatness – which is what I would like to argue are exaggerated – there is simply no excuse for rampant discrimination. In the healthcare sector this is particularly widespreadof doctors even openly admit it that fat patients are more likely to annoy them, that they view us as a waste of time and are less likely to help us. Don’t fat people deserve acceptance, compassion and, crucially, adequate health care?
As fat people, we are often made to feel uncomfortable are ashamed of ourselves and therefore desperately try to make ourselves smaller. (And believe me, I understand; I’ve been there many times myself.) We often don’t want to identify as fat, let alone stand in solidarity with even bigger people, says fat activist Aubrey Gordon. Those with smaller bodies may cling desperately to the benefits of “skinny privilege,” and for many, fatness is a bugbear, a nightmare, a cautionary tale. Instead of joining political forces to demand better treatment, we work on ourselves, shrink and avert our eyes from larger bodies.
But not only is this a sad waste of energy for many of us, who are nevertheless likely to gain weight as we age and decline; it is also a betrayal of people who deserve so much better. This of course also applies to our children, with fatness being one of the most common causes bullying in childhood. Far too many children fall prey to disordered eating (which affects… one in five worldwide) or even outright eating disorders, where parents think they are overweight one of the biggest risk factors.
It shouldn’t even be controversial to say that no matter the size of your body, you deserve what many fat people are currently denied: honestly educational And employment opportunitiesgood health care and access to it private and public spaces, just like everyone else. The fact that this even needs to be said is a depressing reflection of how willing we are to throw each other under the bus in our attempts to get on the bus. Real political progress requires us to pause and look around and extend a sympathetic – better, solidaristic – arm to everyone. There should be no limits to our capacity as humans for inclusivity; there should also be no size restrictions.