CHAPTER 1

INTO THIN AIR

It happened on the tarmac at the Long Beach airport. In the terminal, quarters were tight, and flights were delayed. Passengers were irritated by closeness, strangers’ skin too near their own. Their faces twisted, then calcified with aggravation.

Our flight was oversold, and I was reassigned at the last minute to a middle seat. When the ticket agent handed me my new boarding pass, I looked at her pleadingly, feeling the full width of my size 28 body. I know, she said. I’m sorry.

I retreated from the agent’s desk, defeated. I remember looking for warm faces, desperate to find softness in the frustrated passengers that would flank me. Who could I trust to tolerate the breadth of me? Whose face bore the marks of mercy?

I planned carefully, working diligently to avoid taking any more space or time than I needed. I couldn’t afford to give my fellow passengers more reasons to take aim at my body. I lined up early, checked my suitcase at the gate, and took my seat quickly. I watched the passengers file down the cabin’s aisle, again searching their faces for something forgiving. Then my seatmate arrived.

When he sat down, he didn’t meet my eyes. He adjusted the arm rest, assertively claiming it as his own. He needn’t have—I had long since learned that any free space belonged to the thin. My arms were already crossed tight over my chest, thighs squeezed together, ankles overlapped beneath my seat. My body was knotted, doing everything it could not to touch him, not to impose its soft skin. I folded in on myself, muscles aching with contraction.

Suddenly, he stood up, fighting against the stream of passengers in the narrow aisle to speak with a flight attendant, then returned to his seat, looking thwarted. Moments later, he got up again. I couldn’t hear what he was saying, but there was an urgency in his face. I wondered what their summit had been about. He returned to his seat again, his mouth straight and muscles tense. I considered asking if he was alright, but his agitation threw me. I was a young woman and he an older, upset man, the two of us in an enclosed space for hours to come. I had spent a lifetime learning not to put my hand on the hot stove of men’s agitation.

He got up a third time. That’s when I heard him say, Unbelievable, his voice sharp with irritation. The fourth time, I heard paying customer, angrily over-enunciated, all convex consonants.

He returned to his seat and let out the sharp, belabored sigh of a wronged customer. He crossed his legs away from me, leaning into the aisle, chin in hand, glowering. He checked over his shoulder repeatedly, constantly scanning the cabin. I moved gingerly, not yet knowing the blast that was coming for me.

At long last, a flight attendant approached him and crouched in the aisle, whispering something in his ear. My seatmate rose silently, gathered his things, and moved up one row. Before he sat down, he looked at me for the first time.

“This is so you’ll have more room,” he said. His voice was cold.

The flight attendant looked at him, puzzled. “This won’t be a vacant seat,” she corrected. “Someone will still be sitting here.” My former seat mate looked away, then took his seat.

That was when I realized what had happened: he had asked to be reseated. The nearness of my body was too much for him to bear. All that agitation, all that desperate lobbying—all to avoid two hours next to me. I’d never feared it before. I didn’t think I needed to.

The next thought came quickly, urgently: Don’t cry. You can’t cry.

But it was too late. Hot tears stung my eyes, then spilled onto my cheeks. I stared at my lap, my eyes fixed on the width of my thighs. I glanced up and saw a woman’s face, blank as a canvass, eyes wide and empty. Her neck was craned so she could see me. She was watching me like television.

I stayed like that, with my body knotted up into its most compact shape and eyes locked low for the rest of our trip. Flight attendants visited my row frequently, offering free wine, beer, and snacks to the passengers sitting on either side of me—apologetic offerings for having to tolerate a body like mine. The flight attendants didn’t speak to me. My seatmates didn’t look at me. I had been erased.

As we began our descent, I planned my route from the gate to the bathroom, where I could cry until the humiliation had drained me. I just had to get there. When passengers filtered into the aisle to retrieve their bags, my former seatmate looked at me for the second time.

“You know, I wouldn’t do this to a person with a walker,” he said.

“What?” I struggled to find my words. I hadn’t expected to talk to him. I hadn’t expected to talk to anyone.

“I wouldn’t do this to a person with a walker, or a pregnant woman,” he repeated.

“I know,” I said, stunned. “That’s what makes this terrible.”

There it was. A stranger telling me, in no uncertain terms, that my body entitled him to treat me however he saw fit. He could complain openly, scoff at the fact of my body, publicly decry it to anyone who’d listen, and he would only be met with sympathy. He would never treat me with basic dignity. He would never be expected to.

I watched him as he disappeared onto the jetway. When he was finally gone, my eyes settled back to the aisle, where they met the woman’s. She watched me again, silent and blank-faced.

Since then, I have thought often of what I could have done differently. Whether unprompted kindness would have interrupted the momentum of his anger. Whether I should have confronted him more directly or if I could have made another plea to the ticket agent. Whether I should have skipped the flight altogether. Whether I should ever fly again.

In the years since, I have found ways to minimize the likelihood of humiliation. I check my bag and save up for first-class tickets, which means I don’t fly often. I see my family less often than I would like and I find reasons not to take work trips. Despite my best efforts, when I do fly, the experience remains punishing at every turn. Still, couples stare at me while I wait to board at the gate, openly discussing my body and trying to sneak a picture. Still, passengers issue full-throated complaints about sharing space with my body. Still, they complain to flight attendants, loudly, while I sit silently beside them, my body a knot of tension, forever tightening, while I will it to shrink.

The world around me rejects my body as if it were an organ transplant.

The physical world isn’t built for bodies like mine, even as our numbers are growing. As of 2016, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), 39.8 percent of adults in the United States have BMIs that are considered obese, compared to 34.3 percent a decade earlier.¹ Yet still, our physical environments cater to thinner bodies, seemingly in aspiration, while the realities of our bodies are intently ignored. Too much furniture is flimsy, leaving me uncertain about what will bear me and what will leave me chagrined on a pile of splintered wood, so I often stand instead. Portable seating, like folding chairs and low-slung beach seating, often holds less than two hundred pounds and is categorically out of the question. Theater seating, with its rigid backs and metal arms, digs into my sides, leaving bruises in my soft flesh. Healthcare equipment—exam tables, MRIs, scales—often come with weight limits, leaving me routinely afraid that I will be unable to address the healthcare problems that bring me to a doctor’s office. Until some recent unexpected weight loss, I was unable to buy clothing in any brick and mortar store and was relegated exclusively to the online world of terrible fit and prices triple (or quadruple) that which straight-size people pay.

Wherever I go, the message is clear: my body is too much for this world to bear. And it’s reinforced by the people around me. Like the man on the plane, strangers take it upon themselves to tell me what I already know: that I won’t fit and that I’m not welcome. Many openly roll their eyes when I step onto public transit, often glaring at me or placing their bags and jackets on the seat next to them. When I walk into department stores, the staff greets me immediately and tells me that Lane Bryant is four doors down. Strangers sometimes feel moved to shout at bodies like mine, simply proclaiming my shameful fatness or issuing directives about what to eat, how to move, or how my fatness will hasten my death.

In all these places, my body is a catalyst for panic and resentment, but in airplanes my skin becomes the target of unbridled anger. The sight of my body at an airport gate or in the aisle of a 737 leaves otherwise kind people filled not just with irritation, but with deep resentment, and sometimes with all-out rage. Thinner people who would never dream of shouting slurs at me on the street will readily text friends about the indignation of being forced to be near a body like mine, or they will complain to a flight attendant, who may then escort me from the flight, leaving me stranded in another city without recompense or recourse. A violent kind of disgust that otherwise lies dormant reveals itself in airplanes, lashing out at any fat person that dares to travel. While I work so fearfully to retain my seat, often paying double and rarely receiving additional space, thin people are easily pushed too far by the simple fact of proximity to a body like mine.

I understand why my fellow passengers are on edge. Airplanes are designed for profit, aimed at fitting as many human bodies as they can, with limited regard for passengers’ comfort. I have yet to meet anyone who raves about the cushy seating in the coach section of a commercial airliner. Flying is expensive, cramped, trying, and taxing. Luggage gets cumbersome. We miss connections. Our relationships get strained. And at the height of all that stress—boarding—my wide, soft body becomes their target. Rather than being a compatriot stuck in the same cramped, uncomfortable position as everyone else, I become a scapegoat for all their frustration. In moments like those, it’s hard to get angry with a corporation, its executives, and industrial designers; it’s much easier to get angry with the fat person who dared to fly.

But airline seat sizes have a surprisingly checkered past—and one that has been explicitly guided by airlines’ resistance to regulation and pursuit of unchecked profit at every turn. In the last decade alone, the average seat width has narrowed from 18½ inches to just 17 inches—a nearly 10 percent reduction in ten years.² The average seat pitch—a standard industry measurement of legroom—has also shrunk, from an average of 35 inches to just 31.³ Airline bathrooms are getting smaller too. A Wall Street Journal reporter measured bathrooms on an old aircraft, which were 33 to 34 inches wide, while bathrooms on newer Boeing 737s were roughly 20 percent narrower—a scant 26 inches wide.⁴

And that’s just in the last decade. Notably, in 1978, the United States opted to deregulate the airline industry, opening the floodgates to more cramped space in the air.⁵ The Airline Deregulation Act of 1978 was “the first total dismantling of a federal regulatory regime since the 1930s,”⁶ and its architect, Cornell University economist Alfred Kahn, also served as a significant force in energy deregulation in the US,⁷ contributing to a now-catastrophic global climate crisis.⁸ Airline deregulation ended federal subsidies to provide service to smaller towns and more rural locations, leaving the service of the nation’s newest transportation industry to be determined solely by profits, leading to rising fares (previously regulated by the now-defunct Civil Aeronautics Board), decreasing wages for airline workers, and a 1981 pilots’ strike that grounded 35 percent of commercial flights in the US.⁹ Functionally, deregulation allowed airlines to escape government accountability for prices and accommodations alike. Following September 11, 2001, security protocols changed and, simultaneously, airlines began to charge for services that were previously included for every traveler. Meals were now only available for a fee. Pillows and blankets, previously stocked for nearly every passenger, were now only available in limited quantities. Even passing through simplified security checkpoints—as they all had been prior to the turn of the millennium—came with a TSA precheck price tag.

A national security incident paved the way for a new set of practices designed to increase profit margins by charging for what little creature comforts had previously been provided for free—and no creature comfort was more sought after than a larger seat or more legroom. Smaller seats, too, allowed for more ticket sales and an increased profit margin for airlines. Accordingly, commercial airlines made $14.7 billion in profits in 2017—up 7.4 percent from 2016.¹⁰ And this trend of ever-shrinking space shows no signs of slowing. Every few months, new rumors of even more cramped space emerge, with proposals of partially standing seats, and smaller and smaller bathrooms.¹¹

There have been some attempts to regulate seat size in recent years. In 2017 the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ordered the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to address continually shrinking seat sizes.¹² The FAA responded with an internal ruling stating that they would not regulate seat size.¹³ That same year, the United States Congress stepped in,¹⁴ introducing the Seat Egress in Air Travel Act (SEAT Act), seeking to force the FAA to establish a minimum width, length, and pitch of airline seats, but failing to codify what those sizes ought to be.¹⁵ As I write this, even the relatively toothless SEAT Act has yet to pass.

As airplane seats shrink and Americans grow, airlines’ so-called “passenger of size” policies become more and more unpredictable for fat passengers to navigate. Nearly all major airlines publish policies on how they will engage with fat passengers who may not fit in their ever-shrinking seats. In some cases, these policies are clear and direct, as in the case of Southwest Airlines, which provides fat passengers with a second seat, automatically refunding the extra cost upon landing or providing the second seat altogether free of charge.¹⁶ Others are oddly byzantine, like Alaska Airlines’, which requires passengers to book a second seat by phone and will only refund that seat if all of the traveler’s flights “depart with an open seat available,” and the passenger calls the airline again to request that refund.¹⁷ Spirit Airlines requires the purchase of a second seat and offers no refund.¹⁸ Still others, like Virgin America, fail to publish their policy altogether. (As a very fat person, I have read the policies of these airlines and other transportation options, committing them to memory. My travel depends on it.)

Regardless of those policies’ content, they are wildly unevenly applied, leaving fat passengers to wonder: When will we be allowed to remain on our flight, narrowly escaping detection? When will we be asked suddenly and without warning to pay the day-of price for an additional seat, even if one isn’t available? When will we be escorted from the plane, to be watched by hundreds of our fellow passengers’ prying eyes?

Sadly, those fears aren’t unfounded—for many fat people, they’re borne out in our lived experience. In 2017 Natalie Hage, a plus-size model and influencer, caught an American Airlines flight from Dallas to Los Angeles. Hage unexpectedly found herself in a middle seat on her nearly three-hour flight. Within seconds, her seatmate appeared to be surreptitiously photographing her. When Hage looked down at his phone, she saw a text exchange between her seatmate and a friend.

FRIEND:	Hopefully she didn’t have any Mexican food.
SEATMATE:	I think she ate a Mexican.
	If the news reports a DFW Airbus A321 leaving the runway without rotating, that would be my flight.

Hage waited until the end of the flight to confront the man about his behavior. He denied it until she produced photographs of his text exchange. Finally, the man apologized—but only after an extended, videotaped confrontation.¹⁹

Sometimes, the exclusion fat people face on airplanes is a result of other passengers’ actions, but all too often it’s a matter of enforcing airlines’ formalized policies. In 2016 passenger Errol Narvaez was traveling home after a weekend in Las Vegas when his seat disappeared. United Airlines had moved his reserved aisle seat to a center seat—less than ideal for a fat person. When his seatmate complained, Errol was escorted off the plane, past thirty-six rows of watchful faces. “You don’t know what it’s like, having to walk up the whole plane—Row 36, 35, 34,” he told reporters.²⁰

United, like nearly all major airlines, has a policy in place that allows them to eject fat passengers from their flights. Flight attendants enforced that policy when the rest of the passengers were seated, an audience in a theater, watching a fat person try, and fail, simply to get home unnoticed. The ticket agent rebooked Narvaez’s flight for a 2:00 a.m. arrival, attempting to charge the beleaguered passenger a $117 ticket change fee for a six-hour delay, a sleepless night, and the privilege of public humiliation. With all of that—on the plane, at the ticket counter, in the airport—not one person spoke up in his defense. Hundreds of travelers watched him endure public humiliation—as he put it, a “walk of shame” past each one of them—and not one person spoke up. Like so many passengers before him, Errol Narvaez was more cargo than passenger: inanimate, cumbersome, and in the way. His humanity was disregarded, and he became more object than human.

Vilma Soltesz paid an even higher price. Vilma and her husband, Janos, had flown from their home in the Bronx to Hungary in 2012 without any challenges, having bought Vilma two seats for their flights. But Vilma faced some significant health complications while she was abroad, and her doctor ordered her back to New York as soon as possible. Vilma and Janos purchased new tickets home (two for Vilma, one for Janos). Upon boarding their return flight on KLM, they found that their assigned seats had physically broken beforehand. The couple were escorted off the flight and left to wait in the airport for five hours before being told to find a car, drive five more hours to Prague in the Czech Republic, and board a Delta flight home. When the couple boarded the second flight, a nation away, they were once again removed, allegedly due to Vilma’s size and use of a wheelchair. Finally, they returned to Hungary once more for a Lufthansa flight. For a third time, they were denied the seats they paid for. Even in the midst of a health crisis, not one airline accommodated Vilma and Janos. While they waited and waited, tried and tried, Vilma’s health continued to deteriorate. Within a matter of weeks, she was dead, half a world away from her home and her doctor.²¹

Errol Narvaez weighed 385 pounds when he was removed from his flight. Vilma Soltesz was 407 pounds when she passed away. When I read their stories, I weighed 400 pounds. The message from stories like these was clear: no one will protect bodies like ours. As long as we’re fat, we might as well be dead.

In 2015 Nicole Arbour briefly became a household name. The comedian made a video called “Dear Fat People” whose shock value led it to quick viral success. In it, Arbour lets loose a frustrated rant about fat people, all triggered by her alleged encounter with a fat family at an airport.

As I get to the front of the line, a family comes to the front and gets to butt me. Fattest, most obese—I’m talking TLC special fat. . . . They got to go to the front of the line because they were complaining that their knees hurt too much to stand in it. “Oh, I just came an hour early, like I was supposed to. But you overeat, let me help you.” And they complain, and they smell like sausages, and I don’t even think they ate sausages, that’s just their aroma. They’re so fat that they’re that standing sweat fat. Crisco was coming out of their pores like a fucking play-doh fun factory. . . .

I’m sitting in the aisle, and then a stewardess walks up to me. “Hi ma’am, I hate to ask, but we’ve got a disabled passenger. Would you mind switching seats?” And of course, because I’m not an asshole, I’m like “oh my god, of course, yes.” Oh look, it’s fat family. And Jabba the son sits right beside me. I just lost my shit. His fat was on my lap. I took the handle, I squished it down, and I said “MY SEAT, YOUR SEAT.” I actually took his fat and I pushed it into his seat and I held it. He was fine. He was just fat. Make better choices.

Arbour’s video, with its blunt approach and crass language sparked a nationwide conversation about what is and isn’t okay to say to and about fat people. Notably, however, the conversation stopped short of considering the impact of Arbour’s video on actual fat people.

In a tense appearance on The View, Arbour defended the video as comedy designed to provoke. “That video was made to offend people, just like I do with all my other videos. It’s just satire, I’m just being silly, I’m just having a bit of fun, and that’s what we did. And that topic was actually voted in by fans, some of them who are fat [sic].”²² The View cohost Joy Behar, herself a comic, called out Arbour’s defense. “You sort of hide behind this ‘it’s not healthy’ thing and that’s bull and you know it. [. . .] I’d be interested to see you do that live and see how many laughs you get.”²³

Arbour was roundly rejected for her video, but it still received over twenty-seven million views and became a touchstone in conversations about fatness and fat people. While “Dear Fat People” was an especially outrageous example, it didn’t stand alone in its views on fatness and fat people—especially fat people on airplanes.

Six years before Arbour’s viral video, The Young Turks (TYT) held a conversation about fat people on planes. Despite its role as a widely viewed left-wing news and opinion show on YouTube, The Young Turks’ take was strikingly similar to Arbour’s. Co-hosts Cenk Uygur and Ana Kasparian discussed the issue with a discomfort that quickly turned to honest disgust. Kasparian described a photograph taken by an American Airlines flight attendant of a fat passenger in a cramped airline seat that didn’t fit his body.

“I love how Ana’s trying to be polite about it,” said Uygur. “He seems to be taking up a lot of room? Does he seem that way?”

Kasparian relented, laughing. “What do you want me to say? There’s a fat motherfucker on the plane.”

As the conversation proceeded, Uygur initially acknowledged that the passenger was “trying his best not to get in [the] way” and was “probably super uncomfortable, sitting halfway on the seat”—even acknowledging that the airline’s policy may be discriminatory. But the two co-hosts quickly agreed that the passenger should have to buy two seats.

“I mean, look,” Kasparian added, “I think it’s discrimination when it’s something that the person can’t help, right? [. . .] We’re facing a huge obesity epidemic, right? Okay, so we’ve got a bunch of fatties in the United States, and if they want to travel, too bad, we’re gonna give them two seats and they just have to pay for one? That just doesn’t make any sense to me. I don’t think that’s fair.²⁴

It was surreal to watch it all unfold, this litigation of my body, a voiceless inconvenience, an inanimate obstacle. Like Nicole Arbour, the Young Turks insulted fat people. Like Arbour, they acknowledge, then write off, the idea that someone might be fat for reasons beyond their control. And like Arbour, they focus exclusively on the comfort and safety of thin people sitting nearby, easily bypassing any consideration for the fat person in question. The similarities are striking. But Nicole Arbour’s video received 27 million views and faced significant backlash before being taken down by YouTube. The Young Turks’ video, as of this writing, has received just under 1.5 million views and remains available online. So why did one incite outrage and the other receive so little attention?

The difference is that Arbour’s video offers no counterpoint and comes across to many viewers as crass and crude. The Young Turks, while arguing similar points, do so in what feels like a more measured way. But fundamentally, both videos argue the same points and lay out a road map of core cultural beliefs about fat people—especially fat people in public spaces: Fat people shouldn’t be so fat. Fat people inconvenience thin people with our bodies. Fatness is a choice for most. Arbour’s crime wasn’t that she believed fat people were disgusting, it’s that she openly said it.

That, it seems, is where our conversation about how to treat fat people has stalled. Very few public conversations surface our core beliefs about fat people, hold them up to the light, examine them. Very few engage with the facts. In the case of airplanes, the ever-shrinking seats, the inconsistent policies, and the heartbreaking losses fat people continue to suffer. Very few of those public conversations challenge us, individually, to face our own biases against fatness and fat people. Instead of expressing outrage at the concrete harm we do to fat people, the painful and wrongheaded beliefs we stubbornly cling to, and the systems set up to exclude and underserve fat people, we opt for the easier conversation. We opt for politeness. We opt for if you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all.

Instead of confronting our own beliefs, we confront the few who give voice to those beliefs. And instead of fixing the problem, we silence it. But anti-fat bias isn’t just a problem for public figures, nor is it a simple problem of politeness. A growing body of research in recent decades has taken a closer look at the prevalence of anti-fat bias in the general population. Its findings are increasingly damning.

In 2019 Harvard University released a study based on the results of their immensely popular online implicit bias test. The test asks participants to move through rapidly flashing slides of words and images to measure their unconscious biases around race, gender, sexual orientation, disability, weight, and other characteristics. The study, published in Psychological Science, reviewed the results of over four million test takers over the course of nine years.

On some fronts, the findings were promising. According to the study’s lead author, Tessa Charlesworth, “The most striking finding is that sexuality attitudes have changed toward neutrality, toward less bias, by as much as 33 percent on implicit measures,” with nearly half of people also self-reporting changes in their own attitudes.²⁵ Similarly, if less dramatically, test takers’ implicit bias on the basis of race also decreased by 17 percent.

While most measures of implicit bias decreased or remained stable, one measure exploded: anti-fat bias. In those nine years, pro-thin, anti-fat bias increased by a full 40 percent. Not only that, but weight-based bias was the slowest changing of all explicit attitudes—that is, the attitudes that test takers self-reported. According to Charlesworth:

It is the only attitude out of the six that we looked at that showed any hint of getting more biased over time. . . . And of course again the question might be: why? What is specific about body-weight attitude?

We can only speculate: Body weight has been the target of much discussion, but discussion in a negative light. We often talk about the “obesity epidemic,” or about “the problem” with obese individuals.

Also, we typically think about body weight as something that people can control, and so we are more likely to make the moral judgement of, “Well, you should just change.”

The raw numbers are striking too. In 2016 a full 81 percent of test takers showed pro-thin, anti-fat bias. That’s four out of five of us.

These implicit bias findings are uncomfortable to read, and they run counter to popular assumptions about how bias works. In public discourse, we often discuss bias and hate as things we decide to take on—that our default setting is an unbiased one, and that it’s up to us to decide to take up the mantle of hate. In the popular imagination of many white folks, racism is relegated to virulent, organized white supremacists. Misogyny is the work of overt, proud chauvinist men. Homophobia is the domain of Fred Phelps and Pat Robertson, a cruel and outspoken minority. Few of us think of ourselves as biased because we’re not like them. Few of us think of ourselves as hating any group of people. Still, our implicit biases often belie that self-image and the more comforting stories we tell ourselves.

But acknowledging our biases isn’t a matter of making ourselves into villains, all black hearts and gleeful misdeeds. Acknowledging our biases is a matter of recognizing the social contexts that encourage them. Weight-loss ads flood the airwaves despite the fact that no diet has proven to lead to major, sustained weight loss. A Stanford study comparing low fat and low carbohydrate diets found that neither proved particularly effective for long-term weight loss, leading to an average loss of just over one pound per month for study subjects. Some lost more; many lost less.²⁶ Still, we are constantly confronted with an impossible ideal and snake oil that promises to bring it to fruition. Media messages about revenge bodies and baby weight and beach bodies abound, conditioning our feelings about our own bodies and the ways that we treat those who are fatter than us.

Our biases aren’t just encouraged by private media, either. During those pivotal nine years of booming anti-fat bias, Michelle Obama was the First Lady of the United States, and her flagship campaign was aimed at ending obesity. Throughout the Obama years, the US established a series of federal and state programs aimed at asserting the personal responsibility of adults, children, and their parents to become and remain thin. Between the private and public sectors, billions of dollars have been spent seeding body dissatisfaction that would increase profits for weight-loss companies. In the process, both sectors seeded this astronomical rise in anti-fat attitudes, actions, and policies—all targeted at the fatness we learned to fear in ourselves. But those many shots we have learned to take at ourselves have long landed blows at fat people in the process.

Fat people aren’t impacted equally, either, in part because we aren’t distributed evenly. According to the CDC, women are more likely to be fat than men, and Black and Latinx people are more likely to be fat than white people.²⁷ Fatness is frequently used as a stand-in for poverty, even intellectual disability. In The Obesity Myth, Paul Campos argues that as overt racism, sexism, and classism fell out of favor among white and wealthy Americans, anti-fat bias offered a stand-in: a dog whistle that allowed disdain and bigotry aimed at poor people and people of color to persist, uninterrupted and simply renamed.

We also like to think that unlike Nicole Arbour, though we also have unkind thoughts about fat people, we keep them to ourselves. We believe that they don’t influence our actions, and that we are able to remain clear-headed and objective, even when those judgments enter our minds. But again, the data points to something else. In nearly every facet of public life that’s been studied, fat people face immense bias and often overt discrimination.

One informal survey of over five hundred hiring managers tested their attitudes toward potential employees based on size. Based solely on photographs, 21 percent described the fattest woman they were shown as “lazy” and “unprofessional” more than any other size. Just 18 percent said she had “leadership potential,” and only 15 percent would even consider hiring her.²⁸ A study from Vanderbilt University found that fat women were more likely to work in more physically active jobs behind the scenes and less likely to work in jobs interacting with customers or representing a company.²⁹ Another Wharton study found that “obesity serves as a proxy for low competence. People judge obese people to be less competent even when it’s not the case.”³⁰

Anti-fat bias doesn’t just impact our ability to get hired—it also impacts our wages. Scientists at the University of Exeter found that, in England, women who are just one stone (14 pounds) over their BMI-mandated weight earned over 1,500 pounds ($1,867) less than a thinner woman.³¹ In the United States, the findings are even more troubling. A 2010 study published in the Journal of Applied Psychology found staggering salary inequities based on size. “Heavy women earned $9,000 less than their average-weight counterparts; very heavy women earned $19,000 less. Very thin women, on the other hand, earned $22,000 more than those who were merely average.”³² Conversely, men’s salaries increased with weight gain—until those men became fat.³³

The aftershocks of our bias aren’t just limited to the workplace, either. Fat people feel its effects in the criminal justice system too. A 2013 Yale University study published in the International Journal of Obesity found that men were more likely to find a fat woman guilty of the same crime. “Male participants rated the obese female defendant guiltier than the lean female defendant, whereas female respondents judged the two female defendants equally regardless of weight. Among all participants, there were no differences in assessment of guilt between the obese male and lean male defendants.”³⁴ And the bias isn’t just limited to jurors. In 2017, a Quebec judge made headlines by saying that a fat seventeen-year-old woman might have been “flattered” by being sexually assaulted, saying the woman “is a bit overweight, but she has a pretty face. [. . .] The court specifies that she is a pretty young girl.”³⁵ While his remarks were publicly decried, he faced no formal censure or consequences.

Anti-fat bias is so ubiquitous and unquestioned that the New York Police Department (NYPD) union used it as a defense against murder. On July 17, 2014, Eric Garner, a Black man, was killed on video. He lay on the ground, an officer’s arm wrapped around his neck, while three other officers looked on. Garner repeatedly told officers he couldn’t breathe before he was finally choked to death—all for selling loose cigarettes on the street in New York City. Shortly thereafter, the coroner ruled Garner’s death a homicide. The case seemed open and shut: Garner’s death was taped and widely circulated. In the wave of police killings of unarmed Black men, this one seemed as close to an open-and-shut case as possible. As the case progressed, however, its resolution slipped further and further out of reach. Prosecutors declined to file criminal charges in the case. The officer who killed Garner, Daniel Pantaleo, has kept his job thus far, though he has been relegated to desk duty. In 2019, the NYPD held administrative hearings to determine whether or not Pantaleo would be permitted to keep his job. His defense team argued that Pantaleo should not be held accountable for his actions because Garner was fat. “He died from being morbidly obese,” Stuart London, the police union attorney leading the team, said during an administrative hearing. “He was a ticking time bomb that resisted arrest. If he was put in a bear hug, it would have been the same outcome.”³⁶

By London’s logic, a fat person can’t be murdered, given the widespread and false belief that being fat is simply a death sentence. While the defense’s argument ran in multiple newspapers, just one mainstream headline called attention to its cruel logic. New York Magazine ran the story with the headline “NYPD Union Lawyers Argue That Eric Garner Would Have Died Anyway Because He Was Obese.”³⁷

We create public policy around our bias, ensuring that fat people are not protected from even the most naked abuse. As of 2020, in forty-eight states, it is perfectly legal to fire someone, refuse to hire them, deny them housing, or turn them down for a table at a restaurant or a room in a hotel simply because they’re fat. Michigan, Washington State, and San Francisco are the United States’ three jurisdictions to ban size-based discrimination.³⁸ In the rest of the nation, however, those who experience weight stigma in the workplace are left to fend for themselves with little, if any, legal recourse at all. In 2013, twenty-two cocktail waitresses sued Atlantic City’s Borgata Hotel Casino & Spa for weight-based discrimination. They were regularly weighed in at work and were suspended if they gained “too much weight.” Despite this overt discrimination, the court denied the servers’ claim and upheld the hotel’s legal right to discriminate.³⁹

Whatever we may think of our own beliefs, however hard it may be to stretch beyond our own experience of the world as an unbiased meritocracy, this growing body of research proves that for fat people, it simply isn’t. We get fewer jobs and earn significantly less money. In court, we are more likely to be found guilty by jurors and judges alike.

All of this happens because anti-fat bias exists in all of us. It exists in all of us because it exists in every corner of our culture: our institutions, media, and public policy. How could we avoid it? Ninety-seven million Americans diet, despite the $66 billion industry’s failure rate of up to 98 percent.⁴⁰ The Biggest Loser was a smash hit for its twelve years on the air, reaching over seven million viewers at the height of its popularity.⁴¹ Magazines like Woman’s World reliably feature cover stories like “Lose 13 Lbs Every 5 Days on the World’s Hottest Diet” alongside “Ring in 2019 with Munchies!”⁴² And the United States has not poured endless federal and state dollars into public education campaigns aimed at regulating corporate food production, subsidizing nutritious foods, or ending poverty and economic instability—top predictors of individual health, according to the US Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion.⁴³ Instead, fat bodies themselves are targeted in the “war on obesity” and the “childhood obesity epidemic.” Anti-fatness is like air pollution. Some days we may see it; others, we may not. But it always surrounds us, and whether we mean to or not, we are always breathing it in.

But where does all that bias come from? Like so many morality panics before it, it’s difficult to identify a single source of our cultural and political commitment to sidelining and scapegoating fat bodies. Its roots are many and varied. As it stands, these forces—often driven by profit and political expediency—are today as strong as they’ve ever been. The power and profitability of anti-fatness means that most of us have already internalized hurtful, harmful, and inaccurate messages about fat people. Whatever we may want to think about ourselves, we’ve got to make the shift from thinking of anti-fat bias as something we decide to do out of animus to something that exists within us unless and until we uproot it. If we are passive, we absorb the bias in the world around us, overwhelmingly suggested to us by people and institutions that stand to gain power and profits by scapegoating fat people. It is up to us to both change those systems and to unlearn these enculturated attitudes. In so doing, we can make the world a little less punishing for the 70 percent of Americans who are fat.⁴⁴

I tell a friend about the man on the plane. The way he looked at me. The way he treated me. His naked revulsion at my body, at having to be near me. “All because I’m fat,” I say.

“Oh my God, no!” my friend cuts in. “You’re not fat, you’re beautiful.”

I tell her the rest of the story. She asks why I bought a middle seat. I tell her I didn’t. She asks why I provoked him. I tell her I didn’t. She tells me she finds it hard to believe. I tell her it’s true. Her voice becomes clipped, irritated.

“I guess if you hate it that much, you should just lose weight.”

This, then, is my life as a fat person. I am expected to absorb the discomfort and outright bias against my body in a world built for thin people. The responsibility is mine and mine alone. Should my body cost an airline more, it is my responsibility to pay them. Should my body cause discomfort for anyone around me, it is my responsibility to apologize and to comfort them. Should I begin to question why my body is forever a problem, it is my responsibility to keep quiet. And should these problems become untenable for me, it is my responsibility to “just lose weight.” The decent thing, after all, is to transform my body for the sake of those around me.

It is no one’s responsibility to hear me. It is no one’s responsibility to care for my body. It is no one’s responsibility to ask about my comfort. At times, someone may do me the service of offering “tough love,” berating the body I have always had and the practices they assume created it, but I am never owed consideration, much less an apology. If there is a problem, I caused it with my gluttony and sloth. My body is my original sin. Every road leads back to the penance I must do for the body I have always had.

No matter the problem, no matter the actions of an aggressor, the fault is mine. Regardless of the politics or life experience of the person I am talking to, the answer comes like clockwork. I guess if you hate it that much, you should just lose weight.

But despite its ubiquity in conversations about fatness and fat people, that is the logic of abuse. You made me do this. I wouldn’t hurt you if you didn’t make me. Just because we are accustomed to hearing it doesn’t make it healthy, productive, humane, or helpful. Its functions are threefold: One, to absolve us of any responsibility to address a widespread social problem. Two, to free us from having to re-examine our own beliefs and biases. And three, to silence and isolate fat people, to show us that any complaint we lodge and any issue we raise will be for naught, and may even cost us relationships, respect, comfort, and safety.

Nearly all of us, fat and thin alike, have spent a lifetime learning to see fat people as problems, pariahs, or scapegoats. But what if, instead of doing what we know how to do—instead of comfortably, distantly blaming fat people—we looked at ourselves? What would happen if we interrogated our own beliefs? What would happen if we acknowledged our own complicity in hurting and harming fat people? What would become of us if we sat quietly with our own misconceptions, examined them, looked at the effects they created? What if, for once, we spoke with fat people instead of about fat people?