CHAPTER 8
THE WORLD TO COME
There is a world beyond this one.
In that world, diversity in size and shape are understood to be part of the natural variance of human bodies, from very fat people to very thin ones. So, too, are fluctuations in weight. We do not wring our hands or punish ourselves for one, five, ten pounds’ change in weight. Sudden, dramatic weight loss or gain is cause for concern only because of what underlying conditions they may point to, not because weight itself is stigmatized. Bathroom scales are now largely specialized, a piece of medical equipment used temporarily or infrequently for endocrine disorders or heart conditions linked to sudden and significant changes in weight. The BMI, too, has become a relic, a kind of crude measurement understood to be a harmful, reverse-engineered calculation to defend a cruel and widespread bias. It has been tossed on the junk heap of historical pseudoscience, alongside hysteria and phrenology.
In that world, each of us is judged based on our actions, not our bodies. We do not draw conclusions about others’ character based on the way they look, what they eat, how they move, or how they live their lives differently than ours. Bodies are not believed to be meritocracies and thinness is not understood to be a crowning achievement. Like hair color and height, our size is a simple and uninteresting fact about each of us in that world. It is not something over which to be fixated or troubled, and it is widely understood to be a staggeringly boring topic of conversation. Diet talk is a thing of the past, understood to be a troubling and harmful trigger for people with eating disorders and fat people alike, replaced instead by grounded, emotional reflections on the ways our bodies change like the seasons. The weight-loss industry is widely written off as a scam, some perplexing, sepia-toned relic of a time gone by.
Healthcare is accessible regardless of size, shape, or ability. Doctors, nurses, and healthcare providers of all kinds examine fat patients with the same level of attentiveness and curiosity as thin patients. Health insurance is free and available to all of us, and insurers don’t require weight loss before covering medically necessary treatments. Health outcome gaps are closing between fat and thin people, and doctors are trained in providing competent care to fat patients, patients of color, immigrant patients, trans and nonbinary patients, and intersex patients. Eating disorders are understood as a public health concern and an issue of racial, gender, and economic justice.
The bullying of fat children and adults is no longer regarded as a simple fact but as a troubling trend that needs to be quashed. In schools, teachers and parents respond to the bullying of fat kids by holding bullies accountable for their actions rather than mandating that children transform their bodies in order to preserve their safety and dignity. In intimate partner relationships, researchers seek to end the abuse of fat partners as a key aspect of combatting domestic and sexual violence. Workplaces no longer tolerate diet talk or casual bullying of fat colleagues and subordinates. Most of us, regardless of size, pride ourselves on interrupting the harassment and discrimination targeting fat people.
In that world, there is a vibrant movement for body justice that understands the pressures each of us face to maintain the sovereignty of our bodies that are uniquely informed by both our identities (internal, not always visible) and the way our bodies present (external, based on others’ perception). This movement understands that ending police violence is an issue of body justice, particularly for Black, Latinx, and indigenous people. It understands that accessibility and disability justice are central to body justice, and that failing to make the movement accessible means failing to make the movement. It understands that accessibility for people with chronic illnesses and invisible disabilities are as important as more visible gestures of accessibility, such as wheelchair ramps and ASL interpretation. It understands that, in many ways, anti-fatness relies on the logic of ableism and that bias and bigotry will manipulate and utilize the logic that’s available to them, so liberating any of our bodies will require liberating all of our bodies. That movement works to end compulsory genital surgeries and hormonal treatments for people born intersex and to preserve consenting access to similar treatments for people who are transgender. The movement understands that increasing access to childcare, prenatal care, adoption, and abortion are all crucial and essential body justice issues for people with uteruses, as is protection from forced sterilization. The movement knows that migration is a core human right and that the sovereignty of our bodies should not and cannot collapse in the face of artificial and imagined borders. It understands, too, that justice hinges on self-determination and that there can be no body sovereignty without tribal sovereignty.
Unlike its diluted predecessor, body positivity, the movement for body justice understands that each system of oppression needs to be understood on its own terms, and as part of an interdependent web of oppressions that impacts all of us. This movement knows that we cannot attain and preserve body sovereignty by broad platitudes and whitewashing the differences between our experiences. Instead, it is honest about power and privilege, and it is thoughtful and diligent in dismantling the systems of oppression that keep our bodies out of our own control. It is a hub of community-led movements, not a substitute for them, and it does diligent work to provide the most effective, desired, and meaningful support it can to marginalized communities. Its organizing is tender and relational, making space for holding the traumas caused by our oppression, for building a broad and brave vision for a more liberated world, and for driving toward it with anger and joy.
In this world, the dual abilities to be seen and heard are understood to be our birthrights. Fat people are not expected to earn media representation through the penitence of thinness or the mirage of health. Movies and TV shows regularly include the stories of disabled people, people of color, immigrants, trans people, intersex people, and yes, fat people. Those stories are informed by their identities, but characters’ humanity is rarely overshadowed by the systems of oppression that impact them. Human experiences deserving of empathy are no longer restricted to a single size or body type.
Clothing access has changed too. Manufacturers have followed plus-size brands, and nearly every retailer sells nearly every article of clothing in sizes 00 to 40—at minimum. Every size is available in store, not just online, and fit models are used to show how clothing fits differently on different sizes and builds. Adaptive clothing is widely available from clothing retailers, too, meeting the needs of disabled people, nursing parents, seniors, and people with sensory integration issues, among others.
In that world, you can see me. My body does not make me your built-in ego boost or reassurance (at least I’m not that fat), your uncomfortable denial (sweetie, no, you’re not fat!), your cautionary tale, or the outlet for so much body-based anger and angst. My body is the vessel that brings me to you, yes, and it is also an important part of who I am. It informs my experience in important ways and, in that world, you understand and respect that experience. You only claim it as your own if it is, and if our experiences are shared. We see each other, tenderly hold the young shoots where our experiences grow apart, and work to build a world as gentle as our friendship.
In that world, I can see you, and I can trust you. Let me trust you.
We have reached for that world before, but found our attempts swallowed up by the privilege we failed to acknowledge and the very industries we tried to escape.
The body positivity movement, which gained prominence in the 2010s, is an attempt at creating a new way of understanding our bodies, but it always stopped short of full-throated inclusion for all of us—especially those of us who are very fat. At the outset of its popularization, body positivity felt broad, welcoming, all-encompassing. It held the promise of a home for all of us. Very fat people—like me—wouldn’t have to worry about bullying in the guise of concern. Trans people could rest assured that their healthcare would be championed wholeheartedly, their gender expressions embraced openly, surgery offered without BMI-based restrictions. People of color could believe that their bodies would be represented lovingly, placed carefully in the context of their families, communities, histories, and identities. People with disabilities could trust that any space calling itself body positive would strive for full accessibility and wouldn’t build its credibility on the false foundation of ability or the cruel betrayal of health.
When it first rose to popularity, body positivity appeared to me as a shining city on a hill. Its majestic grid stretched out before me, each neighborhood planned with precision and care. Its map was beautiful and specific, offering modest homes for those of us who’d been shut out for so long. Finally, we could release the exhaustion of educating everyone on our bodies, of convincing them that the blood in our veins was worth their respect. Finally, we could find respite, knowing that a movement would strive to understand our bodies. Finally, we could be free. If our bodies were not celebrated, they would at least be left in our own care.
Like so many fat people, I did not come to body positivity for self-esteem. I did not come to body positivity because I wanted to feel beautiful or loved—those things had always lay beyond the reach of our cultural imagination for people with bodies like mine. I came to body positivity because I cared about being human. As a fat person, my humanity was—and is—too readily erased, eclipsed by either beauty or health. I came to body positivity because it held the promise of something radical—the possibility that I, as a very fat person, could be seen and understood for who I am. Not because I am happy or healthy, thin, or beautiful, but because I am human.
But that was before the skyrocketing popularity of body positivity. It was before their slouched stomachs with one small fat roll were called brave. This was before fat shaming was defined in the popular imagination by the inaccurate judgment of thin women as fat: straight-size women who embodied the beauty standard like pop stars Jessica Simpson and Kelly Clarkson, or Donald Trump scapegoat and Miss Universe winner Alicia Machado. Before fat shaming came to mean hurting thin women’s feelings by incorrectly calling them fat. It was before Dove defined real beauty as multiracial and multi-height, but still free of transgender people, still free of people with disabilities, still free of rolling fat or puckered skin. Before fashion magazines and retailers agreed to stop airbrushing their photographs but kept the same impossibly thin models. It was before marketing campaigns quietly wrote the rest of us out of body positivity and before so many thin people’s body positivity came with caveats: As long as you’re happy and healthy. As long as you’re not, you know, obese. As long as you’re not glorifying obesity. It was before body positivity became pride in thin, fair, feminine, able bodies. It was before that grand vision of a shining city on a hill became a mirage.
Over time, body positivity has made its constituency clear. It has widened the warm and fickle embrace of beauty standards ever so slightly. Now it showers its affections not only on beautiful, able-bodied, fair-skinned women under a size 4 but on beautiful, able-bodied, fair-skinned women under a size 12. Body positivity has widened the circle of acceptable bodies, yes, but it still leaves so many of us by the wayside. Its rallying cry, love your body, presumes that our greatest challenges are internal, a poisoned kind of thought about our own bodies. It cannot adapt to those of us who love our bodies, but whose bodies are rejected by those around us, used as grounds for ejecting us from employment, healthcare, and other areas of life.
Overwhelmingly, the popularization of body positivity has reinforced the exclusion that fat people experience everywhere else. It doesn’t make thin people less afraid of saying “fat” or being fat. While body positivity held the promise of advocating for all of us, it refused to name our bodies. It could not push for meaningful distinctions between thin bodies and fat bodies, nor the social realities that come with each. When we are not pushed to see our bodies as they are seen by those around us, we cannot have real conversations about the distinct challenges our bodies carry with them, much less how to remedy those challenges. When we are not pushed to see our bodies as they are, we are all left to our default perception—the deep, enduring belief that each of us is unforgivably fat. Diet culture hinges on all of us seeking to become thin, thinner, thinnest, engaged in an endless quest to shrink ourselves at all costs. When we are left to our own devices, we retreat to focusing on the problem of our own mindsets rather than the problem of our internalized biases, the harms we (often unintentionally) cause to those around us, and the ways in which others’ bodies invite different experiences than our own. We universalize our own experience, assuming that believing we are too fat is the same as being treated with the discrimination that too readily plagues undeniably fat people.
Thin people especially struggle to say “fat,” the hypothetical that has hurt them so deeply. But as an undeniably fat person, the word isn’t hurtful to me. It cannot be, because I do not have the luxury of escaping it. Instead, I am beholden to someone else’s discomfort with a word that has never accurately described them. Even as a very fat person, when I enter body positive spaces, I cannot be trusted to describe myself as fat, and I cannot expect support when the truth of my body is hurled at me as an insult. I cannot be responsible for naming my own skin. Body positivity quarantines the words used to describe bodies like mine and, in the process, shuts out those bodies themselves. We need the courage to say the word “fat” and the wherewithal to see all of our bodies accurately. Without it, we cannot name our bodies, nor can we truly embrace and understand all of us who have sought out this movement that felt so essential.
This newly popularized body positivity drowns out so many of us, reducing problems of social exclusion to issues of self-esteem and body image. It focuses on normalizing the moments in which thin bodies appear fat, rather than tackling the more intransigent and troubling systems of privilege and oppression that marginalize those of us who are fat. It disproportionately centers the experiences of cis women who are thin, white, Western, abled, straight. And in so doing, it writes out those of us more than one standard deviation from the mean—we can be people of color, or we can have a disability, or we can be transgender, or we can be fat, but we cannot dare be more than one.
There is certainly room to reclaim body positivity for more of us. Undeniably, work can be done to create stronger representation for the rest of us. Someone can make that space. But I am, you know, obese, so it isn’t mine to take up. Instead, I want to build this grand and risky world: a world defined not by platitudes and self-esteem but by access, vulnerability, justice, candor, and courage. And to move past the barriers of the body positivity movement, we’ll need all of that and more.
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. They will need to engage in conversations about oppression and discrimination, even when those aren’t the primary markers of their experiences, acknowledging the critical difference between their internal hurt and fat people’s systemic oppression. The work of straight-size people will need to be courageous, vulnerable, and uncomfortable. It will require them to get painfully honest with themselves, acknowledging that they have been trained to judge and marginalize fat people and, whether they intend to or not, they are often active participants in perpetuating and expanding anti-fatness. They will need to interrogate and jettison all the ways, big and small, that they’ve come to marginalize fat people, from posting triumphant before and after weight-loss photos to reassuring themselves that they’re not that fat when they see a body like mine. And they will need to come to a place of deep understanding and belief that their body—their very own—is not necessarily an accomplishment, not a reward, not a reflection of a laudable work ethic or intense tenacity, but of a series of factors that are largely out of their own control.
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. In a world built for straight-size people, for the first time, they will need to risk their comfort for those of us who don’t have that privilege. They’ll need to intervene in anti-fatness wherever it occurs, and wherever they can, from calling out fat jokes to intervening in anti-fat street harassment, from boycotting the diet industry to leading other thin people through their own learning about anti-fatness. Straight-size people will need to advocate for changes in policy, lobbying for federal bills to regulate airline seat size, advocating for local policies to ban anti-fat discrimination, and ending the “biggest loser” competitions that hurt and harm so many of their coworkers, including fat people and people with eating disorders. 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 muster the fortitude: to do things we’re told we can’t, to wear things we’re told we shouldn’t. We’ll need to risk advocating for ourselves, even when it’s risky (it’s always risky). We’ll need to give up the quiet safety of anonymity and instead step into courageous vulnerability, giving voice to the painful experiences we’ve been so long trained to withhold—the ones we’ve been shown, time and time again, that so many straight-size people will dismiss or defend but never just hear. Building a movement for fat justice will require our leadership, which will mean taking the dual risks of public advocacy and of meaningful accountability to one another, across lines of identity and experience. We’ll need to take on the painstaking work of building a movement that is both tender and radical, caring and visionary.
But the first step for all of us will be to let go of the magical thinking of thinness. Stop believing that a thinner body will bring us better relationships, dream jobs, obedient children, beautiful homes. Stop waiting to do the things we love until we’ve lost ten, twenty, fifty, one hundred pounds. Come to truly believe what we already know, and what so much data tells us: the vast majority of us don’t lose significant amounts of weight and the few who do don’t maintain weight loss in the long term. Nearly twenty years of dieting has shown me that I will never be thin. I believe to my core that I will also never wear straight sizes. I also believe that my life is worth living, worth embracing, worth loving, and celebrating. And it’s worth all of that now—not two hundred pounds from now.
Building that world will require cultural and legal change too. After all, we live in a world in which fat people face staggering disparities in employment, healthcare, accessibility, and then insists those disparities are our own fault for failing to achieve and maintain thin bodies. 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. And for fat people—especially very fat people—that world can feel so very far away when our days are reliably marked by open disdain, perfectly legal discrimination, and sometimes even violence. The marginalization and public abuse of very fat people is so commonplace that it has become accepted, but that doesn’t make it acceptable. 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. Here are some things we can do to stem the tide of systemic, institutional harms facing fat people.
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. And we can demand healthcare that works for all of us—not just those of us who are healthy or who look thin.
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, ability, or age. And we can grow in the direction of universal design, building environments that work for families and individuals, fat people and thin people, abled and disabled people alike.
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. Developing public education campaigns, points of intervention, and meaningful consequences to combat fatcalling and the racist, anti-fat violence that targets fat people of color will be essential to protecting fat people’s physical safety. Increasing training of first responders to support survivors of sexual assault will also be essential to combatting the dramatically under-addressed epidemic of sexual violence facing fat people.
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 Nutrisystem, Jenny Craig, Weight Watchers) may only make claims that are based on repeated clinical trials conducted by independent, third-party researchers—not bankrolled by corporations invested in making sensational claims.
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 blame them for their own circumstance.7 Vulnerable, oft-targeted fat kids aren’t responsible for the bullying they experience—bullies are.
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.
Building this brave new world will require major shifts of each of us. It cannot end with plumbing our own internal depths, rooting out our internalized anti-fat bias, but that is where it will need to begin. We will need to retrain ourselves to understand a new, compassionate set of principles that can guide our actions:
That our bodies are just bodies, not synecdoche for our character, not a badge of work ethic—just bodies. That our bodies are our own, not subject to street harassment, mandates to change, or unwelcome “advice” no matter how well-intended. That health is multifaceted, made up of a wide range of factors, from our mental health to our dis/ability, our blood pressure to our t-cell count; it cannot be reduced to a single measure, much less a number on a bathroom scale. That health is not a simple or monolithic reward for the penitent but largely an outgrowth of our existing privileges: having access to health insurance, receiving competent care from providers, and being born into able bodies. That illness and disability are not punishments for failing to stay vigilant but are variances in humans that have always existed. That diabetes and heart disease aren’t an opportunity for thinner people to gloat but health conditions that deserve competent treatment and compassionate care.
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 isn’t just something each of us bears—it’s something we become. It takes over us, a virus that infects the way we see ourselves and those around us. It slips into our bloodstreams with ease, latches onto us, seeps into the way we see our friends, our family, strangers on the street. It warps our vision and our relationships. 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 world always is.
So let’s get to work.