Aubrey Gordon Quotes

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.

We can build a world that doesn’t assume fat people are failed thin people, or that thin people are categorically healthy and virtuous.

This cultural obsession with weight loss doesn’t just impact our physical and mental health; it also impacts our sense of self and, consequently, our relationships with others of different sizes.

Despite constant insistence that we lose weight for our health and track the simple arithmetic of calories in, calories out, there is no data illustrating that dieting achieves long-term weight loss.

I’m just concerned for your health. I’m concerned for your health, so I have to tell you, again and again, that you’re going to die. I’m concerned for your health, so I have to tell you that no one will love you at your size. I’m concerned for your health, so I cannot treat you with basic respect.

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.

All of us deserve peaceful relationships with our own bodies, regardless of whether or not others perceive us as happy or healthy.

I don’t really want to hear everything you’re doing to avoid looking like me.

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.

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.

Fat people are frequently spoken about or at, but we’re rarely heard. Instead, bodies and experiences like mine become caricatured and symbolic, either as a kind of effigy or as a pornography of suffering. Bodies and experiences like mine are rarely allowed to just be ours.

The fear of being fat is the fear of joining an underclass that you have so readily dismissed, looked down on, looked past, or found yourself grateful not to be a part of.

A diet is a cure that doesn’t work for a disease that doesn’t exist.

While body positivity seems to be everywhere, it doesn’t appear to be changing our deeply held, deeply harmful beliefs about fatness and fat people.

Whether being fat is a choice for an individual or not, they do not deserve discrimination, harassment, or unkind treatment because of the size of their bodies. None of us should have to change our appearance in order to “earn” basic respect and dignity.

When we reduce fat people to their bodies, to “before and after,” or to bellies and rolls, we come to think of fat people as bodies without personhood. Fat bodies become symbols of disembodied disgust.

If a marginalized identity or experience can be established to be a choice, then solving the problems that marginalized individuals face falls to those individuals themselves rather than a broader collective.

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.

Strings shows that white supremacy produces standards of health and beauty that align with whiteness and thinness, and that alignment is far from accidental

I choose to believe that fat people can be genuinely attractive, truly loved, actually lovable, sincerely wanted.

That is, what we think of as health risks associated with being fat may in fact be health risks of experiencing discrimination and internalizing stigma.

I do not know how to convince you to acknowledge—regularly and readily, to yourself and others—that you can feel hurt and also hurt others.

We can build a world in which fat bodies are valued and supported just as much as thin ones.

Thinner people are seen as working hard to achieve their thinness, therefore as dedicated and tenacious. Fatter people are seen, consequently, as failing to put in the effort needed to become thin, or healthy and virtuous.

Read Sonya Renee Taylor’s The Body Is Not an Apology, Da’Shaun Harrison’s Belly of the Beast, Charlotte Cooper’s Fat Activism, Roxane Gay’s Hunger, Caleb Luna’s Revenge Body, Kiese Laymon’s Heavy, Nicole Byer’s #VeryFat #VeryBrave, Esther Rothblum and Sondra Solovay’s The Fat Studies Reader, Rachel Wiley’s Fat Girl Finishing School, and more.

But not remembering treating fat people badly isn’t necessarily a sign of having treated fat people well—it’s just as likely a sign of having so deeply normalized poor treatment of fat people that we don’t even remember when we’ve done it.

Just lose weight is deeply dismissive, incuriously judgmental. It assumes that fat people have neither considered nor attempted weight loss and, more than that, that thin experts need to teach us about the wrongness of our bodies and how to make them right.

Our bodies are believed to be meritocracies, direct reflections of the work we’re willing to put in. We are expected to judge ourselves on what we’re told are the objective measures of our bodies, and we are reminded that others will judge us based on our bodies too.

. In its contemporary iteration, our cultural definition of health depends on thinness. “Get healthy” is used as a euphemistic shorthand for losing weight. Fat people are pressured to change our appearance out of a purported concern for our health, diagnosed solely by looking at us.

In books, political cartoons, films, and TV shows, fat bodies make up the failings of America, capitalism, beauty standards, excess, and consumerism. Fat bodies represent at once the poorest of the poor and the pinnacle of unchecked power, consumption, and decay. Our bodies have borne the blame for so much. Whole artistic worlds are built on the premise that bodies like mine are monstrous, repulsive, and—worst of all—contagious. From individuals to institutions, academia to the evening news, fat people are made bogeymen. And that spills into daily experiences of abuse, driven by intentions both good and ill, but always with the same outcome: an intense shame for simply daring to exist in the bodies many of us have always had.

Fat people—especially very fat people, like me—are frequently met with screwed-up faces insisting on health and concern. Often, we defend ourselves by insisting that concerns about our health are wrongheaded, rooted in faulty and broad assumptions. We rattle off our test results and hospital records, citing proudly that we’ve never had a heart attack, hypertension, or diabetes. We proudly recite our gym schedules and the contents of our refrigerators. Many fat people live free from the complications popularly associated with their bodies. Many fat people don’t have diabetes, just as many fat people do have loving partners despite common depictions of us. Although we are not thin, we proudly report that we are happy and we are healthy. We insist on our goodness by relying on our health. But what we mean is that we are tired of automatically being seen as sick. We are exhausted from the work of carrying bodies that can only be seen as doomed. We are tired of being heralded as dead men walking, undead specters from someone else’s morality tale.

Thinner people are seen as working hard to achieve their thinness, therefore as dedicated and tenacious. Fatter people are seen, consequently, as failing to put in the effort needed to become thin, or healthy and virtuous. We are defined as categorically unhealthy, and therefore as categorically irresponsible.

We are told that our choices are our own, and our bodies are reflections of the rightness of those choices. If we are thin, we will be presumed to have made good choices. If we are fat, we must have chosen poorly. Our bodies are believed to be meritocracies, direct reflections of the work we’re willing to put in.

Fat hasn’t become a bad word because fatness is somehow inherently undesirable but because of what we attach to it. We take “fat” to mean unlovable, unwanted, unattractive, unintelligent, unhealthy. But fatness itself is simply one aspect of our bodies—and a very small part of who each of us is. It deserves to be described as a simple fact, bearing little relevance to our worth or worthiness but a great deal of relevance to how we’re treated by individuals and institutions.

Cultural conversations prompt us to regard thinness as a major life accomplishment; these myths lend credence to that belief. Many of these myths center around treating fat people as failed thin people, implying that thin people are superior to fat people. These myths aren’t just incorrect or outdated perceptions: they’re tools of power and dominance.

Those in workplaces with human resources departments can advocate for the end of anti-fat “workplace wellness” programs, or workplace “biggest loser” weight-loss competitions.

Capitalism is not and will not be a source of justice for any of us.

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.

And when it came from those closest to me, even the most explicit judgment was reliably shielded by a missionary claim of concern for my health.

And it shows up when friends and family comment on other fat people’s bodies, telling us precisely their thoughts about bodies like ours in the process.

Phobias are real mental illnesses, and conflating phobias with bigoted beliefs and behaviors invites further stigma and relies on ableist language.

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

Rather than motivating fat people to lose weight, weight stigma had led to more isolation, more avoidance, and fewer social and material supports.

In the cases of Lizzo, Anna O’Brien, and Angelina Duplisea, they were objecting to fat people receiving media attention without performing a pursuit of weight loss or expressing a deep and abiding shame about their appearances. Simply put, they don’t want to look at us. And if they have to, they certainly don’t want to see us depicted neutrally, sexually, or joyfully.

Despite growing evidence to the contrary, we all share a cultural belief that fat bodies are an individual failing that each of us can and must control. Despite a mountain of evidence linking physical and mental health to social discrimination, the conversation about fat and health stubbornly refuses to acknowledge the possible influence of stigma in determining fat people’s health.

At night, I dreamed of laying my belly on a cold, metal table (a laboratory or a coroner’s office?) and slicing it off with a fish knife in one smooth stroke, bloodied but finally free. Sometimes I still do.

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.

If you don’t experience a particular kind of oppression, it isn’t yours to internalize. And despite the pain endured by many straight-size people—that is, people who don’t wear plus sizes—that pain isn’t internalized oppression.

Those same thin, white, nondisabled people will continue to proclaim that they “feel fat,” using fat people’s bodies as props to illustrate their own anxieties and insecurities, without regard to how that impacts the fat people around them.

Debunking myths starts with repeating those myths. Doing so can seem like uncritically accepting an opponent’s premise. Depending on the myth in question, it can also mean quietly assenting to debating the humanity of the community being discussed.

During and after the American Civil War, racist science boomed, asserting a litany of pseudoscientific, intellectualized justifications for racism and enslavement, allowing white people to prove to ourselves, once again, that our supremacy was innate, earned, and somehow right. That boom time in racist science also left us with the body mass index, a measurement derived solely from the heights and weights of white men conscripts in the nineteenth century and never tested or meaningfully adjusted for anyone else.

The term “overweight” implies that there is an objectively correct weight for every body. A growing number of fat activists consider obese to be a slur. Both terms are derived from a medical model that considers fat bodies as deviations that must be corrected,

The term “obese” is derived from the Latin obesus, meaning “having eaten oneself fat,” inherently blaming fat people for our bodies. A growing number of fat activists consider the term to be a slur, and many avoid it altogether. The term “overweight” implies that there is an objectively, externally determined correct weight for every body. Both terms are derived from a medical model that considers fat bodies as deviations in need of correction. Both are also defined terms used frequently within medical and academic research.

Sabrina Strings’s Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia is an indispensable history linking anti-Black racism to anti-fatness. J. Eric Oliver’s Fat Politics analyzes the emergence in the 1990s and 2000s of the United States’ so-called obesity epidemic.

The fear of being fat is the fear of joining an underclass that you have so readily dismissed, looked down on, looked past, or found yourself grateful not to be a part of. It is a fear of being seen as slothful, gluttonous, greedy, unambitious, unwanted, and, worst of all, unlovable.

The depth and breadth of anti-fatness can be difficult to believe, too, because anti-fat attitudes, comments, policies, and practices are ubiquitous. We cannot see the air we’ve been breathing for years, cannot touch the shifting ground beneath our feet. Anti-fatness has become invisible,

Healthism is itself a facet of ableism, the web of beliefs, behaviors, and institutional practices that marginalize disabled people. Our cultural perceptions of health and beauty have long been rooted in the rejection of disabled people. For example, in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, municipalities across the United States passed so-called “ugly laws,” banning the public appearance of disabled people. According to Canada’s Eugenics Archive, “ugly laws were concerned with more than appearance, prohibiting both the activity of street begging and the appearance in public of ‘certain persons.

Food wasn’t there to satiate hunger, to fuel activity, or to enjoy. Instead, it became emotionally and morally laden. A slice of cheddar cheese became a referendum on my willpower, work ethic, character. A bite of ice cream was a moment of weakness. One scoop was cause for concern; two scoops called for an intervention.

Fat people receive shorter office visits, health-care providers develop less rapport with us, and many fat people face misdiagnosis of severe health conditions, like autoimmune disorders and cancers, because providers attribute symptoms to our weight. That, in turn, leads fat patients to mistrust doctors and avoid seeking health care.

If so many are, as they claim, “just concerned about fat people’s health,” the best way to express that concern is to address the overwhelming stigma facing fat people in doctor’s offices. After all, while some of us may be sick, stigma from health-care providers often prevents us from accessing the care we need, which only makes us sicker. Until

Denying that some of us are fat may feel comforting, especially for those who aren’t universally regarded as fat. But to me, it feels like a denial of a fundamental life experience that has significantly impacted me. It’s not just a denial of my size but a denial of the biased attitudes and overt discrimination fat people contend with all too often.

You know, there’s a lot of calories in that reveals a plethora of messages in its underpinnings: You must not know anything about calories. I noticed that you are fat, which means you must not know how to lose weight. If you knew how to lose weight, you wouldn’t be fat, I wouldn’t have to see your fat body, and I wouldn’t have to bring this to your attention.

Weight-loss methods aren’t marketed as diets but as “lifestyle changes,” “detoxes,” “cleanses,” and “cognitive behavioral therapy.” That shifting language allows the weight-loss industry to cloak its same old diets in the languages of holistic wellness and self-care. We may talk about diets differently today, but social mandates to become thin are as strong as ever.

This should not be the only book you read by a fat person about fatness and anti-fatness. Read Sonya Renee Taylor’s The Body Is Not an Apology, Da’Shaun Harrison’s Belly of the Beast, Charlotte Cooper’s Fat Activism, Roxane Gay’s Hunger, Caleb Luna’s Revenge Body, Kiese Laymon’s Heavy, Nicole Byer’s #VeryFat #VeryBrave, Esther Rothblum and Sondra Solovay’s The Fat Studies Reader, Rachel Wiley’s Fat Girl Finishing School, and more. Whether you’re new to thinking critically about anti-fatness or a longstanding fat activist, be sure to locate this book, accurately, as just one of many fat perspectives available to you. Writers who aren’t fat have made substantial contributions here too. Sabrina Strings’s Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia is an indispensable history linking anti-Black racism to anti-fatness. J. Eric Oliver’s Fat Politics analyzes the emergence in the 1990s and 2000s of the United States’ so-called obesity epidemic. Each of these works offer vital analysis of the mechanics and history of anti-fatness. And each will deepen your thinking about anti-fatness and your clarity in countering anti-fatness.

For me, pressure to lose weight from thin loved ones hurt more than even the harshest jibes from strangers or the cruelest internet trolls. It’s easy to disregard strangers: we know one another for only moments at a time. Few things sting like rejection from those we love most, or conditional love offered with the insistence that they just want to help. “I love you” doesn’t ring so true when it’s followed by “I just want to fix you.

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.

We do not consider the many causes of weight loss. We don’t remember troubling weight loss is sometimes prompted by grief from a breakup, divorce, or death. We don’t think about weight loss caused by cancer or chemotherapy. We don’t consider that the person in front of us might be going through a medical crisis, their weight loss a sign of abrupt and troubling change rather than hard-fought victory. And we don’t consider that weight loss is sometimes linked to declining mental health or a new wave of disordered eating. In our eagerness to compliment what we assume is desired weight loss, many of us end up congratulating restrictive eating disorders, grief, and trauma in the process, revealing that we are in a constant state of surveillance, monitoring and assessing the bodies of those around us. We keep our disappointment and displeasure quiet, revealing our disapproval of fatness only in our celebration of thinness.

But our insecurities don’t stop at our own skin. The ways in which straight-size people see fat people are increasingly limited by their own insecurity. In body positive spaces, for example, thin people will often struggle to hear fat people’s stories of discrimination. The concrete, external harms of anti-fatness are often reframed and reinterpreted as insecurity by thinner people, especially women. After all, thinner women simply aren’t subjected to the same levels of societal prejudice, harassment, bullying, and overt discrimination as fatter people. As such, feeling insecure is among the worst things many thinner women can imagine, so many interpret fat people’s stories of explicit, interpersonal, or institutional anti-fatness as insecurity. The phenomenon of repackaging a fat person’s discrimination as a more palatable, more understandable kind of internal struggle with body image is one I’ve come to refer to as thinsecurity.

All of us deserve better than what thinness takes. We deserve a new paradigm of health: one that acknowledges its multifaceted nature and holds t-cell counts and blood pressure alongside mental health and chronic illness management. We deserve a paradigm of personhood that does not make size or health a prerequisite for dignity and respect. We deserve more places for thin people to heal from the endless social messages that tell them at once that their bodies will never be perfect enough to be beautiful and simultaneously that their bodies make them inherently superior to fatter people. We deserve spaces for thin people to build their self-confidence with one another so that the task no longer falls to fat people who are already contending with widespread judgment, harassment, and even discrimination. We deserve more spaces for fat people too—fat-specific spaces and fat-only spaces, where we can have conversations that can thrive in specificity, acknowledging that our experiences of external discrimination are distinct from internal self-confidence and body image issues (though we may have those too). We deserve those separate spaces so that we can work through the trauma of living in a world that tells all of us that our bodies are failures—punishing thin people with the task of losing the last ten pounds and fat people with the crushing reality of pervasive social, political, and institutional anti-fatness. We deserve more spaces to think and talk critically about our bodies as they are, not as we wish they were, or as an unforgiving and unrealistic culture pressures them to change. We deserve spaces and movements that allow us to think and talk critically about the messages each of us receive about our bodies—both on a large scale, from media and advertising, and on a small scale, interpersonally, with friends and family. But we can only do this if we acknowledge the differences in our bodies and the differences in our experiences that spring from bodies. We deserve to see each other as we are so that we can hear each other. And the perfect, unreachable standard of thinness is taking that from us.

Regardless of our size, working toward fat justice will call upon our most honest, compassionate selves. It will require deep vulnerability, candor, and empathy. Together, we can create a tectonic shift in the way we see, talk about, and treat our bodies, fat and thin alike. We can find more peace in the skin we live in, declaring a truce with the bodies that only try to care for us. But more than that, we can build a more just and equitable world that doesn’t determine our access to resources and respect based on how we look. We can build a world that doesn’t assume fat people are failed thin people, or that thin people are categorically healthy and virtuous. We can build a world that conspires against eating disorders and body dysmorphia, working toward more safety for eating disorder survivors of all sizes. We can build a world in which fat bodies are valued and supported just as much as thin ones.

For many of us, culturally dominant definitions of happy and healthy are out of reach. For people with mental illnesses, happiness can be more a battle than a point of arrival. For chronically ill people, health may feel forever out of reach, all stick and no carrot. And for any of us, regardless of ability or mental health, happiness and health are never static states. All of us fall ill, all of us experience emotions beyond some point of arrival called “happiness.” And when those things happen—when we get sick, when we get sad—they shouldn’t impinge on our perceived right to embrace and care for our own bodies. Ultimately, “as long as you’re happy and healthy” just moves the goalposts from a beauty standard to equally finicky and unattainable standards of health and happiness. All of us deserve peaceful relationships with our own bodies, regardless of whether or not others perceive us as happy or healthy.

There are vast differences of experience within those categories, so consider their use to be broad guideposts for how anti-fatness can impact fat people at different sizes. THIN AND NON-FAT describe those whose bodies are thinner than fat people’s, and who receive social, cultural, and institutional privileges on the basis of that thinness and proximity to thinness. Those same people may describe themselves as “feeling fat” or may not describe their own bodies as thin. But the privileges we receive are based more on how others perceive us than how we perceive ourselves. Because fatness is often defined relative to thinness, thinness itself often goes unnamed, treated as a default not worth commenting on. But tackling biased myths against fat people requires naming thinness too, so that we can identify the ways in which these myths allow some thin and small fat people to evade and perpetuate anti-fatness by aligning themselves with thinness instead.

Fat bodies represent at once the poorest of the poor and the pinnacle of unchecked power, consumption, and decay. Our bodies have borne the blame for so much.

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.

Despite constant insistence that we lose weight for our health and track the simple arithmetic of calories in, calories out, there is no data illustrating that dieting achieves long-term weight loss. To the contrary, constant dieting may make weight loss more difficult, as our metabolisms fight back, searching for the stasis of a familiar, fatter body.57 A major study following contestants from the television show The Biggest Loser showed that despite their dramatic weight loss on camera, most contestants were unable to maintain their smaller size, despite hours of working out each day. 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 Those results aren’t limited to reality TV contestants. As one Slate writer put it, addressing dieters, “You’ll likely lose weight in the short term, but your chances of keeping it off for five years or more is about the same as your chance of surviving metastatic lung cancer: 5 percent. And when you do gain back the weight, everyone will blame you. Including you.

4. Random examples of items which are part of the canon of Camp: Zuleika Dobson Tiffany lamps Scopitone films The Brown Derby restaurant on Sunset Boulevard in LA The Enquirer, headlines and stories Aubrey Beardsley drawings Swan Lake Bellini's operas Visconti's direction of Salome and 'Tis Pity She's a Whore certain turn-of-the-century picture postcards Schoedsack's King Kong the Cuban pop singer La Lupe Lynn Ward's novel in woodcuts, God's Man the old Flash Gordon comics women's clothes of the twenties (feather boas, fringed and beaded dresses, etc.) the novels of Ronald Firbank and Ivy Compton-Burnett stag movies seen without lust

Our bodies are believed to be meritocracies, direct reflections of the work we’re willing to put in.

Aerie did not then, and does not now, carry plus sizes. It used the rhetoric of body positivity and a defanged version of fat acceptance but still wouldn’t serve fat customers.

For people with mental illnesses, happiness can be more a battle than a point of arrival. For chronically ill people, health may feel forever out of reach, all stick and no carrot. And for any of us, regardless of ability or mental health, happiness and health are never static states. All of us fall ill, all of us experience emotions beyond some point of arrival called “happiness.” And when those things happen—when we get sick, when we get sad—they shouldn’t impinge on our perceived right to embrace and care for our own bodies.

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

Some researchers even argue that weight stigma is a primary driver of the so-called obesity epidemic,19 citing a range of studies showing that experiences of discrimination and internalized weight stigma cause weight gain and that health-care providers’ bias leads many fat people to postpone health care or avoid it altogether—another driver of poor health outcomes.

And when it comes to implicit bias—that is, the bias we unconsciously act on—anti-fatness is getting significantly worse. “It is the only attitude out of the six that we looked at that showed any hint of getting more biased over time.”4 While body positivity seems to be everywhere, it doesn’t appear to be changing our deeply held, deeply harmful beliefs about fatness and fat people.

When fat people open up about our experiences, thinner body positive activists often rewrite those accounts of institutional discrimination and interpersonal abuse as “insecurities,” whitewashing the vast differences between our diverging experiences.

We take fat to mean unlovable, unwanted, unattractive, unintelligent, unhealthy. But fatness itself is simply one aspect of our bodies—and a very small part of who each of us is. It deserves to be described as a simple and unimportant fact.

Diet culture hinges on all of us seeking to become thin, thinner, thinnest, engaged in an endless quest to shrink ourselves at all costs.

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.

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.

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.

are disproportionately white or light-skinned, able-bodied, and either straight size (that is, not plus size) or at the smallest end of plus size. While it may not be an intentional one, for many fat activists, the message is clear: body positivity isn’t for us.

Notably, women of all sizes expressed concern about being targeted by anti-fat bias and stigma, though they experienced that fear differently and drew conclusions that directly contradicted the study’s findings. “Among those who are not overweight and who have a hard time understanding what it is like to be overweight, stigma feels like it would help strengthen other people’s resolve to eat less because it strengthens their own.”24

My strengths and passions didn’t define my path in life—others’ responses to my body did. And over time, those responses built me a cage.

Little did I know that those endless diets would later be shown to cause permanent damage to my metabolism,26 ensuring a lifetime as a fat person whose efforts to lose weight would prove increasingly futile over time.

What drew him to me was that I appeared to be an easy mark, and I was. What drew him to me was that I wouldn’t be believed, so I wouldn’t say anything—and I didn’t.

choose to believe that my fat friends and family members who are in love are loved fully, are fulfilled in those relationships, and that their partners are not somehow damaged for wanting them.

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.

Some fat activists strive for body neutrality, a viewpoint that holds that bodies should be prized for their function, not their appearance, and that simply feeling impartial about our bodies would represent a significant step forward for those of us whose bodies are most marginalized

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.

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.

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.

So let’s get to work.