Why Fat Matters
Why isn’t weight stigma seen as a social justice issue?

Those of us who fight to end weight stigma face many challenges, not the least of which is resistance to the idea that weight stigma is even worthy of inclusion in the index of social justice struggles.
As activists, we are asked whether the struggles of fat people in a thin-obsessed culture are as dire as other injustices, and we’re often derided for our focus. “You cannot compare a sort of disgust and disrespect for people who serially overeat and indulge and make themselves ill, sometimes barely able to walk, to an ignorant hatred of someone because they’re a different colour, sexuality, or sex,” writes Fiona Phillips, responding in the Mirror to a U.K. study on weight discrimination. The truth is that the fight to end weight stigma is intrinsically connected to struggles around gender, race, and class. A willingness to acknowledge the negative impact of weight stigma on fat people, and indeed people of all sizes, is critical to all social justice efforts.
Fat advocates are people who identify and speak out against weight stigma and fat oppression with the hope of fostering a new norm of body acceptance. When I spoke with fat advocates in Canada and the U.S. about the challenges of making fat stigma a social justice issue, two common themes emerged. The first is the frequent dismissal of fat stigma as a serious issue when compared to others, and the second is the belief that fatness is the result of individual choices and behaviour and thus not appropriate for broad-based social activism. Unquestioning acceptance of the fat-is-bad/thin-is-good dichotomy has blinded us to both the reality of natural body diversity and to the oppression faced by larger people. Taking fat stigma seriously means confronting these attitudes in ourselves and in others. Fat matters.
Punished for being fat
Consider health care. A 2010 report in the American Medical Association Journal of Ethics notes that, “It is well documented that health professionals often carry the negative biases of our society toward individuals who are obese.” Researchers have found that doctors’ attitudes “reflect the widespread perception of obesity as a lifestyle choice or characterological flaw.” A 2013 study on health and quality of life for overweight and obese people published in the Journal of Eating Disorders suggests that decreased health outcomes for fat people may be less about the negative impacts of fat tissue and more about the results of attempts to alter bodies with yo-yo dieting, weight-loss surgery, and drugs. Fear of judgment keeps many fat people from accessing health care, and those who do visit a doctor are often simply diagnosed as obese, with other potential causes and health concerns – and more holistic approaches – ignored.
Fatness is also punished in the workforce. An October 2014 report by law professor Jennifer Shinall of Tennessee’s Vanderbilt University finds that women considered to be overweight “are more likely to work in lower-paying and more physically demanding jobs; less likely to get higher-wage positions that include interaction with the public; and make less money in either case compared to average size women and all men.” Shinall has been quick to point out that education was not a factor in the study’s findings. “I controlled for education in my study,” she says in an interview for the Guardian. “What is going on is being driven by the employer side of the equation.” The report found that “Heavy women earned $9,000 less than their average-weight counterparts; very heavy women earned $19,000 less.” To further illustrate the intersection of gender and weight stigma, note that while half of top male CEOs in the U.S. are obese, only five per cent of top female CEOs are.
In my province, Saskatchewan, there is the case from the early ’90s of Sandra Lynn Davison, a nurse’s aid in Melville whose application for employment was denied because she was obese. In an article for the Alberta Law Review discussing Davison’s subsequent human rights challenge, Emily Luther outlined the discrimination Davison faced and argued that body size should “be its own prohibited category of discrimination” in section 15 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
The situation is no better in politics. Maggie De Block, Belgium’s recently appointed health minister, has faced intense public scrutiny about her size that was never directed at the previous health minister, Luc Van den Bossche, himself a large man.
Interestingly, one of the first lines of attack against fat activists is their physical appearance. Activists who live in fat bodies are often accused of trying to rationalize their own fatness or of being bitter because they aren’t considered attractive. However, even fat activists who are thinner face backlash based on their appearance. For example, in a recent conversation with me, Linda Bacon, author of the groundbreaking book Health at Every Size, reflected that most of the negative commentary written about her has focused on her physical appearance, not the content of her work. “They can’t dismiss me for being fat, so instead they criticize me because I don’t gender conform.”
Socializing stigma
Addressing weight stigma tends to be seen as private and personal work, carried out through support groups and other safe venues of discussion and empowerment. Jenny Ellison, a Canadian studies professor at Trent University in Peterborough, says that the framing of fat oppression as a personal issue may account for some of the disconnect between fat activism and other social justice work. Even within the fat acceptance community, there can be reluctance to accept weight stigma as a social justice issue. “Within our community, we fall into the trap of our own hierarchies,” says Jill Andrew, a body image advocate. “[Whether] someone is published or considered ‘more militant’ determines what activism should be heralded or not.”
My question is, how can the fat acceptance community continue to move forward and gain credibility with broader social justice movements? In my conversation with Bacon, she suggested starting inside the fat acceptance movement itself by bringing a broader analysis to weight stigma work. This means exploring how the experience of fat women who live in poverty differs from those with greater economic security and looking at how race and sexual orientation impact the experience of living in a larger body.
We have a unique opportunity from within the fat acceptance movement to demonstrate the importance of including weight stigma within an intersectional social justice framework. This will help us bring fat oppression into the public domain and encourage critical analysis of body size rhetoric. When a statement is made about fatness, Andrew suggests we ask some basic questions: Who is saying it, who benefits from it, who gets hurt, and what is the subtext?
Tracey Mitchell, a Saskatoon-based organizer and activist, believes it’s important to find common cause with people working on other issues. “Instead of trying to convince them the obesity epidemic is a myth, I would rather have a conversation on where common interests might lie. What can we work on together? Where do we share values?” Looking for commonalities, like the goal of making exercise and healthy nutrition accessible to all people regardless of size or income, keeps us from falling into the trap of comparing oppressions, sometimes referred to as the Oppression Olympics, where people rank their hardships in order to gain credibility and dismiss others. It isn’t known if the distinct oppression faced by fat people is the same, less, or worse than other forms of oppression. But we can acknowledge a core thread of fat stigma at the intersection of issues of race, class, and gender.
Adopting an intersectional approach to our own weight stigma activism will assist us in our struggle to be taken seriously by other social justice advocates. Mitchell is a coordinator with the activist leadership program Next Up and says that “ability, inclusion, and body positivity are some of the lenses that we use at Next Up.” Bringing body positivity into the equation only strengthens concerns around gender, class, and colonization.
My hope is that we can face our internalized fears and anxieties about fat and see how the fight to end fat discrimination and weight stigma is intertwined with other struggles. Let’s move past the conditioned repulsion toward fat bodies and embrace a vision of social justice that celebrates a diversity of body shapes and sizes.
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7 Comments
In case anyone was wondering… The Saskatchewan Court of Appeal upheld the decision to rule in favor of the Clinic.
The issue that I have with this article is that the author completely ignores the IMMENSE negative health consequences of being overweight or obese.
I agree that one should not be discriminated against for their appearance, however obesity and fatness in general is something which can be changed. As of 2013, 53.6% of Canadian adults (18+) are overweight or obese. While I agree that there are socioeconomic conditions which correlate to being fat, it is unacceptable that over half of our population is now at least overweight.
A separate issue is the burden these overweight people place on taxpayers and the medical system later in life. This is not simply an individual issue, it is an issue which has long reaching effects on all Canadians.
Again, I must clarify I do not blame, nor hold any ill will against fat people. I believe that society should strive to create more programs to encourage the overweight to lead healthy lifestyles. There are valid issues for WHY people become fat in the first place which must be addressed. This is different from simply getting “thin” as the author puts it however. It requires a drastic paradigm shift in how an individual chooses to live their own life. Sacrifices must be made.
I agree that it is not easy to lose weight, it is an immense mountain to climb. However sitting at the bottom and pouting while complaining about society and not being “accepted” is simply unacceptable.
From Anna in Halifax on Dec 29th, 2014 at 5:29pm
Anna, despite you statements that you hold no ill will against people size, your closing paragraph explicitly demonstrates the opposite. We are hardly “sitting at the bottom pouting” – can you be more contemptuous?
We are also not interested in losing weight, because body size is not where the battle is. The battle is with those who are prejudiced regarding body size, and assume That body size determines health, that body size determines social, workplace, and relationship value. The battle is with bigotry.
You have clearly bought the lies, and you regurgitate them here, all the while claiming to hold no ill will. Your ignorance is astounding.
From Rebecca on Jan 1st, 2015 at 2:03pm
I am so tired of hearing complaints that fat people will cost taxpayers money. It isn’t true if you look at the entire picture. If fat people die sooner than their skinnier senior citizens, it evens out the costs. Living longer requires an additional drain on the system with regards to health care, social security costs, life insurance costs, welfare costs etc etc. So stop talking as if you are paying for illnesses when old age requires nursing, doctor visits, long term care, and many other drains on the system. My mother lived until she was 98 and she spent her last year’s in and out of hospitals, rehab and used a fortune on full time care in her home. Yes she was thin. So was her sister who lived till 104 and was in a government paid nursing home for 20 years at tax payers expense.
From Judy in Bellmore, ny on Jan 1st, 2015 at 2:50pm
Anna in Halifax: What strikes me most about your comment is how you assume that fat people are fat due to an “unhealthy” lifestyle and that simply by adopting a “healthy” lifestyle, an individual can attain and remain at a “healthy” weight.
Both of these assumptions have been proven over and over to be totally false. One can be physically active and eat a generally healthy diet (though what is “healthy” for one person may be unhealthy for another, but I digress) and still remain overweight. Conversely, one can eat junk food all day long, and loll about watching TV and still be thin. This is body diversity. Sadly, the fact that people naturally come in different shapes and sizes does not sell, so we are constantly inundated with TV shows and articles portraying all fat people as lazy gluttons. If you would like to find out more about healthy fat people, I suggest you look into the studies conducted by Dr. Steven Blair, a world-renowned researcher on the role of physical activity in maintaining good health. Dr. Blair has done extensive research on physical fitness and reducing heart disease and is one of the most cited exercise scientists in the world. He’s also a runner, and he’s still fat.
As far as losing weight and maintaining that loss, it is generally recognized that a scant 5% of those who succeed in losing weight actually succeed in keeping the weight off for five years or more. Is this pathetic success rate due to the fact that 95% of people who lose weight are just too lazy and junk-food addicted to maintain their new, “healthy” lifestyle? I think not. Interestingly, weight-reduced people, can “afford” to eat much less than those at the same weight who have effortlessly stayed at a “normal” weight all their lives. In other words, those who have made gargantuan efforts to lose weight must continue abnormal calorie restriction for the rest of their lives. They cannot even eat what would be considered a “healthy”, moderate diet without regaining the weight in a very short period of time. By dieting, they have trained their metabolism to slow down (when we diet, our bodies think that we are starving to death), thus making weight regain extremely easy. In fact, most dieters end up weighing more than before the initial weight loss as they yo-yo diet themselves up the scale.
So what is the answer? First, we have to stop dieting. Intentional caloric restriction is actually counter-productive for the vast majority of overweight people. If society is truly concerned about the health costs associated with obesity, we would be truly better off realizing that these costs are actually correlated much more strongly with healthy behaviours such as eating healthy foods (and yes, I know that the definition of what’s healthy is hard to pin down, but for the sake of argument a traditional Mediterranean diet seems to yield better health outcomes that a constant diet of McDonald’s food, for instance) and daily physical activity (for instance, a simple 30-minute walk every day) than the holy grail of the less than 25 BMI.
Then, as a society, we need to work on the social determinants of health: poverty, prejudice, the built environment.
In a “perfect” world, fat people would still exist. That’s body diversity. As far as I know, no one has decided that toy poodles should be banned because they don’t grow as big as labradors, or aren’t as thin as greyhounds. Nor are bushes looked upon harshly because they are wider and lower to the ground than sequoias. We have to take the same attitude towards people as we do to the plant and (non-human) animal kingdoms. We are all different. Take two people. Feed them the same diet. Get them to do a similar amount of exercise and still you might find that person A is slim and person B is heavy. Different bodies react differently to food and physical activity.
In a “perfect” world, some of us would be slim, some average and some fat. But as a society, we would be a lot healthier.
From WRG in Toronto on Jan 1st, 2015 at 4:14pm
Anna in Halifax said:
“The issue that I have with this article is that the author completely ignores the IMMENSE negative health consequences of being overweight or obese”
The fact is, whether there are negative health consequences or not, that wasn’t the point of the article.
“I agree that one should not be discriminated against for their appearance, however obesity and fatness in general is something which can be changed. As of 2013, 53.6% of Canadian adults (18+) are overweight or obese. While I agree that there are socioeconomic conditions which correlate to being fat, it is unacceptable that over half of our population is now at least overweight.”
So, the author’s point is that 53.6% of Canadian adults should be treated better in Canada than they are at present. In the US the number is closer to 67%, and they should have the social stigma of weight bias removed as well.
“A separate issue is the burden these overweight people place on taxpayers and the medical system later in life. This is not simply an individual issue, it is an issue which has long reaching effects on all Canadians.”
Might I remind you that fat people pay taxes as well…….53.6 % of them, assuming they’re all employed. That would mean that fat people are covering the medical expenses of average and thin people as well. You can thank them later…
“Again, I must clarify I do not blame, nor hold any ill will against fat people. I believe that society should strive to create more programs to encourage the overweight to lead healthy lifestyles. There are valid issues for WHY people become fat in the first place which must be addressed. This is different from simply getting “thin” as the author puts it however. It requires a drastic paradigm shift in how an individual chooses to live their own life. Sacrifices must be made.”
There is a program called HAES (for Health At Every Size) for fat people to work towards health, but it flies in the face of conventional medical/pharma propaganda. IF you are interested in taking the time to see what I’m talking about visit [url=http://www.haescommunity.org/]http://www.haescommunity.org/[/url]
“I agree that it is not easy to lose weight, it is an immense mountain to climb. However sitting at the bottom and pouting while complaining about society and not being “accepted” is simply unacceptable.”
I suppose you thought that Dr Martin Luther King and the civil rights activists of the 1960s were pouting as well. Fat people have rights, they pay taxes and have responsibilities like everyone else. I find it interesting that while you “hold nothing against fat people” you wax on about what a burden you feel they are, and how they need to stop complaining. You aren’t maligned for your appearance, but really, who’s complaining here?
From Phil Varlese in New Jersey on Jan 1st, 2015 at 7:08pm
I would invite the author and all those who commented to watch the BBC documentary series The Men Who Made Us Fat.
When the percentage of overweight people in our society skyrockets (in a mere 30 years) from less than 3% to today’s astounding levels, it becomes more than clear that we’re facing a crisis. We need to reverse this trend rather than allow it to become the new norm.
From Dane in Vancouver on Jan 4th, 2015 at 11:31am
“The issue that I have with this article is that the author completely ignores the IMMENSE negative health consequences of being overweight or obese.
I agree that one should not be discriminated against for their appearance, however obesity and fatness in general is something which can be changed. As of 2013, 53.6% of Canadian adults (18+) are overweight or obese. While I agree that there are socioeconomic conditions which correlate to being fat, it is unacceptable that over half of our population is now at least overweight.”
See any room for common cause here? This sentiment dominates everywhere. It’s an open, direct desire to repress, contain and trap fat people in the ‘obesity’ construct.
That construct exists for the purpose of undermining our mental and physical health, to the point where we either fulfill or appear to fulfill the insistence on “ IMMENSE negative health consequences of being overweight or obese.”
This patently isn’t true and we all know it. Biggest loser type shows would kill all their contestants if that were the case. It doesn’t matter how fat a person is, how compromised their health is, asthma, diabetes, depression, eating disorders etc., they’re expected to do the same run until you vomit penitence.
“Negative health” consequences must be created using the force of social pressures. This is repugnant even to those who’ve signed on for it, witness the denial of ill will.
Despite their own (self) disgust, they’ve signed on for this and continue to do so.
I honestly do not believe they are still in their right minds. The acceptance of the construct and the investment of energy has gone beyond mere statement. Through emotionalism and repetition, its created an internal momentum that’s now driving (their) behaviour.
In other words, the insistence that we are “unhealthy/dying” is directing their behaviour towards trying to bring that about.
Clearly this imposes tremendous dissonance they feel the need to resolve. Not by getting off this bandwagon, but by using their influence over fat people, to try and bring it about. Again, they’re not under any duress to comply whatsoever. What happens if they decide they’re not going to go along with this?
Answer; nothing.
FA hasn’t become personal by choice. It’s become personal because fat consciousness cannot get a hearing from anyone. Not even those who love and care about us in general in many cases. How many times can you keep trying to communicate with someone who’s clearly is reveling in having the upper hand? Who feels so utterly empowered by permission to loathe you?
Thus far, the the thing that works best is when others feel they have no control over us or gain any sense that we don’t care about their act.
If you believe fatness is on the “social justice index” then you need no confirmation from anyone else because you are as much sj as anyone.
The same things have been said from the beginning of the internet fatsphere. And the sense of cred we have now is light years from that.
That’s a change within fat people and that has brought about a change in others. The power of change is with us, not they.
If they don’t take it seriously, why won’t they drop it for the sake of harmony with sj aligned folks? Because its more important than sj, feminism, even anti-racism-how much more important do you need them to take it?
From BAdu on Jan 17th, 2015 at 9:01am