Blessed are the Fat

Fat Liberation

Fat liberation is the work of ending anti-fat bias and the systemic oppression of fat people.

Fat

“Fat” is not a bad word. People use fat to mean ugly, gross, or lazy, but it’s none of those things. It’s simply a descriptor of bodies – like short or tall. The weight loss industry has spent decades driving a moral panic over the size of people’s bodies. Weight is not the same thing as health. Being fat doesn’t mean you’re unhealthy. Being skinny doesn’t mean you’re healthy. These types of assumptions and actions taken in light of those assumptions are known collectively as anti-fat bias (sometimes called fat-phobia).

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Liberation

Liberating ourselves from anti-fat bias is a long haul. Folks have been working on it for decades with modern fat liberation work tracing back to queer liberation, Black liberation, and other liberation movements in the 1960’s. Like any liberation, fat liberation is by its nature intersectional. Anti-fat bias is compounded by other identities folks may hold – gender, race, and class to name a few. For example, women and femmes are held to different physical beauty standards than men and mascs. That’s fairly obvious. Another example, it’s difficult to talk about the history of anti-fat bias without talking about the history of white supremacy. That’s not as obvious but still very much a part of anti-fat bias. Fat liberation is liberation for people of all body sizes.

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Anti-Fat Bias

Those who experience anti-fat bias experience it in a lot of different ways. Fat people are legally allowed to be fired just because they’re fat in 48 states. Fat people make less money than thin people. Fat people have to pay more and go to special stores, often online, to find clothes that fit. Fat people go on fad diets and take diet pills that hurt their actual health. Fat people are sneered at by the folks supposed to sit next to them in places like buses and waiting rooms. Fat people have to monitor their intake of food in any public space to try and avoid strangers staring at them, judging them, lecturing them, or occasionally taking their plate and throwing it away. (Yes, it’s happened. No, I don’t want to tell you the story.) Most of this is based in the (wrong) idea that fat people are fat because they haven’t worked hard enough to not be fat or they don’t know the risks of being fat. For more on anti-fat bias, check out this episode of Maintenance Phase.