I'm gonna do something a little spicy this week, because I don't see enough friends in my privileged position doing it: Let's talk about fatphobia.
Before I start, a word of warning: this is not for my fat friends. Y'all already know exactly what goes on in this world, far better than I do. This post is for my thin friends. The ones who posted memes about Donald Trump's body. The ones who only started liking Adele after her weight loss. The ones who would never ever call a friend fat, or even call a stranger fat to their face, but who would absolutely do it behind someone's back, because they think "fat" is a bad word.
This post is for you.
CONTENT WARNINGS: fatphobia (obviously), including intentional weight loss and medical fatphobia; discussion of weight, including specific numbers; medical abuse and malpractice; eating disorders; drug abuse and overdose; BMI
"Jo," you may be asking, "what the fuck is a 102-pound person doing talking about fatphobia?" And it's a fair question. I have never been the target of many of the most invasive and traumatizing types of fatphobia, nor have I ever been put at immediate risk due to it. However, fatphobia has touched my life, because fatphobia has touched every life, particularly those of AFAB people.
For one thing, I have an incredible community of friends and partners around me, and I would estimate that about 95% of them have faced sustained and sometimes violent fatphobia for most of their lives, including people who are objectively not fat.
For another, I, a person who only a year ago crossed the hundred-pound mark, have faced an ugly flip side of fatphobia, one that we don't talk about anywhere near enough.
Don't worry, readers, I'm not about to claim to have been a "victim" of "skinny-shaming". But I have been a victim of medical fatphobia, because it doesn't only touch fat people.
When I was 16, I began to be uncomfortable in my body. I was painfully thin and knew that I was underweight. So I went to my doctor and said that hey, y'know, I've been thinking maybe I should gain some weight, because I don't feel very comfortable right now, and my doctor cut me off and said that I didn't need to gain weight because "you look great!" In fact, I didn't gain weight until I was forced into a truly restful lifestyle by the pandemic, but once I gained that weight, it stayed on, because it needed to be there in the first place. But it wasn't until I was 22 years old that I even had a doctor who listened to me about what I thought my body needed, because my doctors until then were willing to cling to "thin=good" and dismiss my concerns. (Troublingly, I received an email last year from my dermatologist's office about a weight-loss program. I had gone in to have a mole removed.)
Well, guess what? Gaining 25% of my body weight was a blessing unlike any other. My chronic pain is down significantly, my digestion is better, my sleep is better, my self-image is better. And I am so lucky to have had my circle of genuinely body-positive people around me to reinforce that joy.
I know innumerable people who feel just awful about their body fat and what it looks like, and I have a great deal of sympathy for them and everyone else who struggles to be body-positive in a body-negative world. But I also know that one morning, I woke up and realized that the marks on my calves were not bruises, but stretch marks, and I know that I cried not out of sadness, but pure joy.
I gained weight probably faster than would be considered "healthy" by normal standards, which is why my stretch marks are only now fading after a year of prominence. But how much more healthily and comfortably could I have gained that weight with a doctor who supported me, who referred me to a dietician and interrogated my habits to find out why I was underweight to begin with?
The stark and horrible reality of the situation is that mine is an incredibly rare case: I was underweight because I was genetically predisposed to it and didn't know how to mitigate it. Most people I know who are or have been underweight were so because of eating disorders. Probably half the people in my life have or had eating disorders, and many of them, regardless of size, ended up ill and suffering for a long time before they were able to recover.
And the kicker is this: fat people are less likely to die from fatness than people are to die from thinness. Eating disorders are the second most deadly mental illness in existence - the only more prominent cause of death in terms of mental illness is opioid overdose. Underweight people are nearly twice as likely to die from it as those considered "obese".
Do y'all know that BIPOC and queer people are more likely than cishet white people to have eating disorders? I'm not talking a 2% difference here, either; the differences are astronomical. To take a single example, cis gay men are seven times more likely to report binge-eating and twelve times more likely to report purging than their heterosexual counterparts. Disabled people, veterans, athletes, and fat people are also more likely than more privileged peers to have eating disorders. And, most horrifyingly, children are more likely every year to develop eating disorders. 81% of ten-year-olds are afraid of being fat. Eighty. One. Percent. (For a broad overview of this issue, anad.org has a page on it.)
Equally horrifying: weight-loss programs are at an all-time high, and they're getting more insidious. Even I, a slender person with absolutely no desire to lose weight, have been targeted by ads for programs like Noom and Curves. At any given time, approximately half of all adults in the United States are attempting to lose weight, and the marketing tells them that they'll be happier for it.
And for what? Does being thin make a positive difference to people's health? Not really. Its greatest impact is social. Thin people are more likely to be hired for jobs (yes, this is legal) and to be picked even for things irrelevant to weight; I only knew one fat person in my many years of theater who got leads. Thin people are more widely and more compassionately represented across all forms of media than fat people. Thin people are more likely to be seen as hardworking, and fat people are more likely to be seen as lazy. And it's all bullshit, y'all. All of it.
There's a show on Hulu called Shrill, based on the essays of fat icon Lindy West, and starring another fat icon, Aidy Bryant. The show is about womanhood, and fatness, and queerness, and relationships, and a million other things. But it is about fatness. And tonight I watched an episode in which the main character goes to a pool party for fat women, and y'all, I've watched this before, and it's still the most beautiful thing I've ever seen. It's pure joy. We can create that world. But we can only create it by fighting how the world sees fatness now.
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