I am at the airport security checkpoint when I hear a small and tender seedling of a voice behind me. “Look at that fat lady!” I turn around, meet the bright eyes of a three-year-old, and smile.
Her mother’s face is stormy, voice sharp. “Don’t call her that.” “It’s okay,” I offer. At 340 pounds, my size is undeniable. “She’s right. I am fat.”
“No, she’s not. That’s not nice.”
“Some people don’t like to be called fat, but I really don’t mind.”
I look to the girl. “You’re right – I’m a fat lady,” I say, puffing up my cheeks.
The child smiles tentatively before her mother cuts in again, her angular voice coming out in jagged shards. “Don’t ever say that word. It’s a bad word, and I never want to hear you say it again, do you understand me?”
The child bursts into tears. Her mother shoots me a serrated glance. She is a knife; I am her steel.
“Now look what you’ve done.”
As a fat person, I have found this has become a regular feature of my life: trying to convince people who don’t wear plus sizes that I am not deeply wounded by the word fat.
Author Allie Rowbottom gives us a 35-year-old former influencer who is choosing a high-risk elective surgery to reverse her many plastic surgery procedures while also raising questions about the effects social media has on our perception of beauty, the cost of excessive self promotion, and whether the staggering amount of time and money spent to become Insta-perfect is ever worth it.
When I refer to my own body as fat, I’m met with a knee-jerk, syrupy insistence that you’re not fat!
When children observe plainly that my body is fat, their straight-size parents reliably make a scene, sharply disciplining them, insisting fat means pain, and that fat bodies are not to be seen, discussed, observed, or embraced. In so doing, they redact fat bodies from their children’s worldview. And, even with the best of intentions, they create powerful sense memories for children who dare to say the unspeakable name of bodies like mine.
"The hurt doesn’t come in naming our bodies for what they are – it comes in the harm that is visited upon us for being visibly fat."
I try, and almost uniformly fail, to convince thin people that I do not mind the word fat – that I strongly prefer it to kid-glove euphemisms like “curvy” or “fluffy” or stigmatizing medical terms like “obese.”
When I talk to other very fat people, they often feel similarly. The hurt doesn’t come in naming our bodies for what they are – it comes in the harm that is visited upon us for being visibly fat. It comes from the street harassment, the pervasive medical discrimination, and the reliable silence of thin people when we are bullied.
Fat is a term that holds a great deal of power for a great number of people. It is hurled as a weapon, a ruthless mace tearing through too many of us. We respond with Pavlovian fear, overtaken by our own instincts to self-preserve. For some, being called fat just once is enough to trigger the onset or relapse of an eating disorder. For others, it leads to body dysmorphic disorder, in which the affected person obsesses endlessly over perceived flaws in their appearance, usually something minor or imperceptible to others. For such a small word, the hurt it can cause is great.
I’d often look in the mirror and question: what do they see that is so bad?
In many thin folks’ imaginations, being called fat seems to be among the worst size-related experiences a person can have. But nearly all of us have been called fat at one point or another.
And for those of us who are undeniably fat, being called fat is just the beginning. We aren’t just called fat; we’re treated differently by individuals and institutions alike. Employers refuse to hire or promote us and frequently pay us less than our thin counterparts. Airlines won’t transport us, and other passengers happily scapegoat us for policies that already target us. Restaurants won’t seat us, and healthcare providers refuse to care for us.
“I don’t define myself by my fat body, but nearly everyone else seems to.”
All of that discrimination happens, overwhelmingly, without any solidarity from the very thin people who object to the fat shaming of thin people. Theirs isn’t an objection in solidarity; it’s a defence of their privilege as thin people. And at the end of all that differential treatment, we’re told “You’re not fat; you’re beautiful!” or “You’re not fat; you have fat!” Our discrimination and harassment are sanctioned by thin people, who then insist we aren’t fat, quietly cleaving us from our own bodies.
Those around me make it clear at every turn that I don’t have fat; I am fat. Remarkably, unforgivably fat. I don’t define myself by my fat body, but nearly everyone else seems to. And too often, their perceptions turn meeting my most basic needs into a minefield.
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.
It can feel distressing to see our bodies at different sizes – and not know which is “real.”
For the most part, I am not called fat as an insult by other fat people. I am called “fat pig” by a thin server under her breath at a buffet, even before eating. I am called “huge fucking heifer” by a muscular man leering out his car window. I am called “fat c***” by men I reject. And I am called “fat bitch” by a middle-aged woman shouting at me on the street. These moments strike me sometimes as laughable, other times as cutting. Either way, these moments pass.
This, then, is what so many straight-size people fear: not a changing body but a subjugation to the thin person they once were, a thin person who readily passed judgments on fat people or who let others’ judgments go uninterrogated and uninterrupted. 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. Fat has largely been weaponized by straight-size people—the very people it seems to hurt most deeply. And ultimately, thin people are terrified of being treated the way they have so often seen fat people treated or even the way they’ve treated fat people themselves.
“Thinness isn’t just a matter of health or beauty or happiness. It is a cultural structure of power and dominance.”
In that way, thinness isn’t just a matter of health or beauty or happiness. It is a cultural structure of power and dominance. And being called fat cuts so deeply because it hints at a dystopian future in which a thin person might lose their cultural upper hand.
For me, and for many other fat people, reclaiming the word fat is about reclaiming our very bodies, starting with the right to name them. Fat isn’t a negative aspect of one’s body any more than tall or short. It can, and should, be a neutral descriptor. We can, and should, treat it as such. Many fat people are trying to do that, only to be interrupted or usurped by thinner people.
Yes, fat is a term with baggage, especially with straight-size people. But while it may feel loaded to those straight-size people, it is a key step in the healing and liberation of many fat people. Thin people’s discomfort with a word that has hurt them shouldn’t stand in the way of the liberation of actual fat people.
So let us name our own bodies. Like anyone, fat people are just trying to exist in a body in this world –and thin people’s insistence that they know what’s best for us is too often a barrier to accomplishing that simple, onerous task.
Instead of opting for the tempting work of reassuring ourselves and those around us that we aren’t fat, let’s look at the root cause: how we think of, and treat, people who are fat. It’s time to do better by ourselves and the fat people we love by not distancing ourselves from anti-fat bias but by dismantling it.
You Just Need To Lose Weight: and 19 Other Myths About Fat People by Aubrey Gordon (Beacon Press, 2023). Reprinted with permission from Beacon Press.
Treating bodies as commodities you can “try on” is damaging and dangerous.
