Fat Liberationist in the Making

Author and fat liberationist Sofie Hagen recently published a Twitter thread that had me wanting to stand up and cheer. In it, she reminds us that body positivity and loving yourself is great, and it is important, but until the system that allows fat phobia to flourish is dismantled, loving ourselves won’t make a difference.

Getting up every day and facing the systemic discrimination that Hagen talks about is soul-sucking. There’s not a single day that goes by that something gets in my way or causes me pain because people with bodies like mine weren’t even considered in its design. Loving and appreciating my body exactly as it is helps things suck a little less. But Hagen is 100% correct, it doesn’t begin to actually fix the problem.

It’s far too easy to push the needs of the fat, sick, and/or disabled aside. It’s much easier to react to their needs rather than plan for them. Planning takes money and time, and the path of least resistance (making a building up to code, for instance, but not stopping to consider whether the codes go far enough in the first place) is always more alluring. It’s much easier to make all of the fat people try to “fix” themselves, rather than forcing everyone to give us the same basic respect as everyone else. It’s not too much to expect clothes, shoes, seatbelts, and chairs to fit our bodies. It’s not too much to expect that we can access a building unassisted and without using dangerous, unproven, untested “technologies” to do it. It’s not too much to expect that a healthcare professional will treat and diagnose us according to the best information they have and not on a knee-jerk reaction to the size of our bodies. The litany of discrimination goes on and on.

I want to help create the kind of world that Hagen is talking about, one where there’s “a whole generation where no one learns that you have to be thin in order to deserve respect and happiness.” This blog is a tiny, tiny part of that. By calling out fat phobia where I see it over and over and over and over, maybe in my small corner of the world, it’ll start to change.