In her new book, What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Fat, Gordon seamlessly threads a personal narrative with data and history. We deserve a paradigm of personhood that does not make size or health a prerequisite for dignity and respect. Despite a mountain of evidence linking physical and mental health to social discrimination, the conversation about fat and health stubbornly refuses to acknowledge the possible influence of stigma in determining fat people’s health.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Fat - ScienceDirect What We Talk About When We Talk About Fat - ScienceDirect

In a world where thinness reigns supreme and diet talk is as normal as talking about the weather, fat folks rarely have the opportunity to share their stories without fear of being bullied or berated. What we have long considered the health conditions associated with being fat in actuality may be the effects of long-term dieting, which very fat people are pressured heavily to do. What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Fatis a crucial tool to create a tectonic shift in the way we see, talk about, and treat our bodies, fat and thin alike.

In her book, Gordon references sociologist Sabrina String’s Fearing the Black Body, in which Strings argues that fatphobia was never about health, but serves as a tool to “validate race, class, and gender prejudice,” dating back to colonization.

Fat Friend Wants You to Start Having Conversations With Your Fat Friend Wants You to Start Having Conversations With

What I wanted to lay out in that last chapter wasn’t the end-all be-all of fat liberation, but a series of policies that would actually stem the tide of the incredible wave of harm that is visited upon fat people.

Gordon, also known as “Your Fat Friend,” (previously anonymously), has claimed her own space online where fat stories are welcome. Because of fatphobia’s history as a structural means of body policing, Gordon says, “all of the ways that we level our bad behaviors at fat people are absolutely entrenched in oppressive systems, in violent forms of communication. A world where the words ‘obesity epidemic’ are shared everywhere as fact without really anything to back up the reality that, even if there is an increase in obesity, there’s literally no proven way for the vast majority of people to lose weight and keep it off. And I’d venture to guess you even hear it in your head, when your pants are suddenly fitting a little differently. Leaving the religion of diet culture 🙌🏼 It’s a wild ride ✌🏼 Sources pictured: Anti-diet by Christy Harrison and What we don’t talk about when we talk about fat by Aubrey Gordon.

What We Dont Talk about When We Talk about Fat | TikTok What We Dont Talk about When We Talk about Fat | TikTok

She is what she describes as ‘very fat’, and she has experienced a life of doctors, friends, and strangers making all sorts of assumptions about her, and judgments about her life and frankly about her worth. Fat people bear the brunt of it because we’re forced to be aware of our bodies in a different way and where we sit in the hierarchy of body shapes and sizes. The marginalization and public abuse of very fat people is so commonplace that it has become accepted, but that doesn’t make it acceptable. You see it on TV, like when Miranda from Sex and the City joins Weight Watchers right after having a baby. More importantly than this, I’ve been raised in a society that seems to think that fat people don’t deserve kind or even humane treatment.The last chapter of Gordon’s book supplies a vision for a better world for fat people, and all people. There are two entry points in: if you’ve never thought about this before, if you’ve never thought about fatness and fat people in this dignity- and justice-centered way, there will be plenty of user friendly entry points for you. All of the policy changes she proposes are pretty light lifts, but they would be strides toward dignity for fat people. From the creator of Your Fat Friend, an explosive indictment of the systemic and cultural bias facing plus-size people that will move us toward creating an agenda for fat justice. We just seem to be stuck in dogged pursuit of an answer to this one question: how do we stop having fat people?