Personal & political

A note on fatness

I want to write about fatness the way I have actually lived it, which is to say not as a problem to be solved by spring or by surgery, but as a body that walks into rooms — queer rooms, supposedly radical rooms — and gets read before I have said a word. This is not a before-and-after. There is no after. There is only the ongoing, ordinary business of being fat in spaces that love to talk about liberation and still quietly rank who gets to be wanted.

“Body positivity,” lite

Somewhere along the way, body positivity got sanded down into something gentle and saleable. The version that reaches most of us now is a slightly softer mirror: love yourself, drink your water, every body is beautiful — usually said by someone whose body was never in any danger of being treated as a public emergency. It is not that the sentiment is wrong. It is that it has been hollowed out. The movement that the phrase grew from was about fat people, specifically, demanding to take up space without apology; the lite version asks everyone to feel a little better about a thigh while leaving every structure that punishes fatness exactly where it was.

What got lost is the politics. Loving your body is a fine private project, but it does nothing about the chair with arms that does not fit, the doctor who hears “my knee hurts” and says “have you tried losing weight,” the clothes that stop at a particular size as if larger people simply stopped existing past it. You can have flawless self-esteem and still be sized out of the room. Self-love was never going to be a substitute for being treated as fully human, and it is telling how often we are handed the first thing instead of the second.

You can have flawless self-esteem and still be sized out of the room. Self-love is not a substitute for being treated as fully human.

The hierarchy nobody admits to

Queer scenes like to imagine themselves as the place desire got free — beyond the narrow scripts, beyond the magazine bodies. And in some ways they are. But walk into enough bars, scroll enough apps, read enough bios, and a hierarchy surfaces that nobody will say out loud. “No fats, no femmes” did not appear from nowhere; it is a hierarchy of desirability wearing the costume of personal preference. We are told attraction is just attraction, that it cannot be argued with, and so the ranking gets to hide behind the most unanswerable phrase in the language: it’s just what I’m into.

I do not think anyone is obliged to be attracted to me. That is not the complaint. The complaint is the way fatness becomes a flaw to be excused in advance, a thing people apologise for finding attractive, a body that is fine in private and disappeared in the group photo. There is a particular loneliness in being wanted in the dark and unacknowledged in the light — and queer communities, of all places, should recognise that loneliness, because so many of us came here running from exactly that.

The cruelty of it is not usually loud. It is the small, deniable stuff: the surprise in someone’s voice that you have a partner, the compliment that arrives pre-shrunk — “you carry it well,” “you have such a pretty face.” Each one is a tiny instruction about where you sit. I have written more directly elsewhere about the everyday machinery of that contempt, in a piece on fatshaming; here I only want to name that the machinery does not switch off at the door of a queer space. It came in with us.

Refusing the diet frame

I am not a doctor, and this is not medical advice — it is one fat person’s account of a life. But I want to be plain about one thing: I am no longer interested in organising my existence around becoming smaller. The diet frame asks you to treat your own body as a permanent renovation project, always nearly-but-not-quite acceptable, acceptability forever postponed to a future weight that, for most people, never arrives or never stays. That is not a neutral health message. It is a way of living suspended above your own life, waiting for permission to begin.

You do not have to take a position on anyone’s health to notice that the constant pressure to shrink does its own harm — to how people eat, to whether they go to the doctor at all, to what they believe they are allowed to want. The point is not that health does not matter. The point is that “lose weight” has been doing the work of a moral verdict for so long that we mistake the verdict for care. Refusing the diet frame is not refusing to be well. It is refusing the lie that my worth is on a sliding scale calibrated to a scale.

Fat joy is real, and it is communal

Here is the part the lite version never gets to, because it is too busy managing shame: fatness is also a site of enormous joy. There is the specific pleasure of a fat friend who hugs like they mean it, of a kitchen full of people who are not performing restraint, of dancing in a body that takes up its full share of the floor and refuses to fold itself smaller for the comfort of onlookers. There is the relief — and it is a physical relief, in the shoulders, in the jaw — of being in a room where no one is going to comment on what you eat.

That joy is rarely solitary. It is built. It comes from finding the people and the corners where fat bodies are ordinary and beloved rather than tolerated, where desire is offered in daylight, where the first thing about you is not your size. Queer culture, at its best, is genius at making exactly these corners — at inventing belonging out of the parts of us the wider world wanted us to be quiet about. We just have to be honest that fat people have too often been asked to build that belonging for everyone else and then wait outside it.

Refusing the diet frame is not refusing to be well. It is refusing the lie that my worth is on a sliding scale calibrated to a scale.

So this is the note. I want a body positivity that has its teeth back — that is about access and dignity and desire, not just affirmations. I want queer spaces that will actually interrogate the hierarchy they pretend not to have, instead of hiding it behind preference. And I want fat people, including me, to get to be wanted in the light, photographed in the middle of the frame, loved out loud. None of that is a lot to ask. It only feels like a lot because we have been trained to expect so little.

If any of this lands somewhere tender — if the years of being told to wait until you were smaller have left a mark — you are not weak for feeling it, and you are not alone in it. There is more on living kindly inside your own body in our body coverage, and on the harder days, our mental-health writing and the support links there are a good place to go.

SectionBodies, with the politics left inWriting on living in your body that does not stop at “love yourself” and call it done.Read →From the archiveOn fatshamingThe everyday machinery of contempt — and why “concern” is so often its disguise.Read →SectionWhen it weighs on youLived-experience writing and links to real support for the days the shame gets loud.Read →