Ephie :3

Photo: Wally McNamee/Corbis, circa 2009

What is Fat Liberation? 🐋⛓️‍💥

Fat liberation is a social justice movement that works against anti-fat bias, oppression, and discrimination. Fat liberation is a radical alternative to body positivity – a movement based largely in appearance that is often appropriated by the mainstream – and affirms the value of all people, regardless of their weight or health. Fat liberation understands anti-fat bias and discrimination to have strong roots in anti-Black racism, colonialism, and classism, and that anti-fat bias and discrimination are routinely practiced without recrimination. Fat liberation seeks to identify and alleviate systemic anti-fat bias and individual prejudice, and to unlearn internalized fat bias and oppression. Fat liberation is a struggle tied to other intersectional struggles against oppression, and stands shoulder-to-shoulder with struggles against racism, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, ageism, ableism, and others. Fat liberation not only seeks to normalize fat bodies, but to celebrate them.

– fatliberation.org

Photo: Katie Loncke. Fat Rose, 2018

About Me 🪐

I'm a 24 year old blogger called @fatliberation (they/them), also known as @thaenad. I am a fat, queer, trans, and neurodivergent artist/activist. I am a fat liberationist and unapologetic feedist who openly speaks out about intra-communal stigma surrounding the marginalized identities that I hold. My experience battling deep-rooted childhood shame growing up as a sexual outsider has shaped my work in fat liberation and pleasure/autonomy advocacy from a distinct lens, and I am interested in empowering others to break free of ingrained anti-fat and sex-negative biases. Over the past five years, I have done years of extensive research in the field of Fat Studies. I have worked with four fat acceptance organizations since 2020 and currently serve as a board member of a fat activist non-profit in Chicago. In 2022, I helped design a course on de-stigmatizing body size for a CE program run by licensed clinical social workers and healthcare professionals, and in 2023, I organized and documented a scale-smashing protest to raise awareness of the harms of diet culture. In 2024, I drafted a design for a Fat Liberation Flag. Today, a large focus of my work integrates fat liberation and sex education. I have over a year of experience working a live hotline providing queer inclusive, comprehensive, and fat-positive sex education for teens and emerging adults. Offline, I spend much of my time building and strengthening in-person connections with my local fat kink community through the grassroots organization Abundance Chicago, which I founded solo in 2024. 🔗 My Links

My Writing 📝

(🚧 = in progress, 📃 = article)

📃 Anti-Obesity Drugs In Sociopolitical Context

📃 Fat Rights? Fat Chance! A History of Fat Liberation In The United States From 1967-1974

FAT MYTHS MASTERPOST

FAQ: An overview of my writing integrating fat liberation and the feedism/fat kink communities

Anti-Fatness is Systemic.

Diets Don't Work.

Guide to advocating for yourself at the doctor's office

Fat Genital Maintenance Guide + Accessible Sex

#Fat Sex Ed

Beginner fat liberation resources for eating disordered individuals

My Projects 💭

Fat Liberation Flag

🚧 The F Word: A Sex & Fat Positive Podcast

🚧 Fat-Positive Organizations Database + Interactive Map

Lived experiences with medical gaslighting: survey trends

SMASH YOUR SCALE! Live Protest

Fat LGBTQ+ Reading List

Fat Liberationist Films

Fat Bodies in Horror

“FAT DYKES RULE” at the New York City Dyke March, June 2000

Extra Resources 🔗

Fat Liberation Manifesto, 1973

Health at Every Size Principles

NAAFA's Campaign For Size Freedom

What's Wrong With 'The War on Obesity?'

Weight Science: Evaluating the Evidence for a Paradigm Shift

Long‐term Effects of Dieting: Is Weight Loss Related to Health?

HAES Health Sheet Library

Printable Self Advocacy Cards for Healthcare

Fat Friendly Health Professionals List

Weight Neutral Providers Spreadsheet (USA)

ASDAH Healthcare Provider Listing

Non-Diet Providers for Eating Disorder Recovery

Fat-Positive and Anti-Diet Parenting Resources

Fat Travel Resources

Eating Disorder Support

The Fat Protestor

Photo: Marge Dean. Members of the Fat Underground, 1979

Books 📚

Science & Health:

Health at Every Size by *Lindo Bacon PhD

Body Respect by *Lindo Bacon PhD and Lucy Aphramor PhD, RD

Secrets from the Eating Lab by Traci Mann PhD

Anti-Diet by Christy Harrison MPH, RD

The F*ck-It Diet: Eating Should Be Easy by Caroline Dooner

Decolonizing Wellness: A QTBIPOC-Centered Guide to Escape the Diet Trap, Heal Your Self-Image, and Achieve Body Liberation by Dalia Kinsey, RD, LD

Weight Bias in Health Education: Critical Perspectives for Pedagogy and Practice edited by Heather Brown, Nancy Ellis-Ordway

Fat Politics:

Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia by Dr. Sabrina Strings 

Belly of the Beast: The Politics of Anti-Fatness as Anti-Blackness by Da’Shaun L. Harrison

What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Fat by Aubrey Gordon

Thickening Fat: Fat Bodies, Intersectionality, and Social Justice edited by May Friedman, Carla Rice, and Jen Rinaldi

Queering Fat Embodiment edited by Jackie Wykes, Samantha Murray, and Cat Pausé

Fat Activism by Dr. Charlotte Cooper

Fat Politics by J. Eric Oliver

The Fat Studies Reader by Esther Rothblum (Editor) and Sondra Solovay (Editor)

Fat Shame by Amy Erdman Farrell

Fat and Queer: An Anthology of Queer and Trans Bodies and Lives edited by August Owens Grimm, Miguel M. Morales, and Tiff Joshua TJ Ferentini

Self Acceptance:

The Body is Not an Apology by Sonya Renee Taylor

Things No One will Tell Fat Girls by Jes Baker

Eating in the Light of the Moon by Anita Johnson PhD

Fat! So? Because You Don't Have to Apologize for Your Size by Marilyn Wann

Happy Fat by Sofie Hagan

Fat Girls in Black Bodies: Creating Communities of Our Own by Joy Arlene Renee Cox, PhD

You have the Right to Remain Fat by Virgie Tovar

*ASDAH's Statement on Lindo Bacon

ੈ✧̣̇˳·˖✶ ✦ delete world? ੈ✧̣̇˳·˖✶ ✦

My next book is The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI, out next month. Pre-order it now, including as a DRM-free audiobook or ebook, at my Kickstarter, and help me continue to prove that DRM-free isn't just the right way to reach an audience, it's also the best way to reach them.

"Object permanence" is the ability to understand that even if you can't see something, it still exists. Most toddlers acquire a thorough sense of object permanence by the age of two. But when it comes to technopolitics, object permanence eludes even full-grown lawmakers. These motherfuckers would lose a game of peek-a-boo.

Over and over again, politicians are warned about the ways that their pet policies will a) produce enormous collateral damage, and; b) be easily evaded by the people they're seeking to control, giving rise to a cascade of ever-more extreme measures. And yet, they swallow a spider to catch a fly and then act baffled and hurt when we tell them it's their own damn fault that they now have to swallow a bird to catch the spider:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/13/wanting-it-badly/#is-not-enough

The foreseeable and foreseen consequences of bad technopolicy are all around us, but in the eternal now of a politics utterly devoid of object permanence, no one is allowed to remember what happened the last time we did something stupid, especially not when we're on the verge of doing that same stupid thing again, only worse:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/07/foreseeable-outcomes/#calea

Technopolitics are defined by Bruce Schneier's "security syllogism," which goes, "Something must be done! There, I've done something." "Something" doesn't have to fix the problem, and "something" doesn't have to anticipate what will happen next. So long as "something" is done, the issue is resolved and the politician can chalk up a win.

This gives rise to some genuinely bizarre consensus hallucinations, in which we pretend that the reality decreed by policy matches up with actual reality. Take "streaming." There is no such thing as "streaming." A "stream" is just "a download that is transmitted to an application that doesn't have a 'Save As…' button":

https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/01/fulu/#i-am-altering-the-deal

Once you decree that there is such a thing as a stream, you must bend heaven and earth to ensure that no "Save As…" buttons are added to the "streaming" program. You have to pass laws that make it illegal to inspect code. To modify code. To report on defects in code. To index information about defects in code. To index information about mods. To link to indices that compile defects and mods. You have to swallow the fly, the spider, the bird, the cat, the dog, and the whole damned horse:

https://memex.craphound.com/2012/01/10/lockdown-the-coming-war-on-general-purpose-computing/

Then there's that perennial fave, "bans on working cryptography." To ban working cryptography, you have to outlaw free/open source software. You have to inspect every device that comes into your country. You have to erect a Great Firewall that blocks every site that might carry working cryptography. You make it impossible to reliably update the software in pacemakers, anti-lock brakes and nuclear power plants, and you make it easy for identity thieves, foreign powers and corporate spies to raid your government, your corporations, and your households – and it still won't work!

https://memex.craphound.com/2018/09/04/oh-for-fucks-sake-not-this-fucking-bullshit-again-cryptography-edition/