#fatliberation

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 25 year old blogger called @fatliberation (he/him), 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

https://www.tumblr.com/thaenad/817106591215140864/fatliberation-has-been-terminated-by-tumblr

@fatliberation, who I often reblog here, has been censored by staff. This blog has been a respite from fatphobic culture, and we are all worse for having lost it. Please support their other blog, @thaenad, if you’re interested in continuing to support this creator.

I haven’t spoken about this directly, but I believe the institutionalized anti-feedist sentiment on tumblr is puritanical and inherently fatphobic. This policy has been used to justify silencing and harassing fat people, both who are and aren’t feedists.

I understand that there are range of opinions and histories with the feedist community, and I respect not wanting to engage with the kink. Everyone has the right to curate their own sexual experience. There are shitty people in every community, and I’m not here to dismiss people’s pain associated with mistreatment by feedists.

However, most feedists are fat people. Or they’re the partners and friends and allies of fat people. Tumblr especially tends to attract feedists who engage in the kink with less shame, and less reason to mistreat other fat people. Demonization of them on the basis of a sexual preference people find distasteful is bullshit. Limits on self expression and alternative perspectives harm all of us.

And to people who say feedists fundamentally objectify fat bodies, the majority of people in my likes and reblogs are feedists. They’re fighting the good fight. They’re expanding the Overton window on fat liberation. I think it’s bad politics to reject allies because they give you the ick.

I have posted often about the difficulty of approaching and, even admiring from afar, fat men in public. How there is always a bit of worry that my stares will be interpreted negatively. All FA/FFA's have been in this situation before... we see someone gorgeous in public, but we are hyper-aware of our stares of desire being misinterpreted as stares of disgust.

Someone called out societal fatphobia for causing this very situation. And I agree 100%.

Society has told fat people that they don't deserve love towards their bodies. So, getting positive attention in public must be impossible, right? So any looks from others... they must be having a laugh.

And, even worse, I know of fat people who are also on their guard against fat admirers. I don't blame them, if they have actually had a negative experience. But mainstream society says that if you have any kind of positive opinion towards fat, you must have some kind of mental disorder.

So there are two, or really, three obstacles here:

1. Fatphobia causing a fat person to interpret any looks towards them as negative.

2. Awful fat admirers that use their partners, and therefore all fat admirers must be bad.

3. Or society in general looking down on those who are attracted to fat people and think they deserve love.

They can all blend in a way... fatphobia causing a negative reaction to positive attention in public: either because society tells fat people they will never get admiration for their size, or society telling fat people that if they DO get positive attention... the person giving it has some kind of dangerous fetish.

If the world tells fat people that they only deserve attention for weight loss... and the only time they get positive attention is praise towards that goal... I don't blame fat people for being on their guard when they do get attention in public.

I mean, what a mind fuck that is. Your whole life being told that being fat is bad. And if you've always been fat... that can easily be interpreted as "I'm bad, because I'm fat."

The only positive attention you've ever gotten towards your body is when you've lost weight. (Not to mention, losing weight is hard. And I've seen people really hurt themselves while on diets... to the point of needing an organ removed). And yet, torturing yourself like that gets praise and admiration because you've lost weight?!

It's obvious society doesn't care about the physical wellbeing of fat people. They'd rather see someone almost die due to weight loss, than see someone healthy at a big size.

Fatphobia is a serious issue. It's not just hurting people's "feelings"... it's killing people.

Yeah, it's frustrating seeing the benign results of it: the legitimate positive attention towards their bodies always being interpreted as mockery. But, it can be very serious. Fat people hurting themselves to lose weight because their whole life they were told that being fat is bad.

But then the question is: what can we do about it? How can we be the change that we want to see in the world?

I think normalizing fat bodies is a start. Standing up for fat people when we see any kind of public abuse. Speaking assertively and often about fat rights and accessibility.

Also, and this isn't often thought of... NOT talking about someone's size when we know nothing about them. (This is a big one. Years ago, the amount of times I've seen people praise my partner's weight loss, when in fact he had stomach ulcers and was in severe pain. If he was thin and had the same medical issue, people would be worried. But instead it was, "Oh, you're looking great, you've lost weight." And it's like... no shit, he's sick. You're basically praising illness for it's superficial results.)

I'm definitely venting, since I have a lot of anger towards how fat people are treated. Mainly because I've lived it with my partner for almost 2 decades. I've seen how people treat him, in many different phases of his weight and his life. When he's considered very large, people don't really respect him. When he's lost weight due to illness, people praise him. And I definitely harbor anger towards those people. (As a side note: you can bet your ass, I speak up about it, and continue to do so. I don't let them get away with it).

Click these links to read all the articles and learn more about all of the fat, black contributors.

Tiane:

Brittany:

detty:

Kelsey:

Omotara:

Jonquel: