Fat Liberation: Widening Our Circle of Social Justice

Some may be familiar with "body positivity", but fewer have encountered the history of the fat liberation movement. Rooted in the belief that people of all body sizes deserve dignity, respect, and equitable treatment, fat liberation challenges the stigma, discrimination, and systemic barriers faced by fat people in healthcare, employment, public spaces, transportation, clothing access, media representation, and everyday life.

In this service, we will explore the history and principles of fat liberation, examine how weight bias shapes our lives and institutions, how our culture views fatness as a moral failing, and consider what fat liberation justice and inclusion can look like through a Unitarian Universalist lens. Drawing from both research and personal experience, we will reflect on the ways body size intersects with other identities, belonging, and human dignity, and how our faith calls us to widen our understanding of liberation for all people.

https://youtu.be/hHnRm8DJhtM

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Fat Liberation: Widening Our Circle of Social Justice 

Introduction: 

Words can’t entirely capture what it feels like to stand before you today and speak on the topic of Fat Liberation. If I had to try, the words that come to mind are vulnerable, nervous, excited, honored, and, ultimately, liberating.

For a very long time, my interest in what our culture calls "body positivity" and the deeper, more radical framework of fat liberation were things I largely kept to myself. They were quiet lifelines I sought out in the privacy of my own home, in online spaces, and through books tucked away on my shelves. But the reasons this fellowship drew me in, and the reasons I chose to become a member of this congregation, are our shared values: our deep commitment to love, equity, and an unwavering respect for human dignity. Since joining this community, I have experienced a sense of comfort and belonging that I have not found in very many places in this world.

And so, I share this sermon today out of vulnerability, but also out of a profound trust and love for this warm congregation. When we truly love a community, we share what is vital to us. We allow ourselves to be fully seen.

Today, we are going to explore the history and core principles of fat liberation. We will examine how weight bias silently shapes our everyday lives and public institutions, unpack how our culture views body size as a moral failing, and consider what fat liberation justice looks like through a Unitarian Universalist lens. Later, I will share my own personal story, my relationship with my body, bullying, disordered eating, and my time as a competitive wrestler. Together, we will look at how body size intersects with race, class, and human dignity, and explore how our faith calls us to widen our understanding of liberation until it truly includes every single body.

Defining Fat Liberation: Moving Beyond Body Positivity

Let us begin by defining our terms. What do we mean when we say fat liberation?

Historically referred to as the fat acceptance or fat activism movement, fat liberation is a political and social justice movement aimed at eliminating size discrimination, weight stigma, and the systemic oppression of fat people. Rather than focusing on how an individual feels about their body when they look in the mirror, fat liberation focuses outward. It seeks to dismantle the societal, legal, and medical systems that treat fatness as a moral failure or a problem to be solved.

To understand this movement, we have to look at its four core tenets:

• Systemic Equality: This is the basic demand for equal access to public spaces, employment, fair compensation, and adequate physical accommodations—whether that means seating in a theater, a restaurant, or an airplane.

• Healthcare Equity: This is the fight against medical weight bias. Activists advocate for weight-inclusive care, such as the Health at Every Size (HAES) paradigm, arguing that fat individuals deserve real medical treatment rather than universal prescriptions for weight loss.

• Decoupling Health from Moral Worth: This is the fundamental acknowledgement that a person’s physical health is entirely independent of their human right to dignity, respect, and equal treatment. Your worth as a human being does not depend on a lab report or a doctor's chart.

• Intersectionality: This is the recognition that anti-fat bias cannot be separated from other systems of oppression. Weight stigma deeply intersects with racism, sexism, ableism, homophobia and classism.

  
  

The Radical History

Many people think that talking about body size in a political way is a brand-new, modern phenomenon. But the fat liberation movement has deep roots in the 1960s civil rights and counterculture movements.

In 1967, around 500 people gathered in New York City’s Central Park for a "Fat-In." They protested size discrimination, burned diet books, and demanded visibility in a world that wanted them hidden. Two years later, in 1969, the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance (NAAFA) was created to formally address weight bias as a civil rights issue.

By 1973, a radical feminist collective called The Fat Underground formed in Los Angeles. They actively challenged the medical establishment, popularizing a phrase that still rings true for many today: "Diets are a cure that doesn't work, for a disease that doesn't exist." In 1979, they published the historic Fat Liberation Manifesto, demanding equal rights for fat people in all sectors of life.

Fat Liberation vs. Body Positivity

It is important to understand how fat liberation differs from mainstream "body positivity." While body positivity grew out of these radical roots, it has largely been hollowed out by advertising and social media.

Today, body positivity is primarily about self-esteem. Its core message is: "You should love your body and feel beautiful just the way you are." It focuses entirely on internal, individual feelings.

Fat liberation, on the other hand, is about civil rights. Its core message is: "You deserve equal respect, medical care, and public access, regardless of how you feel about your body." You can have a bad body image day and still demand that an airplane seat fits you or that a doctor listens to your symptoms.

Diet culture often co-opts the language of body positivity to sell us products meant to shrink us. But as fat activists remind us: you cannot love yourself out of systemic oppression. Self-love is wonderful, but fat liberation demands that the world change to respect the inherent worth and dignity of all bodies.

Unmasking Diet Culture and the Power of Words

To understand why this movement is so necessary, we must name the water we are all swimming in: Diet Culture.

Diet culture is a rigid set of social beliefs and expectations that prioritizes thinness and equates it with health, moral virtue, and personal worth. It affects every single one of us, regardless of our size. We see it when foods are labeled morally, categorized as strictly "good" versus "bad," or "clean" versus "junk", triggering intense guilt and shame for simply eating. We see it when thinness is equated with success, beauty, and value. It teaches us a "fix-it" mindset, encouraging us to constantly monitor, restrict, and modify our bodies under the guise of "wellness." It forces us to prioritize external rules like calorie counting or strict schedules over our body's natural hunger and fullness signals.

In short, diet culture links what you look like and what you eat directly to who you are as a person.

Now, a common question arises: "What if someone still wants to lose weight?" Fat liberation does not judge that desire. In a society that punishes fatness so severely, wanting to lose weight is a completely normal, understandable survival strategy. Fat liberation is rooted in absolute bodily autonomy, the right of every person to do whatever they wish with their own body, free from judgment.

Reclaiming the Language

You might also wonder why I use the word "fat" throughout this sermon, rather than medical terms like "obese" or "overweight." I do this intentionally, as a deliberate political and personal choice.

In her groundbreaking book The Body Is Not an Apology: The Power of Radical Self-Love, Sonya Renee Taylor addresses reclaiming this word. She writes:

"Saying I'm fat is (and should be) the same as saying my shoes are black, the clouds are fluffy, and Bob Saget is tall. It's not good, it's not bad, it just is. The only negativity that this world carries is that which has been socially constructed around it. We don't need to stop using the word fat, we need to stop the hatred that our world connects with the word fat."

When we use "fat" as a simple, neutral, descriptive adjective like tall, short, or brunette we strip it of its power as an insult.

In contrast, the terms favored by the medical establishment carry heavy baggage. The word "overweight" inherently implies that there is a "normal" or objective weight that a person has exceeded. But we must ask: Over whose weight? This standard relies entirely on the Body Mass Index (BMI), a metric created in the 1830s by a Belgian statistician and astronomer named Adolphe Quetelet. He was not a physician; he was calculating the dimensions of the "average man" using data collected exclusively from white, Western European men. His work was later heavily used by early eugenicists to create racial hierarchies. Today, progressive healthcare providers widely agree that the BMI is a deeply flawed, inaccurate metric that ignores metabolic health, muscle mass, genetics, and lifestyle.

Similarly, the word "obese" pathologizes natural body diversity, turning a physical characteristic into a medical disease. Its linguistic origins come from the Latin obesus, meaning "having eaten yourself fat" or "devoured." From its very beginning, the word built an explicit, moral connection between body size and gluttony. It wasn't codified as a disease category until the mid-20th century, a move driven largely by insurance companies looking to categorize risk profiles rather than clinical health outcomes.

The Systemic Barriers of an Unaccommodating World

The consequences of this linguistic and cultural bias are not just felt in our minds; they are built directly into our institutions. Anti-fat bias creates real, dangerous, and sometimes fatal barriers in the world.

Healthcare Discrimination

In healthcare, weight bias is not just an issue of poor bedside manner. The most dangerous consequence is diagnostic overshadowing. This occurs when a healthcare provider attributes every single physical symptom a patient experiences to their weight, ignoring the actual underlying cause. Early warning signs of serious conditions like cancer, cardiac issues, or autoimmune diseases are routinely dismissed with a generic prescription to "lose weight and exercise."

Because of the shame, lecturing, and hostility fat patients face at the doctor's office, many actively practice healthcare avoidance. They delay routine screenings like Pap smears, mammograms, and colonoscopies, meaning treatable conditions are often left to worsen until they become medical emergencies.

We see this tragedy embodied in the story of Ellen Maud Bennett, a 64-year-old Canadian woman who passed away from advanced, inoperable cancer in May 2018. She used her self-written obituary to call out the medical profession for weight bias, expressing her deep frustration that doctors repeatedly told her to lose weight instead of treating her actual symptoms until it was far too late. Her dying wish was that "women of size" would advocate fiercely for their health and refuse to accept that weight is the only relevant health issue.

Furthermore, medical spaces are frequently unequipped for larger bodies. Small blood pressure cuffs give artificially elevated readings. Weight limits on MRIs, CT scanners, and exam tables mean patients are turned away or treated unsafely.

The ironic tragedy is that experiencing this constant stigma triggers a chronic stress response in the body, elevating cortisol and systemic inflammation. This psychological trauma actively contributes to the very cardiovascular and metabolic conditions that doctors blame entirely on a person's size.

Public Spaces and Employment

Our physical architecture also treats larger bodies as an afterthought. Fixed-arm seating in restaurants, theaters, stadiums, and airplanes can cause physical pain or bruising. Narrow turnstiles at transit stations and tiny public restroom stalls restrict basic mobility.

In the retail world, fat people face the "plus-size tax," where brands charge significantly more for larger garments while failing to integrate plus sizes into physical stores. Finding high-quality, professional workwear or functional athletic gear in extended sizes remains an exhausting trial-and-error process.

In the workplace, weight discrimination remains completely legal in most of the United States, with only a few exceptions like Michigan, Washington state, and cities like New York and San Francisco. This leads to a severe "wage penalty" that disproportionately impacts women, who earn significantly less than their thinner peers for identical work. Employers harbor implicit biases, treating fat candidates as lazy or lacking discipline, passing them over for leadership and customer-facing roles.

Media and Harassment

Mainstream media reinforces these biases by relying on harmful tropes. Fat characters are almost always relegated to the clumsy "comic relief," the lazy sidekick, or the physical embodiment of villainy and greed. Think of Ursula in The Little Mermaid or the Dursleys in Harry Potter.

In our digital age, this cultural permission to mock fat people has manifested as public harassment and online trolling. Strangers secretly film fat people on planes or in grocery stores to post online for ridicule.

Author and activist Aubrey Gordon, in her book What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Fat, addresses the phenomenon of "concern trolling" where anti-fat bias is disguised as a well-meaning health concern. She writes brilliantly on this narrative:

"I'm just concerned for your health. I'm concerned for your health, so I have to tell you, again and again, that you're going to die. I'm concerned for your health, so I have to tell you that no one will love you at your size. I'm concerned for your health, so I cannot treat you with basic respect."

Intersectionality and the Religion of Purity

To truly understand fat liberation, we must recognize that weight bias does not exist in a vacuum. As sociologist Dr. Sabrina Strings notes in her book Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia:

"Fat phobia isn't about health at all, but rather a means of using the body to validate race, class, and gender prejudice."

During the Enlightenment and the rise of the transatlantic slave trade, European colonists sought to separate themselves from Black people by aligning thinness with self-control, rationality, and white racial superiority. Larger bodies, particularly those of Black women, were stereotyped as "uncivilized" and "lazy." Today, this history manifests in the fact that Black women experience harsher professional and social penalties for their weight than their white peers.

Anti-fatness also intersects deeply with classism. In wealthy nations, thinness has become an expensive status symbol requiring immense time, financial resources, and access to boutique wellness spaces. A larger body is often falsely treated as proof of personal poverty or ignorance, completely ignoring systemic food deserts and structural inequities. When fresh, nourishing food is treated as a luxury or a tool to manipulate body size, we lose sight of a basic truth: everyone inherently deserves access to quality sustenance, entirely separate from any mandate to be thin or healthy. 

The Moral Metric of Food

Perhaps most closely related to our context as a spiritual community is how anti-fatness borrows vocabulary from religious traditions, turning eating habits into a metric of spiritual purity. Diet culture relies on pseudo-religious language: foods are "sinful," "guilt-free," or "pure." Eating a slice of cake is framed as a moral failing requiring penance through restriction or a punishing workout.

Historically, American Puritanism deeply linked outward physical appearance to internal spiritual health. A thin body was viewed as evidence of a disciplined soul, while a fat body was stigmatized as a visible manifestation of gluttony and sloth.

In modern, secular spaces, this traditional religious purity has shifted into healthism: the belief that health is the ultimate moral goal and an individual's primary responsibility. Under healthism, a person is deemed worthy based on how performatively healthy they are. If a fat person is actively dieting or intensely exercising, they are labeled "good." If they reject those pressures, they are treated as morally deficient.

But as a spiritual community, we must ask: when did we allow the joy of creation to be reduced to a math problem or a moral report card? Food is so much more than mere biological fuel or a metric of compliance. It is meant to be pleasurable and fun. It is a vibrant expression of our diverse cultures, a centerpiece that brings us together, and the texture out of which we weave our deepest family memories. To strip food of its joy is to strip it of its humanity. 

A Unitarian Universalist Response

As Unitarian Universalists, our faith explicitly rejects this moral hierarchy. The Unitarian Universalist Association officially supports fat liberation and considers the dismantling of weight stigma to be a matter of social justice and religious inclusion.

In September 2023, the UUA Board of Trustees issued an official statement on fat liberation, declaring that fat bias is utterly inconsistent with UU principles and values, and therefore "has no place within Unitarian Universalism."

The UUA’s stance directly challenges healthism, rejecting the equation of health with virtue. Furthermore, our denomination has entered a period of accountability, acknowledging that fat people have experienced institutional bias within our own churches, including barriers in the ministry ordination and hiring processes, insurance policies, and physical inaccessibility in congregational spaces.

Change is actively happening at the national level. The UUA has committed to structural changes, including ensuring accessible seating options at our annual General Assembly, reforming pricing practices at the InSpirit bookstore so that plus-size items don't carry an unfair financial premium, and developing lifelong learning curricula, such as the recent cohort "Fat Liberation in a Time of Body Fascism" to help local congregations unpack implicit biases.

Personal Testimony: The Weight of the Scale

This intersection of faith, bias, and the human body is not just theoretical for me. It is the story of my life.

I have always been big, in one way or another. I was the tallest and the heaviest child in all my elementary school classes. My earliest memories are wrapped up in this reality: other children calling me names based on my size, worried comments from my family about what I was eating, and my mother finding ways for me to exercise that had absolutely nothing to do with a child’s natural joy of movement.

I was encouraged to go on a diet by a doctor when I was only in fifth grade. My mother went along with restricting my food and encouraged me to join the high school wrestling team, knowing the sport is notorious for making athletes crash diet and overexercise to meet strict weight classes.

I say this not to condemn my mother. She did what she believed was best for me with the information she had at the time. She grew up as the youngest of four children, under a father who would literally pull out the family scale and make my oldest aunt weigh herself in front of the entire family before she was permitted to eat dinner. My mother was an elementary PE teacher during a cultural zeitgeist that was highly fearful of "childhood obesity." She was acting out of her own conditioning.

I did join the high school wrestling team. When I was 15 years old, I lost a third of my body weight in a little over a year. Yet, according to the BMI, I was still considered "overweight."

Because of that dramatic weight loss, I was featured in the local newspaper. I was publicly congratulated and applauded for my "discipline." That public praise made it infinitely more devastating when my body, starving and exhausted, inevitably gained the weight back. This cycle partly led to my diagnosis of depression and anxiety during my junior year of high school.

I went on to become a highly decorated wrestler in both high school and college, earning medals from state and national tournaments, alongside athletic and academic scholarships. But looking back, all that occupied my mind during those years of peak athletic achievement was an all-consuming anxiety over the number on the scale. My life was governed by a rigid control over what I ate and how many extra miles I ran on top of my team's intense training and conditioning. I was physically elite, but mentally and spiritually broken.

I also have to recognize the harm I caused during that time. The internalized fatphobia I carried didn't just hurt me; I projected it onto others. The people around me had to listen to my own biased commentary about bodies, a reflection of the war I was waging against myself.

When I finally quit wrestling during my last year of college, my body could no longer sustain the disordered eating and excessive exercise habits. As the weight naturally came back, I found body positivity spaces online that threw me a lifeline. Around this time, I gradually disengaged from my evangelical Christian background. Part of that departure was due to the religious focus on fasting which felt far too identical to the trauma of cutting weight, the physical inaccessibility of the seating in my family’s church, and the constant equivocation of dieting with moral purity.

Later, while serving as a Peace Corps volunteer in Myanmar, I began to see the global reach of these standards. I saw the profound effects of Western beauty standards and colonialism on the Burmese people. It was there that I discovered the more radical, social justice-focused fat liberation movement. I read authors like Lindy West, Jes Baker, Sonya Renee Taylor, and Aubrey Gordon. I listened to clinicians like Christy Harrison, and for the first time, I realized there was scientific and historical reasoning behind my experiences.

It was not a lack of discipline. It was not a personal failure. There was, and is, absolutely nothing wrong with my body, or any fat body. We are inherently deserving of love, respect, and liberation.

Conclusion: What Liberation Looks Like

Today, I am reclaiming my mental, physical, and spiritual health. I practice intuitive eating and embrace gentle movement that brings me genuine joy, completely independent of a desire to shrink myself. I am no longer waiting to live my life, or waiting to do the things I truly desire, until I reach an arbitrary weight.

So, what does liberation mean to me?

To me, liberation is living in a world that considers my body in its design. It is the ability to breathe easily as I move throughout this world.

Liberation is a world that does not see me as a problem to fix, a disease to cure, or a burden to alleviate, but sees me precisely for who I am: possessing inherent dignity and worth.

Liberation is dancing, singing, moving, speaking, working, resting, and loving without shame or inhibition. It is the freedom to pursue our interests and live in the bodies we have today.

Sharing all of this with you today is an act of liberation. I share it because I know that we, as a fellowship, hold a shared vision of a world where everyone’s dignity and worthiness is validated. Let us carry this calling forward into our community, widening our circle of love, until every body is truly free.

Blessed be, and amen.