“Anti-obesity campaigns aren’t out to kill fat people, therefor anti-obesity campaigns aren’t actually trying to get rid of fat people and don’t hate fat people” is pretty directly parallel to “I just think homosexuality is an illness and a sin, and should be gotten rid of, but I don’t hate gay people or want to kill them, I just want them to stop being gay.”
Fat people are at a societal disadvantage. We are actively discriminated against and marginalized in ways that are structural and systemic. There are government programs devoted to prevent people from becoming like us. Homosexuality was criminalized instead, but that’s still the government trying to prevent people from being gay.
Doctors tried to come up with ways to make people not-gay, and those didn’t work any better than weight loss did. They tried to pathologize homosexuality, just like they have with fatness, and noted correlations with depression, suicide, drug use, a range of illnesses, and, of course, eventually with AIDS (which was originally dubbed Gay Related Immune Deficiency, or GRID, and many claims were made that it was either the natural result of gay sex or punishment for it from an angry god).
Regardless of whether or not it’s a choice, regardless of whether or not people are born this way, attempts to change it work very rarely, the evidence that the thing itself is damaging to the person is very thin and relies purely on correlation, it doesn’t affect other people at all, and it is never ever a reason to discriminate against people. It is never a reason to be shitty, ever. It is never a reason to run huge campaigns to get rid of it. Ever.
Campaigns to eat healthy and exercise? OK, whatever. Still healthist and usually ableist, and they need to fucking fix that. But campaigns to eliminate obesity are campaigns against fat people. Obesity isn’t a thing on its own. It does not exist outside of fat bodies. It’s not like measles, that invades your body and makes you really sick, and you get better or die. Just like you cannot have a campaign against homosexuality that is not a campaign against LGB people, you cannot have a campaign against obesity that is not a campaign against fat bodies.
There are going to be a lot of people pissed at me for this. I don’t give a fuck. I am queer – and, frankly, have put up with a lot more harassment and physical attacks and threats for being queer than most of the people on this site who are going to be mad – and I am fat, and I have been the object of both of these things in action, and they are very similar indeed.
The haters aren’t going to listen. I didn’t say it to convince them. I said it for me, and I said it for us, the readers of this blog, the fatties and the queers.
To hell with the phobes and haters. They’ll keep on hating. We need to support each other in the face of their hate.
-MG