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The Wall Street Journal reported in August that fat activists, people who advocate to eliminate the social stigmas faced by fat people, are attacking Ozempic, the anti-obesity drug, for fueling the perception that fatness is a disorder instead of a harmless difference.
It sounds crazy because it is. But in the world of social justice activism, the fat advocacy movement demonstrates an astute commitment to equity doctrine, the broader progressive theory of fairness from which all other social justice movements flow.
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Following the death of George Floyd in 2020, the term “equity” burst into American life, emerging as a guiding principle across institutions. Schools, businesses, sports leagues, media companies, and even churches suddenly adopted the term as a foundational principle.
The problem, however, was that hardly anyone understood what “equity” really meant, operating as if it implied a kind of “super equality,” a perfecting of the Christian concept that all people possess the same ultimate and inherent value.
But the truth behind “equity,” understood well by the radicals who developed the concept and continue pushing it into the mainstream, couldn’t be more different. Unlike the Christian notion that equal opportunities should be afforded to all as a consequence of equality before God, equity demands equal outcomes as a result of flattened hierarchies and erased differences.
Former Vice President Kamala Harris correctly articulated the concept during the 2020 campaign, saying that “equitable treatment means we all end up in the same place.” (Incidentally, Harris’s frequent refrain that America should be “unburdened by what has been” also echoes the writing of Karl Marx).
For fat activists — I’m not being rude here, they prefer the term “fat” to overweight or obese because those terms suggest a problem that needs solving — the mission is to ensure equal outcomes by eliminating social stigma and ensuring legal protections against weight-based discrimination. Like their progressive activist counterparts, they maintain that fat people are inherently oppressed and that their oppression intersects with other forms, such as racism, sexism, homophobia, etc. They see their fat body types as an immutable characteristic, no different than the color of their skin or hair. This enables fatness to be counted among the oppressed categories.
That means fatness must not be regarded as a medical condition, but as a mere difference. Unequal outcomes for the fat must be exclusively understood as the result of social stigma and bias. Any hint of fatness being the result of individual choices shifts responsibility from society to the individual, rendering it out of bounds for equity-based activism. It is impossible to get everyone to “end up in the same place” if individual choices play a key role. All oppressed conditions must be something that cannot be helped.
As with their trans activist counterparts, fat activists promote alternative science to deliver ideologically correct conclusions.
Marilyn Wann, a “weight diversity speaker” and author of Fat!So?, argues that the causal link between excess weight and other illnesses such as cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, and cancer has yet to be firmly established.
“The assumption that being fat causes diseases like diabetes or heart disease is based on correlation, not causation,” she said in an interview with The Fat Studies Reader. “Thin people get these diseases too, and we don’t scrutinize their lifestyles the same way. The focus on weight distracts from systemic issues like poverty or medical bias, which have clearer impacts on health outcomes.”
A mountain of science contradicts this claim. A 2021 American Heart Association study found that obesity contributes to cardiovascular risk factors and independently increases the risk of cardiovascular disease and mortality. Meanwhile, the British Journal of Cancer found that obesity is causally associated with a variety of cancers.
The conclusion that obesity significantly contributes to serious diseases is firmly established in mainstream science.
But for Ani Janzen, operations and project leader at the Association for Size Diversity in Health, poor health outcomes for fat people are the result of biases in the healthcare system. She told the Journal, “The unfortunate reality is that a lot of the time, fat people don’t get the care they need, which can result in healthcare disparities. It’s an awful Catch-22 because those disparities are then used to enforce the idea that larger people are in worse health than people are in smaller bodies.”
The fat activists’ strategy, as with all other equity-based movements, is threefold: produce alternative science, impugn real science, and then blame society for being insufficiently enlightened.
To be sure, the spread of ideologically driven junk science is dangerous. We have only begun to understand the damage inflicted upon an entire generation by gender ideology. The foot soldiers of these ideologies deserve to be held fully accountable.
But the elite institutions that give these faux-intellectuals a perch bear greater responsibility for amplifying their influence and legitimizing their claims. Many of our most prestigious universities offer courses in “Fat Studies” that promote fatness as a social construct instead of a medical condition, while advocating for things like “fat liberation” and “size equity.”
The University of Maryland, for example, offers a course called “Fat Studies: Intersection of Blackness and Fatness” that, according to the syllabus, “emphasizes fatness as a social justice issue” that “intersects with other systems of oppression.”
Princeton University also offers courses in Fat Studies, including one titled “FAT: The F-Word and the Public Body.” A key course text, Queering Fat Embodiment, dismisses the obesity epidemic as “alleged” and argues that fatness has been unfairly subjected to “medicalization, pathologization, and commodification.”
Brown University offers a Fat Studies course in its pre-college summer offerings for high school students called “The F-Word: Examining the Science, Culture, and Politics of Fatness.” This course explores the “pathologization of fatness in the medical community and the rising prevalence of eating disorders, as well as how fatphobia intersects with other systems of oppression.”
Universities that offer such courses should be ashamed of themselves. Prioritizing ideological narratives over scientific consensus risks real-world harm and further erodes public trust, which is already at an all-time low. Universities are meant to be the gatekeepers of reason, not amplifiers of ideological gibberish.
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Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s stint at the Department of Health and Human Services has drawn the well-earned ire of many for his anti-vaccination extremism — the Washington Examiner’s most recent In Focus Forum skewered him for it. But on the topic of America’s obesity crisis and what needs to be done to solve it, the Ivy League makes RFK Jr. look like Jonas Salk.
The first step in overcoming any addiction, whether to food, alcohol, or ideology, is to admit you have a problem. That would be a good place for our elite universities to start regarding the ballooning field of Fat Studies. They should give themselves a good look in the mirror and ask themselves if they like what they see.