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.
Photo: Katie Loncke. Fat Rose, 2018
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
Anti-Obesity Drugs In Sociopolitical Context
FAQ: An overview of my writing integrating fat liberation and the feedism/fat kink communities
🚧 Origins of the Fat Liberation Movement in the 60s and 70s
Anti-Fatness is Systemic.
Guide to advocating for yourself at the doctor's office
Fat Genital Maintenance Guide + Accessible Sex
Beginner fat liberation resources for eating disordered individuals
🚧 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 DYKES RULE” at the New York City Dyke March, June 2000
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
Photo: Marge Dean. Members of the Fat Underground, 1979
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
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
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
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
NAAFA rally in Tobin Plaza calling on the Governor to include fat people in the New York State Civil Rights Bill, 1993
