[Note from Cindy: when I saw this information about Fat Liberation, I was so appreciative of how thoughtful it was and how it was framed that I asked Lex for permission to make it into a series of blog posts on my website. They generously agreed. So please enjoy this series. I hope you find it inspiring and helpful, as I did. Don’t forget to check out Part 1 and 2 of this series.]

Many fat people have experienced widespread gaslighting about the discrimination we experience by:

• people refusing to admit to their own anti-fat bias when it comes up in specific interpersonal dynamics
• people who frame anti-fat discrimination as a form of concern/love
• people refusing to acknowledge anti-fat discrimination even exists as a system of oppression that has real financial, educational, health, sexual, existential, emotional, and relational consequences

As a result, we are likely to feel a kind of warranted distrust, doubting that the people around us really do see us with full dignity.

To mitigate that dynamic, we need people to demonstrate their participation in the deconstruction of anti-fatness. They can do this by utilizing a posture of vulnerability and earnest desire to understand fat experience. From that posture, they can engage deconstructive concepts such as how they themselves have been harmed by fatphobia, the ways in which they personally have participated in harmful anti-fat patterns, and acknowledgement of the existence of insidious forms of fatphobia.

Lex Vriend (he/they) is a lover of trees, social justice, deep questions, fossil hunting, dance rituals, mushrooms, poetry, emotional intimacy, epistemic humility, and humans who revel in their weirdness. Lex is a Licensed Professional Counselor in private practice in Fort Worth, TX. He is passionate about integrating psychological models with frameworks of intersectional social justice, cultural difference, and ecological wholeness.