You’re listening to Burnt Toast! This is the podcast where we talk about diet culture, anti-fat bias, parenting, and health.
Today I am chatting with Tigress Osborn. Tigress is a fat rights advocate and Chair of the Board of NAAFA, The National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance. She’s also the founder of Full Figure Entertainment and a co-founder of PHX Fat Force. Tigress is an intersectional feminist teacher and writer whose professional background as a youth empowerment leader and DEI educator has informed her fat liberation activism since 2008.
It is a huge thrill to have Tigress on the podcast. She is amazing on every level you can think of, but specifically because right now, Tigress and NAAFA are working on legislation that will protect fat rights all around the country, which we have been sorely lacking for decades. But NAAFA and the Campaign for Size Freedom just scored a huge victory in New York City and there is more to come.
So I really want us, as the Burnt Toast community, to think about how we can get involved and directly support this. And Tigress has a lot of ideas and strategies and suggestions for us.
Episode 94 Transcript
Tigress
So I am the chair of NAAFA, which is the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance and I have been the chair since the beginning of 2021 and on the board for several years before that. But I actually started my life as a public figure of fat visibility and fat activism as a nightclub promoter in Oakland, where I created an event called Full Figure Fridays. So I’ve been doing some form of fat activism since about 2008.
Virginia
As I was prepping for our conversation, I read the profile on you that ran in the Smith College magazine. Burnt Toast’s own
went to Smith, my sister went to Smith and another friend of mine—so I had multiple people sending me that, like, look at Tigress on the cover!Tigress
Look at this fat lady on this magazine!
Virginia
They knew I would be overjoyed and I was. There was one quote I really loved in the piece where you said, “My aunts were the Lizzos of my neighborhood, but they still talked about how they should be on SlimFast.” Tell us a little bit about how you grew up understanding fatness.
Tigress
I’m from a mixed race family and I had fat aunts on both sides of my family. My Black aunts were confident and were sexy and wore tight dresses and got dressed up to do fancy things and go out. My fat aunts on the other side of the family and the other people on the other side of my family who were fat or thought of themselves as fat didn’t have that same boldness. And I really received that as a racial difference.
But I think we ended up with that quote in the magazine was because I was talking to the reporter about people’s perception that Black women have it easy when it comes to body image. I definitely saw a racial difference in my family, but I also still saw my aunts thinking that they were supposed to lose weight. I still saw other people talking about their bodies.
As a smaller kid, I was a slim. Then puberty came around. My biology kicked in and I was a teenager who was curvy. I probably wasn’t even officially plus-sized until I was a late teenager, but I remember having a difficult time finding clothes for my graduation because we’d been advised to wear white under our gowns and finding something white and plus size in the limited stores that were available… I was a teenager before Torrid. There was none of this “just go to Torrid.”
There was a store here called Stewart’s Plus and it was the trendiest of 90’s fashion, like bright prints and bright colors and stuff like that. It was the closest thing I could get to a teenager look because Lane Bryant, back then especially, was really matronly. Everybody else was going to Clothestime to buy their Guess jeans or whatever.
And I was one of those teenagers who had subscriptions to all of the teen girl magazines. Those magazines were for me what Instagram and Tiktok are for teenagers today. Like, where you see the body standards that you are supposed to aspire to, where you’re told how to be beautiful, how you’re supposed to be as a girl or as a young lady. But they weren’t like Instagram and Tiktok in that they didn’t have also a vein of alternatives to that, right? In Seventeen magazine, the person who was supposed to be like the person who looks like me as a young Black girl is Whitney Houston. I don’t look like Whitney.
Virginia
That’s a realistic standard for one to aspire to.
Tigress
Exactly. So I grew up with all the messages from the culture—I’m an early MTV kid, I was really into really into music videos, I watched music videos any chance I had to watch them. And you didn’t see curvy people, let alone actually fat people, in music videos, except for a handful of men.
I was thinking the other day about how much I love the rapper Heavy D when I was a teenager. One of the only places where I will allow the term ‘overweight’ is his song The Overweight Lovers In The House. So I had a burgeoning identity as a fat girl, not just in a sort of this-is-a-way-I’m-an-outsider or this-is-a-way-I-don’t-fit-in kind of way. I remember trying to write something for one of my teen magazines that I was going to send to them about how important it was for me to see the fat boys, to see that you could be cool even though you were fat.
Virginia
Why can’t we see fat girls, too?
Tigress
Yeah, it never occurred to me to be like, “where are the fat girls?” The only fat person was Oprah and her whole little red wagon thing was when I was in 8th or 9th grade.
Virginia
She’s fat but she’s actively, determinedly, pursuing not-fatness.
Tigress
I remember as a late teenager I discovered BBW Magazine, Big Beautiful Woman magazine. I can remember my aunt being like, “Oh, these are fat ladies who aren’t really fat because they’re fancy.”
Virginia
These are Fancy Fat Ladies.
Tigress
Because they had access to a completely different kind of clothes, because they are fashion models. As limited as that was, a magazine has access to different clothes than we had access to in small town Arizona.
Virginia
Yeah, and they can shoot you in a dress that doesn’t zip up in the back and it looks like it fits from the front. There’s this whole smoke and mirrors piece of it that they can manipulate.
Tigress
Yeah, all of that, but it was really meaningful to me to start to see. I can remember the expansion of print magazines in my early 20s because there was BBW. There was one called Grace, then there was there was a Black fat positive magazine called Bell.
Virginia
Yeah, I remember Grace and Bell.
Tigress
I remember seeing that when I moved to California and I was in an area where there were more Black folks, then there were more Black magazines available to me. When I grew up, where I grew up, it was Essence and Jet only. Essence might have someone a little larger in it from time to time back then, but there wasn’t regular plus-size representation when I was a teenager in those magazines. And of course, Jet Magazine had the Jet Beauty of the Week that was like, a woman in a swimsuit. I remember them as being curvier than some of the women I saw in other magazines, but they were not arguably fat, right?
Virginia
When you talked about your aunts still on the SlimFast, and still struggling in that way, even though they were also representing to you this joy in fatness that you weren’t seeing from your white relatives—do you think that the way Black magazines were portraying Black bodies at the time was a factor in that? Or where do you think that came from?
Tigress
I think there sometimes are actually cultural differences around what body types are accepted. I think a lot of it was male gaze kind of stuff. Like, “men still find me attractive.” And there was a kind of creativity and community-mindedness around finding clothes or making clothes that was different. My community was a community of Black folks who love to show out. So when you have to show out, you’re going to find or make some clothes. You’re not going to just settle for whatever the clothes are available to you, if that’s limited. And so there was partly that. I think there were personality differences, there was cultural difference. It wasn’t all racial, but as a kid, I definitely received it as racial.
As an adult, I can see more nuance. I can see all the ways that even if there is some community protection around body image, there is still body shaming and you’re still ingesting the messages of the regular culture.
I was trying to explain to a Gen Z colleague, upon the passing of Sir Jerry Springer, what it was really like to be coming of age in the era of daytime talk shows and how much of that was very specifically body shaming. They would have these episodes all the time that were like, “Too Fat For That!” The Too Fat For That episode was the one where your BFF comes on with you to try to get the world to help save you from yourself, because you are wearing biker shorts and cut-off tops. “Just because they make it in your size or you can stretch it to your size doesn’t mean you should wear it in your size, girlfriend.” I think my aunts were somewhere along that spectrum of like, well, maybe I will wear these biker shorts or maybe I would be the friend who’s on TV telling her, girl, you shouldn’t be wearing that.
I think the magazines were reflective of the culture, but also reflective of respectability politics. Respectability politics allow for a certain kind of fat, they allow for the church ladies to be fat, but there’s still all this stuff about appetite and control and what’s ladylike. So, I think it’s just a mixed bag across the culture and shows up in some really racialized ways and gets experienced in some really racialized ways.
Whatever you’re getting in your home culture, you still have to participate in the mainstream culture, right? Because unless you go to an HBCU, you go to a predominantly white college. Unless you start or work for a Black-owned company, you are working for and with white folks. There are some protective elements around community standards or different beauty ideals, but you still have to operate in the whole rest of the world. Weight Watchers is still just dominating daytime television commercials and Oprah with her little red wagon and People Magazine every time you go to the grocery store with the “I lost 100 pounds and I’m half of myself.” All of that stuff is still there. And that was still there for me, even though I have these aunts who were just really glamorous and amazing to me.
The folks that stand out to me the most from my younger childhood as glamorous were fat women—including one of my mom’s friends who was not a Black woman and who had this cloud of Miss Piggy hair. She just reminded me of Miss Piggy and she was an Avon lady so she always had the makeup. And my Aunt Linda is still doing it, with her and her wigs and her all things, outshining everybody when she shows up at a barbecue. I don’t know how much of that is just personality. I don’t know how much of it is despite being fat or how much of it is because of being fat. Like, “I better make sure I’m the best dressed and the best makeup and the best hair and the best everything else because I don’t have the body everybody thinks I’m supposed to have.”
Virginia
Yeah, there’s a little bit of the Good Fatty, maybe.
Tigress
I think so.
Virginia
“I need to perform this in a certain way.” But it also sounds like it gives them a lot of joy.
Tigress
And it gave me a lot of joy! But I was still very clear, especially as a teenager, that if you have a choice, you shouldn’t be fat. And if you have enough willpower you do have a choice.
Virginia
Of course, that’s how bodies work.
Tigress
I was in that sort of infomercial era of my early teen years my early years at Smith where the sort of like Richard Simmons Deal-A-Meal era and the Susan Powter Stop the Insanity era. Do you remember her? Everybody remembers Richard Simmons probably.
Virginia
I think that’s safe to assume. Or if not: Children, Google your history.
Tigress
Learn who Richard Simmons is. He is very important to our cultural understanding of bodies. I’m not even exaggerating, like, Richard Simmons is very important to our cultural understanding of bodies. But Susan Powter pitched herself as a feminist and was loud and unapologetic and had long nails and makeup and red lipstick and this platinum buzz cut haircut. She wouldn’t be exercising in stilettos, but she was posed in stilettos. She was an “it’s okay to be sexy” feminist. There were many things I loved about her message but she was always on these infomercials screaming about how dieting is insanity, stop the insanity! Here, buy all of my diet my exercise videos because they are the only ones that are not insanity.
Virginia
Just starting to head in the right direction and then doubling back.
Tigress
Looking back at some of that 80’s and 90’s super diet-y or intended to be anti-fat stuff, I think there’s a sort of rebellious read on it. Richard Simmons videos were the places of highest fat visibility for me outside of my own family and neighborhood. I could see fat people dressed in bright, colorful, fun clothes, dancing and sweating to the oldies as a dance party. My favorite part of those videos when I was in my late teens and early 20s was the part at the end where it’s almost like a soul train line and everyone dances down and then they put up the numbers of how much weight they lost. If you remove those numbers, that’s some of the best fat joy exploration! I think you could reclaim that stuff by by sweating to the oldies for 50 cents on the DVD at your local thrift store. You’re not supporting diet culture, but you can have a subversive read.
Virginia
There definitely needs to be a deep dive into this, because Richard Simmons was certainly making some deliberate choices in casting his videos in that way. In not just showing all the thin aerobics models. But then, of course, pairing it with the weight loss message.
Tigress
Exactly. It’s really an example of how everything came at me at that era of my life. I think I’m watching this at the end for the weight loss inspo, but really what I end up remembering about it 20 years later, is just how much fun those people looked like they were having and how they were getting in shape regardless of whether they had those numbers to put up. But they wouldn’t have been in that video if they didn’t have those numbers to put up, so that’s where the it takes the turn.
Virginia
But, they were in their bodies. They were joyful in their bodies.
Tigress
So in the midst of all this, I did learn about NAAFA when I was in my first year at Smith because we had this early 1990s campus diversity day called Otelia Cromwell Day. It was named after the first Black Smith grad. And in the spread of workshops, there was stuff about race, there was stuff about gender, and there was a workshop by Carrie Hemenway who worked in the Career Development Office at Smith, that was called something like “Large-Bodied Women.” She was an active member of the Boston chapter of NAAFA. Back in those days, NAAFA had chapters in major cities. Now we’re more virtually based, but Carrie was really active in the Boston chapter and did this workshop at this women’s college in the early 90s.
This would have been the fall of 1992, so long before #bodypositivity or anything like that. That was where I learned about NAAFA and I didn’t get involved directly in NAAFA until years later, but just the idea that there is an organization that exists. That was first time I’d heard the idea of just using fat in a positive way. Like, what we were talking about earlier about my aunts and stuff—you still called those ladies full-figured or big-boned. You didn’t call them fat. Even if you were somebody who loved fat women, you still didn’t say that, at least in the circles around that were around me. So that idea, that was where I was introduced to the idea that you could just use fat as a descriptor or even as a positive identifier.
And I’ve never forgotten that. Just knowing NAAFA was out there in the world doing something different than what Richard Simmons and Susan Powter were doing when it came to fat people was so empowering to me. I remember one of my friends going home for fall break and trying to explain to her mom that she wasn’t going to diet anymore because it was okay to be fat. I don’t remember her mom’s reaction either, but I just remember us planning that conversation on the bus on the way home, because it was going to be this groundbreaking new approach.
Virginia
Yeah, and unfortunately it still feels too groundbreaking, right?
Tigress
It always feels like one step forward, two steps back. Sometimes it feels like one giant leap for humankind and then a bouncy house of bouncing back from that leap.
Virginia
That bouncy house image is very much how I feel at the moment.
Tigress
Oh, I bet. I can’t even imagine what is coming at you. People are so mad at fat people for daring to be. Like, how dare you be? You’re inconveniencing me by being. It’s the level of vitriol directed at people because they have the nerve to stay fat and not be constantly trying to apologize to the world and demonstrate that apology through actively dying and—actively dieting. Well, actively dying, that might not have been a slip. That is actually often also true in terms of what diet culture expects of us. There’s a perception that we’re dying because we’re fat and there’s just not enough discussion about how the things we’re doing trying to not be fat are actually the things that are killing us. But people get really mad.
NAAFA is supporting fat rights legislation all over the country and I wandered into the comments on one of the New York Times articles about this. The article itself was already framed too much as a like, should they exist or not? And can legislation help allow fat people to exist? I mean, overall, there were lots of great points in the article and I’m grateful that the New York Times is even talking about this issue. But also: Please don’t start the fat rights article with an anecdote about the founder of Weight Watchers. Like, I don’t know, just don’t. But the article itself is for a mainstream news outlet, at least it’s highlighting some fat points. And then I wandered into the comment section, and I was like, “Oh, right.”
Virginia
Here we are in the dumpster.
Tigress
We are not even in the dumpster. We’re in the mud underneath the dumpster.
Virginia
That oozy material.
Tigress
That’s right. When the dumpster has been so bad that it rusted out the bottom and underneath there is sludge. That’s where we are. We can’t even see the light from the top of the dumpster. Sometimes the worst is the people who think they’re most helpful. I got one letter from this woman who was mad about the magazine cover, because—for people who haven’t seen the magazine cover, it’s me in a tight dress with all my back rolls out.
Virginia
It’s fantastic, it’s beautiful.
Tigress
Thank you so much, shout out to my photographer, Dante Earle Tubbs from Contrast Photos in Arizona. It is a gorgeous photo and I have no shame in having my fat vanity and saying that is a gorgeous photo. And, she pulled this quote that I never could have imagined would be on the cover of a magazine about how the world should be prepared for fat people to be audacious because we’re not going to stay in the shadows, in the corners, anymore.
Virginia
It’s amazing!
Tigress
And so, some people, both in positive and negative ways, just reacted to the cover without reading any of the rest of the magazine.
Virginia
Most of the sludge under the dumpster has not read. They’re not reading.
Tigress
That’s right. “What! Fat people and audacity? Let me have my thindacity and contact them to tell them how they’re gonna die.”
So this lady writes to me—well, she had clearly written this to the editor of the magazine, but just wanted to make sure NAAFA didn’t miss it so sent a copy directly to us. And it was just like, “I’m a retired ophthalmologist and Tigress and Lizzo would not fit in my exam chair.” Well, first of all, lady, I’m wearing glasses in some of the pictures. So clearly, I’ve been to an opthamologist. That’s not really the point. But also kind of the point.
Virginia
Maybe have better exam chairs? That sounds like a you problem..
Tigress
Talk about audacity! You have the audacity to write to a civil rights organization and say, “I am fully admitting that my office was inaccessible to people and that’s their fault and they’re going die?” Because she did the whole “and if they ever had to have eye surgery, their eyes would explode.” “And if, in fact, they had to have any surgery, they’d be more likely to die.” And then she closed on, “I don’t think fat people should be discriminated against, but I pity them.”
Well, first of all, you clearly do think we should be discriminated against because you didn’t do anything about that exam chair in your office while you had a whole career. But also, you reached out to a stranger to tell them that you think they’re gonna die and then you patted yourself on the back for being smarter than them. I guess that’s not legal discrimination. We can’t legislate against you. We can legislate against that problematic chair.
Virginia
For sure.
Tigress
We can’t legislate against you just having this attitude, but you don’t get to tell yourself that you’re not discriminatory. You don’t get to say, “I’m not a bigot, but I just pity these fat people and had to tell you that I pity you.” You’re not being the bigger person here. I’m the bigger person, literally and figuratively, because you failed at being a bigger person, if that’s what you thought you were doing. Because that’s just a put-you-in-your-place letter. That is not a concern for your health letter. That was not like, here’s a list of optometrists near you that might have a chair that can accommodate you because I care about your eyesight, right? It’s none of that. It’s just a holier than thou expression of dismay that you have the nerve to live.
Virginia
So, let’s talk about the legislation piece of things, because this is really exciting work you all are doing. Tell us about the Campaign for Size Freedom.
Tigress
So the campaign for size freedom was founded by NAAFA and FLARE. FLARE is the Fat Legal Advocacy Rights and Education Project, which is a project with the law office of Brandie Solovay and was started by Sondra Solovay, who’s one of the icons, and has been the voice of common sense and good legal sense around anti-fat discrimination for for many, many years. So the FLARE project does all this really incredible work. We work with them all the time.
We started the Campaign for Size Freedom with them to support passing more legislation that is related to protections around body size. And the project is supported also by Dove. So it’s really exciting in that way, in that it is really the largest corporate social responsibility investment in fat liberation, ever. There’s no record of anything like what Dove is showing up to do there. And, I know that there are a lot of folks in fat community who hear Dove and they kind of go, “hmm body positivity, they stole it.”
Virginia
I did want to ask about this. I mean, they were definitely one of the first brands to embrace body diversity. But there’s a fair critique that they often co-opt the rhetoric.
Tigress
I was literally in one of the protests campaigns about Dove in the mid-2000s. It was called Beyond Beauty. Dove launches their “Real Beauty” thing and then there was this Beyond Beauty photoshoot with all of these visibly fat, Black and brown people and visibly disabled people and just a variety of ages and identities and all that stuff. This is either a supplement to or in protest of the way that Dove is showing these images, even as they’re trying as much as you can expect capitalism to try. We want to always give credit to the folks who are genuinely trying and also hold accountable the folks who are trying and missing it. But I do think that Dove has come a long way.
And, there’s still always going to be a segment of fat liberation community who are anti-capitalist and just don’t work with organizations like Dove, ever.
Virginia
Right, the Green Peace of this movement. We need that voice as well.
Tigress
We need lots of different kinds of voices and lots of different kinds of approaches in the movement. And for us, we really, really vetted Dove. We really liked some of the work that Dove was doing, a lot of work around supporting The Crown Act. So when they showed up with us saying we want to support you around legislation, they didn’t show up as like, “we want to develop a stretch mark soap and so we need some fat consultation,” it wasn’t a thing like that.
It was like, we are really looking at our corporate responsibility practices and this is a thing we’re seeing in the research. Because they do so much research around girls and self esteem and I think with an increasing awareness around expansive ideas about gender, but they’re still pretty centered in this “girls and women” language and space, but they’re working on it. We’re going to keep working on that. But they do so much research around girls and self esteem and they were just seeing more and more in their research about how much body oppression and size discrimination affects girls and their self esteem. And so they were like, what’s a thing we can do about this?
And they have several campaigns that they’ve run that are looking at how kids see their bodies and highlighting how teenagers are affected by beauty standards and body standards. So the legislative piece is really important because their research was showing people are reporting all of this discrimination. Like, when we talk not just to the kids but also to the moms about how they live in their bodies, we’re seeing all of these things about discrimination in our research and we want to be part of the solution to that. So, I’m excited about the support from from Dove. And they’ve been very good about letting the fat people drive this.
Virginia
I’m here for this.
Tigress
NAAFA and FLARE really are out in the front of the project. And right now there is pending legislation in New York City that is super exciting because it’s about to pass which will make New York one of the most populous places on earth that has protections against height and weight discrimination. By the middle of this summer, we will have a law in New York.
Virginia
I just got chills!
Tigress
But what a lot of people don’t know is just how rare that is. Because we have this sense as Americans that if somebody does something wrong to you, you can sue them. And you can, you can sue people, whether there’s explicit law protecting you or not, but your chances of being able to win when there’s not an actual law about the thing that you are trying to sue over becomes increasingly more difficult. Especially around an issue where there’s such cultural pervasiveness about people’s own attitudes. So Sondra wisely says in her book, we could be already treating fat people fairly under the law with other laws that exist just around general fairness, but we don’t apply those laws. The lawyers don’t know how to apply those laws, the judges don’t know how to apply those laws. Having the explicit protections helps.
Virginia
I just want to quickly say Sondra’s book is Tipping the Scales of Justice: Fighting Weight Based Discrimination. It is an incredible resource for learning more about all of this.
Tigress
It’s incredible resource and it’s also an incredible artifact of how slow this change has been because Sondra wrote that book in the the late 90’s and it’s really accurate still.
Virginia
I did a piece for Slate in 2021 about how body size comes up in custody, states taking custody of children. I wrote about this in my book, too, and referred back to all the research she did on that in the book about BMI being a criteria. These were cases that were coming out in the early 2000s. And it is still happening, that BMI can be a reason to lose your children.
Tigress
Absolutely. A lot of people don’t people don’t know that, unless it happens to them or unless it becomes so sensational of a story that it hits the headlines. And when it hits the headlines, it’s really devastating. Not just for those families, but also for all kinds of other families who begin to be really, really afraid. That work is so important. Sondra’s work over the course of fat liberation, her whole career is so important, but also it is a shame for us as a culture that her book is still so contemporary. But that is part of what the Campaign for Size Freedom is trying to change.
We’re trying to amplify the issue so that people understand this is a really serious civil rights issue. The list of where anti-fatness shows up in our social justice concerns is really short, right? When do people put it on the list as a social justice concern? That that happens very rarely. But the list of places that we care about social justice and anti-fatness shows up within that is a very, very long list because it’s basically every area where we care about social justice. If you care about racial justice, if you care about economic disparity, if you care about gender oppression, if you care about queer antagonism, if you care about issues about the carceral system, if you care about immigration, if you care about reproductive rights. If you feel like all of those are areas where anti-fatness shows up and adds an additional layer of oppression for people, an additional set of hurdles for people in everything from can you get fertility treatment to can you get a desk that fits you at the school you’re trying to attend?
Virginia
Can you get an exam chair that fits you at the ophthalmologist?
Tigress
And can you get people to care about that and see it as an issue that they should change things instead of an issue that you should change your body?
But the tide is turning. Public opinion polls show that people are in favor of protective legislation. People are starting to recognize things as discrimination. I was at the International Weight Stigma Conference last year and one of the researchers there was presenting some research they were doing about asking people to self-assess whether they’d been discriminated against or not. What they found was, when you just asked fat people, “have you ever experienced discrimination because you’re fat?” Many of them will say no. But then when you start breaking down the questions: Have you ever experienced this in your workplace or that in the doctor’s office? Have you ever experienced this in your educational setting? Those same people who said no actually check a bunch of things that they are experiencing discrimination, they just haven’t thought of it that way.
Virginia
It’s kind of reminding me of the way the #MeToo conversation helped us understand what sexual harassment and sexual assault really are. Because for so long, we only had kind of like the movie version of these concepts. And realizing, like, oh, wait, actually your boss making this kind of comment.
Tigress
That’s right.
Virginia
But we miss the nuances of it, because we’ve been fed one narrative of what is okay.
Tigress
I don’t want to overemphasize that parallel, but something else I see in that parallel is the blame the person that’s happening to dynamic. If your boss said something funky to you, well, you shouldn’t have worn that shirt to work, right? And it’s the same if your boss said something funky to you about your weight, well, you just shouldn’t have been fat and then that would have happened to you. And cultural attitudes around that are changing.
Now there’s that under the dumpster sludge clash. There’s a loud voice, especially on the Internet, of how you’re gross and you’re going to die. But also, there’s so many more fat people and people of all sizes saying that’s just not true. And even if that’s what you think, what does that have to do with fat people having civil rights? The older I get, the less invested I am about whether I care what people think about what I look like in this body. It’s still there for me because that’s how pervasive it is. I’ve been doing fat liberation work in some way or another for 15 years and the voices are still there for me. So if you’re new to this of course you’re still going to struggle with it, right? It’s still tough, because we do still live in that SlimFast culture.
I know you know Marilyn Wann because I’ve heard you talk about her on the pod. What I loved about Marilyn’s book when it came out was, again, just the existence of this reminds me of something. It is Fat! exclamation point, So? question mark. And that’s so is really important and it’s really important in the work that we do at NAAFA now. Because when people say, like, you’re just a hater because you can’t lose weight. No, we’re not. And even if that were true, even if I’m just a lazy fat person who is mad at all the thin people because they’re thin and I’m not and I can’t wear your Kim Kardashian clothes or whatever—even if all of that is true, my employer should still have to pay me fairly.
Virginia
Right.
Tigress
My doctor should still have medical equipment that allows me to get information I need about my health. All of these pieces that fall under this legal discrimination umbrella are all things that should not happen to fat people, regardless of what you think about our health or our attractiveness.
Virginia
Or how much it’s our fault or that whole willpower conversation that’s really besides the point.
Tigress
Completely beside the point. There are some audiences where I just will refuse to talk about health. I lead a civil rights group. We can talk about health in so much as there are health disparities that are represented by anti-fatness and weight bias within the healthcare system. We can talk about that. But if you just want to talk about like, do I have high blood pressure? Not your business, not my employer’s business, not my landlord’s business. That’s my doctor’s business and my business and my momma’s business—and sometimes not even hers.
That’s what the Campaign for Size Freedom is doing, it is lifting this conversation so that more people are aware that there are so few places in the world that have made it explicitly illegal to discriminate based on body size. In the United States, that list is really short. Michigan has a civil rights law. Washington State has it in part of disability law. And there are a handful of municipalities across the country with either appearance based discrimination law or civil rights law. And it is soon to be New York City. [Virginia’s note: The NYC bill passed right after we recorded this!]
It is also hopefully soon to be New Jersey, New York at the state level, Massachusetts and Vermont, all of whom have pending legislation in the wake of New York City. And there’s at least one other state coming but we haven’t publicly talked about it yet. But there’s a non-coastal state coming. We’re not only doing this on the East Coast.
Virginia
We like the middle of the country states.
Tigress
That’s right. These East Coast places are places where it arose organically. In Massachusetts, this work has been being done for years. And I mean, like, 10-12 years ago, people like Sondra and people from NAAFA. Back then there was an organization called the Society for Short Statured Americans who was partnering with NAAFA. That organization doesn’t exists today, but we are partnering with Little People of America. People have been doing this work in Massachusetts for years. They’ve been making attempts at the state level in New York for years. But it’s brand new in New Jersey and Vermont, but it all rose organically there by either legislative leaders who looked around the world and said what’s missing from our civil rights laws? What can I take on here? Or by people listening to their constituents who brought issues to their offices. Now we are looking at the whole country and thinking about where do we want to push next? The dream is a federal civil rights law.
Virginia
Absolutely.
Tigress
We don’t think that in the current federal political culture that we can do that. And especially without having done it in several states.
Virginia
Yeah, you need to incubate it in a few states.
Tigress
I mean, we see that with the Crown Act. We saw that with marriage equality, we’ve seen this with other civil rights issues.
Virginia
Let’s talk about what the Burnt Toast community can do. We are big supporters of state legislation being the seat of power and where things happen. Last year Burnt Toast worked with The States Project and we raised a ton of money for state government elections to turn some states blue—actually Arizona was our focus state!
Tigress
Thank you!
Virginia
Yeah, it was rough out there, but we did raise a bunch of money and had some key victories. This is something that the Burnt Toast community feels really passionate about. Obviously, this legislation is something we feel hugely passionate about. So, tell us where you need us.
Tigress
You can follow NAAFA and follow the Campaign for Size Freedom, the hashtag we’re using is #sizefreedom. You can like and comment and reshare and all the things that help boost the signal. If you have money to give, you can give to NAAFA. We are a 501(c)(3) charity. Even though we have this investment and support coming from Dove, we are still an under resourced and understaffed organization, as is all of fat liberation.
If this is an issue you care about and if NAAFA is not the right organization for you—if we’re too moderate, we’re too conservative, we’re too focused on legislation and you care about other things—there are other fat organizations that you can give to. ASDAH, the Association for Size Diversity And Health, they are the Health at Every Size people and they are also now the examining Health at Every Size to see if that’s even the right framework anymore. Super radical work happening at ASDAH, Black led, queer led radical work.
And in the health care space, NOLOSE is also a 501(c)(3). So if you care about that, if you care about the tax receipt. NOLOSE is a queer-centered fat liberation organization.
But also, you can give money to the folks who aren’t going to have a tax receipt for you but are doing mutual aid in the community, are doing really important activism in the community. Look around your own local communities and see where you can put some dollars into fat things, if you have dollars to give.
Whether you have monetary contributions you can make or not, you can sign the petition on our website. And if you sign the petition there, the reason we’re asking for your address is so that if we start doing work in your area we can get in touch with you directly. You can get on our main mailing list to just get other updates about other work. We’re an advocacy organization, we’re not a lobbying organization. There’s all kinds of other work we’re still trying to do. We run a pretty robust program of virtual events so that folks can get to us online and get to each other online for everything from education to joy. August is fat liberation month, so we’ll have even more programming during fat liberation month.
And: If you’re still working on using the word fat, keep working on it. It is good for you, it is good for folks around you. And it’s a sort of bat signal to other fat people of whether you have some politics around this. I live in Arizona, there’s all kinds of fat people here. But there’s not all kinds of fat community here because the amount of folks who have a fat liberation framework is not the same as the number of fat people who exist here, right? Finding each other in your local community can be hard. And it is one of the best things, as much as the Internet can be toxic, it is one of the best things about the internet, finding your own. And if you’re local to me, hit me up in my DMs! We can plan some fatty rabble rousing in the Phoenix area.
But, give your time, give your energy, give your money, give your platform. Those are the things that people can do. When you can’t physically give your energy, send vibes, good vibes. We take all the good fat vibes.
Virginia
Well, this platform is always available to you. So please let us know when there’s a specific thing on the docket and you’re like, “I need a lot of people to sign this petition, I need a lot of people to call representatives.” We are here for it.
Tigress
And do that you get in touch with your representatives after they vote for these things, because we want we want to keep those kinds of people in office. We want to keep them knowing that this is a community issue. We want to expand the bills, expand the regulations in places where they’re not protective enough or next time the fight comes back around. The New York City Law is incredible. It will be life changing to people and it is limited to housing, employment, and public accommodation. So there are still other spaces that it’s not taking on.
When we do the next round to cover those spaces, we want the people who supported us on this round to know that we paid attention to that. And we want people who didn’t support us on this round to know that we paid attention, too. So don’t just write the pressure letters, write the follow up thank you. Those are really important.
Virginia
That’s so smart.
Butter
Virginia
Alright, Tigress, what is your Butter today?
Tigress
My butter today is I’m really loving watching Midnight Diner on Netflix. It’s it’s not new. It’s a Japanese. It’s a half an hour Japanese serial. It’s a little bit soap opera-ish. I’m just really, really loving that as my bedtime story every night. I’m relatively new to podcast world, so I really am loving Wondermine, which is a podcast about about joy and community. Those are two of my favorite things lately.
Virginia
That is wonderful. Mine this week is that Somebody Somwhere is back for season two. I don’t know if you watched, Bridget Everett is a treasure, just a treasure.
Tigress
I watched the first season and I didn’t know it was coming back. Right now I’m just kind of head down, catching up on some work things so I’m only watching Midnight Diner at night and then listening to all of my fat podcasts. But, the second season, I can’t wait. Have you started it already?
Virginia
I just watched the first episode and it was just delightful. Her chemistry with her best friend—I’m terrible at remembering character names, but everyone knows who I’m talking about.
Tigress
I love that character.
Virginia
I love them so much together. I would watch them to hang out and just talk about nothing and I would be so delighted.
Tigress
I’m going to have to get into that this weekend.
Can I say one more butter? The second Saturday in May is Black Fae Day, for Black folks who are into the whole magical creature realm, who do cosplays and meetups and stuff like that. So I’m also working on getting together my Black Fae Day costume. I haven’t found an Arizona meet up yet, but I’m going to do a photoshoot with the same photographer who did my Smith cover. I’m super excited about that. So y’all can follow me on Instagram, you’ll see my Black Fae Day costumes. But also you can just follow that hashtag and like support Black creators who are doing this really incredible cosplay. I think for some of them this is not even cosplay, Fae is their aesthetic and that is why they just look like fairies every day. But I am really, really excited about that.
Virginia
I’m so glad, I didn’t know about that. And I’m really excited to look on Instagram for the hashtag with my five year old because she is a fan of fairy things.
Thank you. Please come back anytime. Tell folks where we can follow you and support your work.
Tigress
You can learn more about NAAFA and you can follow us on most of your favorite social media sites. We’re most active on Instagram and Facebook. And you can follow me on Instagram at @IoftheTigress.
Virginia
Wonderful. Thank you so much, Tigress. It was really a pleasure having you here.
Tigress
It was so great to be here. I cannot wait to I got my copy of the book. I can’t wait to dig in. I’m really excited for to interact with the the Burnt Toast family. Do you call your fans Toasties or something?
Virginia
Corinne came up with Burnt Toasties recently, and I sort of love that. Also one of my favorite little bits of troll commentary was the guy who called me high priestess of the indulgence gospel, so I’m kind of running with high priestess these days. I think we are all part of the indulgence gospel.
Tigress
I love that.
Virginia
He definitely meant it as a burn and I took it as the honor of my life.
Tigress
One of my favorites lately was somebody who inboxed me to tell me that I’m so fat I look like Kung Fu Panda. And I was like, I will see your Kung Fu Panda and raise you one. I posted this picture of me with a giant hippo statue. Please look for that on my Instagram. I love that picture. And also, fuck that guy. Reclaiming the troll trash and turning it into treasures is way more fun than the whole don’t feed the trolls thing. Like, yes, don’t feed them. But also take everything they say and make it a hashtag that you love.
Virginia
Now I need a high priestess costume.
Tigress
Well, I hope to interact more with followers of the indulgence gospel and all the Burnt Toasties out there. Please do find me and say hello.
The Burnt Toast Podcast is produced and hosted by me, Virginia Sole-Smith. You can follow me on Instagram or Twitter.
Burnt Toast transcripts and essays are edited and formatted by Corinne Fay, who runs @SellTradePlus, an Instagram account where you can buy and sell plus size clothing and also co-hosts mailbag episodes!
The Burnt Toast logo is by Deanna Lowe.
Our theme music is by Jeff Bailey and Chris Maxwell.
Tommy Harron is our audio engineer.
Thanks for listening and for supporting anti-diet, body liberation journalism!
The Dream Is a Federal Fat Rights Law.