How and when the book came to be in my Kindle library I don’t exactly know. Perhaps I noticed the bright red cover during a search for something else. My curiosity piqued, I clicked and bought it and forgot about it. So there it was, waiting, when I found myself “between books.”

What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Fat by Aubrey Gordon turned out to be a stunning eye-opener. It’s about living, or trying to, as a conspicuously, immensely FAT person. According to Wikipedia, the author is a known podcaster and activist. You can look her up. Her passionate and well-documented book, published in 2020, details the issues confronting noticeably FAT people every day of their lives, beginning, in many cases, as children bullied in school. At no time and in no place, as Gordon recounts in detail, does a FAT person find empathy, accommodation, and care.

These days we are bombarded with conversation about civil rights afforded to people with differences ranging from color to gender identity to citizenship status to dis/ability. What we do not hear, let alone see, is the universal discrimination in every possible category against people described in medicine as obese or morbidly obese, in fashion as plus-size, and bluntly in everyday encounters as FAT. We watch them warily as they walk toward our row of seats on airplanes. We peer into their grocery carts. We look sideways at them as they eat a dish of Dairy Queen smaller than the one we ourselves are slurping, wondering how those calories are adding up on their enormous bodies.“Them” I say, for we non-FAT people may often be thinking, in our pleasantly zaftig self-satisfaction, “At least I don’t look like them.”

Reading Gordon’s well-documented chapters lighted up my brain with evidence of the manifold methods by which FAT people are rendered less than human by…everybody. Yes, everybody.

I used to think I had a dog in this hunt. From adolescence on, I’ve wrestled with what I call my “weight management issue.” That is, I have a strong hereditary tendency to accumulate fat on my body. I’ve been so successful with “weight management” that few people who know me would ever suspect that I consider myself a FAT person contained in a temporarily non-FAT body. At the age of 75, I have acquired dietary facts and habits, ingrained and sustained over literally decades, aimed at keeping that FAT person from ever showing up. Over the years, I’ve offered an educated and encouraging voice to other people who share what we call our “weight loss journey” at whatever stage we find ourselves. I have worked hard at not being a FAT person. What was my personal motivation? Well, that’s another story.

What I’ve missed, however, in my celebration of successes and my forgiveness of failures in this lifelong challenge, is this: being FAT makes no one less worthy of respect for their human dignity, appreciation for their talents and capabilities, and insistence on their civil rights, whether or not they are able to “fix” themselves as I (deeply, secretly) believe they should (read: like I DID!) In my heart, I have remained a Mean Girl to FAT people, oblivious to their human worth as is.

I call this blindness, in myself and almost everyone else, an unacknowledged frontier of human rights activism and justice–in employment, medical care, education, transportation, social and romantic expectations, and so much more. Next time you catch yourself glancing furtively at a FAT person, examine your thoughts. Like me, you may have missed the most pernicious prejudice of all that pervade American life today.