Fighting for a (wide enough) seat at the table: weight stigma in law and policy

ABSTRACT

Few jurisdictions provide legal protection against discrimination on the basis of weight despite evidence of pervasive inequalities faced by fat individuals in employment, healthcare, education, and other domains. Yet, in the last two decades, advocacy efforts in several countries aimed to remedy this situation have been largely unsuccessful. We present a cross-national conceptual analysis of three significant anti-discrimination developments regarding weight in the United Kingdom, the United States, and Iceland, respectively, to highlight how the creation, implementation, and enforcement of legal and policy mechanisms that prohibit weight discrimination ironically suffer under the very burden of deeply rooted structural stigmas against fatness and fat bodies that such efforts seek to counter. However, drawing on research around policy change in response to other social movements, we conclude that we may be at a time where broad-ranging policy change could become a reality.

KEYWORDS:

• Weight stigma
• legislation
• civil rights
• policy change
• discrimination

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Darliene Howell (NAAFA Board of Directors), Andrea LaMarre, Michael Orsini, Cat Pausé, Jaclyn Siegel, Joslyn Smith, Iyiola Solanke, and the members of the Fat Studies Facebook group for comments and suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Other legislation addresses discrimination on the basis of sex and race or ethnicity.

2. The word “obesity” is placed in inverted commas to indicate contestation of the medicalization of body weight and the social construction of a disease narrative.

3. Absent from this coverage were the voices of fat rights organizations. It is worth noting that there is no such body in the UK, unlike NAAFA in the US and the Body Respect Association in Iceland (see below), both of whom are often approached for commentary. However, it is at least likely that the BBC did not expect “obesity charities” who claim to cater to the needs of fat people to speak out against the ECJ ruling.

4. Mr. Fry’s statement that if employers were to make adjustments to workplace set up to accommodate “very large people,” it would “cause friction … between obese people and other workers” also typifies a common misunderstanding of equality protections as something that gives a disadvantaged group preferential treatment – that they are getting something more than their benighted “normal” colleagues, rather than access to equal opportunities.

5. See for example, the opinions of the Advocate Generals in ECJ rulings on HK Danmark (Cases C-335/11 and C-337/11; point 32) and Kaltoft (Case C-354/13; point 32) and HM Government Office for Disability Issues (2011) Guidance on the Equality Act (2010), paragraph A3.

6. As such, the situation remains the same after the UK left the European Union in 2020. The Equality Act (2010) covers this same ground, even in the absence of EU statutory requirements.

7. Wilkes criticizes the formation of what she terms HIPAA culture, but herein we take no position on the merits of the critique. Our point is rather the ways in which changes in law can have downstream effects independent of the specific ways the laws are and are not enforced. On HIPAA privacy in general, see the body of work from legal scholar Stacey Tovino (2017).

8. Confidence in the extent to which structural stigma is influencing judicial decisionmaking can only follow (1) the development of a valid and reliable construct for identifying when such stigma exists and/or is animating particular judicial reasoning; and (2) an ensuing legal surveillance or mapping study that will document the prevalence of such stigma in the common law. Neither step has been achieved, though Goldberg is working on a construct for tracing stigma in statutory and regulatory language.

9. https://stigmaconference.com/previous-conferences/reykjavik-2015/

10. It should be noted that many higher-weight individuals may also reject a fat identity, considering themselves as atypical of “other” fat people and being, in truth, a thin person in a temporarily fat body (Kyrölä and Harjunen 2017).

11. orality and value judgments frequently play a role in the negative experiences of women and Black and Indigenous people of color in the legal system. For a thorough examination of how multiple systems of oppression impact minoritized groups, see Gonzalez Van Cleve (2016) and Matsuda (1991).

12. For example, in the US states of Utah, Massachusetts, and New York, the city of Las Vegas, and in the Canadian provinces of Manitoba and Ontario.

Additional information

Funding

Angela Meadows is supported by a SSHRC Banting Postdoctoral Fellowship [award no. 411947-64696]. Marquisele Mercedes is supported by a Presidential Fellowship from Brown University.

Notes on contributors

Angela Meadows

Angela Meadows, Ph.D. is a social psychologist specializing in how higher-weight people respond to the stigma they encounter in their daily lives, whether by internalizing their low status or by rejecting and challenging devaluation, and the impact this has on them as individuals and on society. She writes on issues around weight and health for print and digital media. In 2013, she founded the Annual International Weight Stigma Conference.

Sigrún Daníelsdóttir

Sigrún Daníelsdóttir, M.Sc, Cand.Psych, is a clinical psychologist and project manager for mental health promotion at the Directorate of Health in Iceland. Her work centers largely on mental health promotion in schools and communities where she has headed several national policy initiatives. Over the past 15 years, Sigrún has written extensively, both nationally and internationally, about body image, body diversity and weight bias and contributed to numerous research papers and book chapters. She is also a long-time activist and initiated the body respect movement in Iceland in the early 2000s. She  hosted the 3rd International Weight Stigma Conference in Reykjavik in 2015.

Daniel Goldberg

Daniel S. Goldberg, JD, PhD, is trained as an attorney, a historian, and a public health ethicist. His work focuses primarily on the social determinants of health, chronic/noncommunicable disease, health inequities, and structural violence. Much of his work addresses so-called “contested” diseases that are active foci for health and disease stigmas, including pain stigma, weight stigma, mental/behavioral illness stigma, and addiction stigma. He has a background in disability studies and over the last several years has begun to work in the emerging field of legal epidemiology, which is the study of laws as epidemiologic exposures.

Marquisele Mercedes

Marquisele Mercedes is a doctoral student at the Brown University School of Public Health. Her training is focused on the critical study of weight stigma and how it impacts people in larger bodies as they come into contact with health institutions and professionals. Her intersectional analyses of these experiences are heavily influenced by fat studies, scholarship on race/ism, and sociology.