UC-Davis Creates ‘Weight Stigma’ Guide for Students to Make ‘Fatphobia-Free Spaces’
“non-polarizing language about bodies and food”
Is this really what college has become? Safe spaces to fight fatphobia?
Campus Reform reports:
UC Davis offers ‘weight stigma’ guide so students can ‘create fatphobia-free spaces’
The University of California, Davis (UC Davis) offers a Weight Stigma guide on its Student Health and Counseling Services page in order to combat “fatphobia.”
”Weight stigma,” according to UC Davis, is discrimination against those “perceived to carry excess weight,” and appears in “many areas of life,” including employment, education, housing, public transportation, and more.
The guide offers tips to mitigate the stigma on both personal and societal levels.
According to the university, individuals with bodies that are “perceived to be smaller” should “[r]efrain from giving unsolicited diet or fitness advice,” “create safe fatphobia free spaces” including the use of “non-polarizing language about bodies and food,” and correct others that may be “displaying weight bias and using harmful language.”
Meanwhile, individuals with bodies that are “perceived to be larger” may take action by letting a healthcare provider know about weight bias and “seek[ing] out safe spaces where larger folks can be seen and feel acknowledged.”
In order to fight “weight stigma” on a societal level, readers are encouraged to “[s]hop at size-inclusive clothing stores,” “[i]nclude larger bodies on marketing and communication materials,” and “[p]etition for weight-inclusive training and care for healthcare professionals.”
Additionally, the guide discusses the Body Mass Index (BMI) measurement system, claiming that its “effectiveness for people of color has been debated, because it was developed based on a sample of white, European men.”
Per the guide’s ‘Terms and Definitions’ section, the word ‘fat’ is an adjective which “can be used by someone to describe their own body in a liberating way,” while ‘fatphobia’ is defined as “the fear and/or hatred of fat bodies.”
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Comments
Seems to me those resources would be better spent encouraging their students to be healthier and lose weight.
That would hardly qualify as ‘fear and/or hatred of fat bodies’, would it?
As a fat guy. A very overweight, fat guy. I am this is ridiculous. I don’t want personal attacks on any one person. But I’m not gonna live in a pretend world either I need to be healthier and it’s great that people will be willing to remind me of that. No person overweight is served by living in some fairyland.
Here’s a better idea. Stop stuffing cookies into your mouth and lose the weight.
When you encourage the continued growth of Studies of the Intersectionally Oppressed, here’s where you fetch up. There is now an academic specialty called Fat Studies. And, yes, those who are into Fat Studies want to make medical doctors stop encouraging patients to lose weight.
You could say that by hatching Fat Studies, Critical Fill-in=the-Blank Theory has reduced itself to the absurd.
And maybe it can’t get any more absurd. Except there is still some noise about making an oppressed group out of “minor attracted persons.”
Continued growth…fat studies…I see what you did there,
“non-polarizing language about bodies and food”
“More Songs About Buildings and Food”
“Stop Making Sense!”