Is Fat the New Gay?

(CC) Guillaume Paumier/Flickr

And if so, does that mean we’re in for a whole new bunch of pride parades?

“Anti-obesity: The new homophobia?” That’s the title of a recent opinion piece on Salon.com by Paul Campos, and you could almost see it coming. It was preordained that some advocates of “fat acceptance” would characterize obesity as the new homosexuality, just as some gay rights advocates in the 1970s characterized gay as the new black.

Mind you, I don’t know anything about Paul Campos, other than that he is a University of Colorado law professor, and I have no interest in picking a fight with him. Certainly when it comes to being subjected to mistreatment and discrimination, the obese/gay analogy is empirically accurate. I just think it’s an analogy that Mr. Campos draws too broadly.

Rather than paraphrase his position, I’ll try, as much as possible, to let him speak for himself by quoting relevant excerpts from the article, and offering a response.

“Homosexuality” and “obesity” are both diseases invented around the turn of the previous century. Prior to that time (they were) considered moral rather than medical issues. In the latter half of the 20th century these frames were challenged by gay rights and fat rights advocates… by asserting that different sexual orientations and body sizes were both inevitable and largely unalterable, and that being gay or fat was not a disease.

Campos accuses the medical establishment of “pathologizing” homosexuality and obesity and then offering bogus “cures” for what are natural conditions for a segment of the population. I can go along with him up to the natural part. To begin with, it is precisely the “inevitable and largely unalterable” factor that constitutes a fork in the road for homosexuality and obesity, the former being more genetic than volitional by about a 9 to 1 ratio, the latter being the reverse in about the same proportion. Unless, that is, you assume that the number of persons carrying an “obesity gene” has roughly tripled in one generation, but don’t try selling that hypothesis to a geneticist.

Campos notes that gay rights activists have successfully challenged the “disease” label when applied to homosexuality, but charges that “fat rights activists still deal with a public health establishment that…advocates ineffective cures for an imaginary illness.”

What he calls the “public health establishment” does not, that I can see, regard overweight as an illness to be cured but a condition to be treated — a condition which in many cases is in fact alterable, and which if left unaltered has been shown to contribute to a variety of actual diseases, several of them fatal. The analogy that comes to mind involves AIDS. Homosexuality is not a disease, but unprotected sex between gay males of brief acquaintance is a common form of disease transmission. Obesity is not a disease, but the diabetes, stroke or heart attack it can help to produce clearly are. Both homosexuality and obesity carry with them specific risk factors for serious illness, and are thus of legitimate concern to public health officials.

The extent to which either one’s sexual orientation or one’s weight are chosen states is minimal. With rare exceptions, people cannot intentionally alter either their sexual orientation or their weight in a long-term way. Telling fat people they ought to be thin is about as helpful as telling gay people they should be straight. Indeed, the most striking parallel between attempts to turn gay people into straight people and efforts to turn fat people into thin people is that both almost invariably fail. The various “cures” advocated for “obesity” have been demonstrated again and again to be every bit as ineffective as conversion therapy has been shown to be for “homosexuality.”

This is where Campos’ position is most vulnerable: with his repeated claim that the obese individual, like the homosexual, has absolutely no choice in the matter. But that simply doesn’t square with reality. In fact, obesity is, for a significant number of persons, very much a matter of choice, or at least a matter of a countless little individual choices made over time. And fat people do successfully choose to no longer be fat. It happens all the time. It’s not easy, and the success rate may be discouragingly low, but there are plenty of successes, and for every Oprah and Kirstie Alley you toss at me, I’ll come back with an Al Roker or Mike Huckabee or Al Sharpton.

Those examples exist because, unlike one’s sexual orientation, one’s weight is clearly neither inevitable nor unalterable. I think the author also errs in comparing weight-loss programs to so-called “conversion therapy,” which presumed to reprogram or “cure” homosexuals, and which the author rightly dismisses with the contempt it deserves — because it was nonsense and doomed to failure. That’s precisely why you can’t lump it in with Weight Watchers and the Atkins Diet and a number of other rational weight-loss programs: They can and do work, and have for tens of thousands of people.

It is true that fat people are at a higher risk for certain diseases (although the extent to which higher weight correlates with increased mortality and morbidity is greatly exaggerated). But trying to, for example, lessen the prevalence of diabetes by eliminating “obesity” makes no more sense than trying to lessen the prevalence of HIV infection by eliminating “homosexuality.”

But that’s not what we’re talking about. We’re talking about lessening the risks to one’s health, not eliminating a human condition. In the case of homosexuality, that doesn’t mean eliminating sex, but engaging in sex sensibly and in a manner not likely to harm oneself. In the case of obesity, it doesn’t mean fasting, but eating sensibly and in a manner not likely to harm oneself.

Clearly there are cultural parallels between homosexuality and obesity. For example, I certainly don’t mean to minimize the prejudice and discrimination and open antipathy that the obese encounter on a regular basis. But it simply doesn’t equate with that encountered by homosexuals. We are talking about two distinct and different human attributes, each with its own set of cultural burdens. On the one hand, for instance, gays have traditionally been able to conceal or at least not manifest their particular “offense” to the world, in contrast to obese people, who don’t have that invisibility option. On the other hand, there are no laws prohibiting fat people from marrying other fat people. Well, unless they’re gay fat people, of course.

To them, my heart goes out.

(By Robert S. Wieder for CalorieLab Calorie Counter News):

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Is Fat the New Gay? is a post from: CalorieLab - Health News & Information Blog

Source: http://calorielab.com/news/2012/09/04/is-fat-the-new-gay/

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