Obesity isn’t unhealthy. Medical paperwork is violence. We’re living under fascism for fat people. All these arguments have been asserted not in an uber-woke Reddit thread—or, not only there—but at a panel sponsored by Harvard Medical School.
“Against the Pathology of Unruly Bodies” took place on September 30, and I had the pleasure of attending, via Zoom. The event featured a research-based criticism of established obesity medicine from a series of qualified experts and scientists. Just kidding. It was, instead, a bizarre panel conversation of far-left, Covid-mask-wearing activists seeking to promote—at an elite medical school—an alternative version of reality. It was also a disturbing reminder that, in some of our most powerful institutions, progressive activism is still freely eroding well-established fact.
The event was hosted by New York Times contributing writer and famed left-wing author Roxane Gay, evidently in her capacity as a visiting professor and artist-in-residence at Harvard Medical School. (I wasn’t aware medical schools employed artists-in-residence.) She was joined on the panel by the socialist writer Da’Shaun L. Harrison, a biological male who identifies as transgender and uses they/them pronouns, and whose scientific credentials include authoring the book Belly of the Beast: The Politics of Anti-Fatness as Anti-Blackness, which won the 2022 Lambda Literary Award for transgender nonfiction. Harrison is perhaps best known for going viral in September after claiming at the Socialism 2026 conference in Chicago that GLP-1 medications like Ozempic are part of a “genocide” against fat people.
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The other “expert” on the panel was activist and consultant Ragen Chastain, whose day job is essentially telling medical providers that the assumption that obesity has severe negative effects on overall health—which is the consensus of U.S. and global health authorities—is wrong. This is a core tenet of “fat positivity,” the movement that united to reframe obesity not as a disease but as another laudable identity in the diversity rainbow. Partly in response to the brutal weight shaming and utterly unrealistic body standards of the early aughts, it gained traction online in the late 2000s and early 2010s, moving from corners of the internet like Tumblr and ultimately making its way to magazine covers and elite media outlets. But alas, the science still doesn’t seem to have drawn the conclusions desired by the fat positivists. And so, they persist.