After Years of Writing Anonymously About Fatness, I'm Telling the World Who I Am?

I was in an argument with a friend.

In an otherwise unremarkable conversation about our relationships to our own bodies, I held that the relationship I have to my own body was always formed first by others’ perceptions of it, and that thin people’s struggles with body image, while real and understandable, were less of a fait accompli than that of their fat peers. My friend insisted this was minimizing to thin women, like her, who had eating disorders. (I did not tell her that fat people, too, get eating disorders; that a persistent hunger bloomed into disorder in my ribcage even as we spoke.)

It was a respectful conversation, never personal or acrimonious. But we both left that conversation feeling profoundly unheard.

So I wrote her a letter. I wrote it passionately, pleadingly, painfully, hoping desperately to convey just how different our worlds were, how much I wanted to be there for her, and just how much I needed her solidarity. Once I was finished, I sent it to another friend with one question: Am I being a total bitch?

He read the letter and asked if I’d be willing to post it online.

“I’d like to share it with my networks on social media, and I bet a few other people would, too. We don’t talk enough about this stuff. You could do it anonymously,” he suggested, knowing that I’d just started a new and higher-profile job, and knowing me to be risk averse when it came to my professional reputation. I was a longtime community organizer, working with organizations built by and for historically marginalized communities. He knew, as I did, that even in progressive, social justice-oriented spaces, defending fat people could make some colleagues think twice about working with me.

Deciding to publish was a struggle. I reasoned with myself that publishing one letter anonymously on the internet would likely wind up the way most blog posts do: seen by a handful of followers, then left to gather dust. So I published the letter under a pseudonym, calling myself Your Fat Friend.

Within one week, 40,000 people had read that letter. So I just kept writing.

I anchored each essay in personal experiences of being on the receiving end of the relentless bias that follows fat people nearly everywhere. I started revisiting experiences I’d long since blocked out, too absurd to address in the moment, and too frightening and painful to remember now. I wrote about the stranger who took a cantaloupe from my shopping cart, tut-tutting that it was too high in sugar for me. The man who asked to be reseated on a plane rather than endure the fate of sitting next to a fat person. The perfect stranger at a work event who asked me, without so much as learning my name, when I started eating, and if that was when my dad left.

As I wrote, my perception of the life I’d lived began to shift. I had long thought of myself as living a charmed life, and for the most part, I did. But that perception was contingent on continuing to ignore experiences that were the direct result of anti-fat bias. These were experiences that I had excused at the time, passively accepting them as a natural consequence of daring to live in a body that was so inexcusably fat. But the more I wrote, the more I realized that I had spent a lifetime haunted by a Greek chorus of strangers, eagerly foretelling my death, proudly insisting upon what they saw as my inevitable future illness, failure, loneliness. In their eyes, I wasn’t trustworthy to manage my own body. After all, I’d already trashed the place.

In the face of such overwhelming and uniform rejection, the only path to being tolerated was to join them. They had rejected my body, so I had to, too. As I waded through my own past, I came to look at old memories in a new light. At the time of these experiences, I hadn’t done anything in the moment, not really. What could I do? According to everything I knew at the time, they were right. I was unlovable. I must be unhealthy. I couldn’t be tolerable to sit beside for two hours on a regional flight. Shame was the only option made available to me. I had internalized the logic of abuse: This is for my own good. They wouldn’t do this if I didn’t make them. Their actions are my responsibility. It’s my fault.

I had never interrogated those beliefs. I had never felt their fissures, found their weak spots. Anti-fatness was the Great and Powerful Oz, all-knowing and all-seeing. And only through the project of writing about these experiences could I peek behind the curtain, and see all that bluster and force for what it was: a desperate attempt to contain bodies that look like mine, and a sad and limiting insistence that people my size and larger simply don’t deserve to be seen, to be loved, to be respected, or even to be left alone.

So I started to look closer at the life I’d already lived.

I reexamined my schooling. I had attended a mix of public and private schools, following my educator mother wherever she taught. When I entered middle school, she got a job at a private college prep academy that afforded an 85% tuition break to children of faculty members. I remembered running the mile and reliably finishing last in my class, while the rest of my classmates looked on with disdain (or worse, encouragement), irritated that they wouldn’t be dismissed until the last student had finished. At the time, I blamed myself. As an adult, looking back, I wondered why our gym teacher had created a theater for such public humiliation.

I revisited my career in community organizing. I remembered countless coalition meetings, when progressive organizations pitched their upcoming ballot measures as a way to stem the tide of the obesity epidemic, not realizing that mine was the body they were seeking to eradicate. I thought about the years my colleagues and I spent working to make our home state of Oregon one of the first in the nation to require insurers to provide inclusive health care to transgender people. My fat trans colleagues and I spoke to lawmakers and insurance carriers, public committees and private businesses. Lifesaving health care for trans people was frequently written off as “cosmetic,” reliably pitted against something decision makers saw as more urgent: weight-loss surgery. Then, for what felt like an eternity, a room full of thin people discussed how bodies like mine should be cut up and put back together, regardless of what we wanted, so that we could look more like them. My trans colleagues’ health care—the health care we’d gone there to discuss—was consistently overshadowed by policy makers’ insistence on correcting fat bodies.

I combed back through old relationships. Dates who had said terrible, judgmental things. The uninvited men who told me too eagerly about their rape fantasies, recounting in detail everything they wanted to do to me. And I thought back on the relationships I’d ended prematurely because I believed their affection was a kindness, not a truth: that they’d taken pity on a fat girl, not that they loved or desired me.

Nearly every aspect of my life, it turned out, had been colored by anti-fat bias—often more prominently than the homophobia and misogyny I faced as a queer woman. While I had trained countless volunteers and organizers on systems of oppression and theories of change, I’d absented this, one of the most pervasive biases I face. And in so doing, I’d absented myself.

The more I wrote, the more I was willing to interrogate. Unsolicited diet advice wasn’t help, it was an act of surveillance: I see your body, I notice that it is fat, and I need to tell you that I disapprove. Correcting fat women for calling ourselves fat wasn’t an act of mercy, it was an act of supremacy. My discomfort with that word matters more than your autonomy. Doctors who refused to examine fat patients, or coldly insisted on weight loss before treatment, weren’t doing it for our health, they were acting on their own bias. Time and time again, institutions and individuals blamed fat people for their own biased beliefs and behaviors. The harder I looked, the more the logic of anti-fatness fell apart, revealing itself to be motivated by profit, disgust, or simple bigotry.

As I put my writing out into the world, always anonymously, I was consistently met with strong responses. Fat readers emailed pages at a time, pouring out the pain and trauma that anti-fat bias had wrought in their lives. Thin people sent lengthy and pained mea culpas, seeking some kind of absolution for every fat person they’d stared at gratefully, thinking at least I’m not that fat.

There was an army of trolls too. Some would proudly self-identify as trolls; others eschewed the label. It’s not trolling, it’s common sense. It’s science. But however they thought of themselves, they all wished me harm, either at their own hand, or at what they saw as the natural consequence of living in a body as horrifyingly fat as mine. Some sought to take away my self-respect. Others sought to take away my life. There were threats of physical assault, sexual assault, even murder. My anonymity moved from a simple preference to an urgent need.

But over time that simple shield of anonymity grew heavy, became too much to bear. Despite feeling more at peace with myself than ever, clearer and more surefooted in my beliefs, I found myself struggling to maintain a burgeoning second life that grew larger every day. And while my lifelong dream of writing for a living became more real, the anonymity that kept me safe became a barrier. It was a barrier to publishing what and where I wanted to publish, and to living the proud and honest life that I wanted for all fat people, including myself. The privacy I had long relied upon wasn’t just cumbersome—it was holding me back.

Even as I write this, on the eve of publishing my first book and revealing my face to readers for the first time, I am afraid.

I’m afraid of what those trolls might do. I’m afraid of the classic troll technique of swatting: calling in false reports of criminal activity to police, so that they will send a SWAT team to raid my home. I’m afraid of being hurt, being killed. On some days I remember the remoteness of this possibility. On others, the fear of it consumes me.

I’m not afraid of the silent judgments of my body from others, but of the ways they may wield those judgments to disengage from this crucial conversation about the basic needs and dignity of fat people. I’m afraid of the response from fat people, some thinking that I am not fat enough, others finding me unthinkably fat, both balking at ever having listened to me. I am afraid of thin people too—afraid that they will use their response to my body to disengage from this urgent, important conversation.

Some of those fears will come to pass. Some won’t.

Just after signing the contract to write What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Fat, I reached out to another fat writer for advice on how to weather reporters’ prying questions and readers’ inevitable disgust at the sight of me. “You’ve already lived in the world as a fat person,” she responded. “There’s nothing anyone can say or do to you that hasn’t already been said or done to you.”

She was right, of course. As fat people, we’ve already heard the worst of what nearly everyone thinks of us. After all, anti-fat bias is so normalized and ubiquitous that most of us don’t even try to conceal it. I’ve already heard and experienced it all.

So it’s time to tell you who I am. I’m Aubrey Gordon, I’m 37 years old, and I weigh 350 pounds. I’ve been waiting to meet you.

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