Tigress Osborn looks at fat acceptance and body size through a civil rights lens

GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy have changed the conversation surrounding body size in a major way.

For a long time, obesity was seen as a medical problem that needed to be solved — whether it was with old fashioned diet and exercise, or bariatric surgery.

Then there was the dawn of body positivity and plus-size fashion and the idea that you could be happy in your body at any size. But, through it all, there has also been a different kind of movement — a civil rights movement pushing for equal rights for people of all sizes.

The National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance, or NAAFA, was founded way back in 1969. It’s a civil rights organization that advocates for anti-discrimination statutes and more.

Meet NAAFA's their executive director, Tigress Osborn.

She lives right in the Valley, was named one of Time Magazine’s 100 Health leaders last year and this year released a book she co-edited called “Weight and Wisdom,” all about the surprisingly long history of the body liberation movement.

She came into KJZZ's studios to talk about it all, beginning with her own story.

Full conversation

TIGRESS OSBORN: I can remember writing a letter to the editor of a teenage magazine to talk about, like, how they should be having more celebrities like the Fat Boys in their magazine. So, like, I was thinking about it pretty young. And then my first year in college, at Smith College, I met someone who was really involved in NAAFA, a woman named Carrie Hemenway who worked at Smith and did a workshop on, like, fat liberation politics. I never remember the exact name of the workshop, but, like, literally on my 18th birthday.

LAUREN GILGER: So you knew about the organization for a long time but didn't get involved until later on. What magazine was it, you wrote a letter to the editor?

OSBORN: It was probably Teen magazine. I just remember, you know, there would be like these celebrity stories or whatever. And I wasn't always using the word fat to talk about myself, but I was identifying with fat people. And I really loved the Fat Boys, and then later, really, Heavy D.

... And you know, I was really a teenager who was thinking a lot about Oprah and her as a role model, as a Black woman and as a smart Black woman who was becoming a mogul, but also, you know, as fat representation.

And I was reading all of these teen girl magazines, and so much of them were doing what we would today call "diet culture" stuff, right? Like, "This is how you lose 10 pounds," or "This is how you don't get fat" or whatever. And I was just like, but what about these cool fat people? Why aren't they in your magazine?

And so I think I was in my late teens, early 20s, when I discovered a magazine called BBW, Big Beautiful Woman. That was a fashion magazine for plus-size fashion. And that's where I really started to see more visuals of folks who were, you know, just unafraid to be in their bodies.

And I had seen that in my own life through some of my aunts who were really creative with fashion. But on the other side of my family, I'd also seen through my other aunts, just sort of, like, a body shame and a shrinking of self expression — that it's something you need to put on hold until you lose weight.

So I'd had these sort of conflicting messages and images in my own personal life, and in my neighborhood and in my family. And I was just looking for it everyplace else. You know, I really love pop culture, and I was watching a lot of TV and movies and I don't know ... I don't remember ever getting an answer to that.

GILGER: What did that feel like when you started to see it reflected in pop culture a little bit here and there, and discovered those things?

OSBORN: It's exciting. I mean, it is exciting to see that representation, especially when it's authentic representation, and when it's not the whole storyline. Because what we started to see is, like, you get fat people in TV shows, but the storyline is about how sad they are because they're fat or ... what their weight loss challenge is like or whatever.

And when you start to see even more that's not that — that's just, like, fat people doing the same stuff everybody else does. Falling in love, having conflicts with their family, you know, trying to progress in their careers. Like just doing the same things instead of being those sort of tropes; the funny fat sidekick or some kind of, like, weird sci-fi thing about fatness. There's a lot of weird sci-fi stuff about fatness.

GILGER: Interesting.

OSBORN: But, like, it's really great to see, like, reflections of yourself ... You know, I think about teenage me a lot because we form so much of our identity around our bodies in those years. And like, what teenage me would be experiencing that's different, and what teenage me would be experiencing that's the same. In terms of, like, you know, the stereotypes and the body ideals and, like, of course, teenagers today get so much of that through social media. But there is, like, a whole wave of young fat activists on platforms like TikTok that are, you know — that are speaking up for themselves. And I wonder if teenage Tigress would have been a TikTok-er. I wonder.

GILGER: I wonder. So, OK, we have to pause for a second because you're using the word fat. And I think, you know, people are probably prickling at that, right? Because it seems like this is a word we don't use. That's rude. It's not something we talk about. This not the case for you and for many people involved in, you know, what is now called the fat liberation movement. Talk a little bit about the terminology here and how that matters.

OSBORN: We use the word fat in fat activist communities and at NAAFA specifically because we believe it should just be another neutral descriptor. You know, I'm a brunette, I have freckles, I'm fat. It doesn't have to be loaded with all the trauma that it is loaded with.

... So we do that carefully in some settings because we understand that a lot of people have been traumatized by the word. But for us, it's like a balm to use it in a way that is affirming. And even celebratory in some cases. Because it's not something we should have to apologize for or be ashamed of. It just is. It's just another physical descriptor.

GILGER: And you don't — and some people don't use words like obese, like overweight. Right?

OSBORN: Yeah. For a lot of folks who do advocacy work for fat folks, fat communities, the medicalization of fat is considered to be one of the things that really reinforces stigma. So we talk so much about fat as a medical problem to be solved and ... getting rid of it as the only path to, you know, a healthful life.

And we don't believe that that's true. And we believe that that has more to do with capitalist structures and selling you things to change your body than it actually has to do with health.

GILGER: That's interesting. Have you had those conversations with people in the medical world, I wonder?

OSBORN: Yes.

GILGER: I'm sure.

OSBORN: Yes, I mean, both as a patient, going to the doctor myself, or interacting with other health practitioners. But also as an advocate, especially now that I'm the executive director of NAAFA. And I, you know, I have had some interesting conversations with people who consider themselves obesity experts or ... anti-obesity. Like their, you know, their work is about, sort of, eliminating obesity.

And many of them have never questioned that paradigm, like, should we have ever designated this as a disease in the first place? And are there other ways to approach some of the places where body size and an illness or medical conditions do have correlations. Not necessarily causation, but correlations. Are there other ways to approach managing that, that don't reinforce this stigma?

Because we keep hearing from the medical establishment that the more that we talk about obesity as a disease, the more we will reduce stigma. Because people will understand it's not your fault.

NAAFA's a civil rights organization. So our stance is: Whatever reason you're fat, you still deserve to be treated equitably in the culture.

GILGER: Especially within health care, it sounds like.

OSBORN: Especially within health care, but within employment, within housing, you know, within government policies. Like, there are all these places where we take the approach that anything we do that makes fat people's lives easier might make it easier for them to be fat so, therefore, it might be unhealthy.

But there are people in all body sizes that have healthy or unhealthy habits, right? And you can't look at someone and tell something about their health or just put them on a scale and tell something about their health.

GILGER: So you're arguing here that you can be fat and healthy, essentially. Do you feel like that conversation is going somewhere with the medical establishment? Like you said, you have these conversations all the time. I'm sure this is the crux of a lot of the debate, maybe, around this. Are they making progress in your mind, these conversations?

OSBORN: Yes and no. I think there's sort of progress in one direction, but then there is, really — the GLP-1 one drugs are really a juggernaut in the media.

GILGER: It's changing the whole thing.

OSBORN: Yeah, in the medical establishment and in the media. At the same time, though, there are increasingly more people who are questioning the obesity paradigm and more than you sometimes might think. There's a new organization called AWSIM, the Association for Weight and Size Inclusive Medicine, that is an organization for medical professionals who want to question the obesity paradigm and who want to think about weight-neutral health care.

The Association for Size Diversity and Health, that is the "Health at Every Size" organization; and that organization is over 20 years old. So NAAFA's 56 this year. And that organization, ASDAH, is over 20 years old. So there are folks who think, like, body positivity just started two months ago or when Lizzo, right?

... And, no, this stuff actually goes back decades. There is this grassroots movement that's been growing the grass for decades and is still tending to the grass.

GILGER: So let me ask you about that because that's one of the things that's so interesting about the new book and about the work that NAAFA has done for a long time. ... How old did you say it was?

OSBORN: We'll be 56 this year.

GILGER: Fifty-six years old — but that's not even where this all began. This "fat liberation movement," whatever maybe it was called at the time ... began even before that.

OSBORN: Yeah. I mean, well, we like to credit the, sort of, individual folks, like the leadership in other civil rights movement who were fat women, especially, and especially black women in the U.S. Civil Rights Movement, where there were these folks who were really icons of that movement, who were people living in larger bodies. People like Fannie Lou Hamer and Johnny Coleman who were civil rights, again, icons that were talking about their body size as part of what they were experiencing.

It predates NAAFA.

GILGER: So let's talk about the work that NAAFA does, because it's really interesting in terms of policy especially, I think. Like you said, it's a civil rights organization; it frames this issue in a civil rights framework. Talk a little bit about the policies that NAAFA has pushed and the success that you've seen in places.

OSBORN: Well, we've always done advocacy in the business world and in the government. There are only nine places in the U.S. where it's explicitly made illegal to discriminate based on body size.

GILGER: Nine places?

OSBORN: Nine places. And unfortunately, Arizona is not one of those places. We may see some work on that developing soon. But the most recent and most, sort of, prominent win is that New York City passed a law two years ago to ban size discrimination in housing, public accommodation and employment.

Two years ago, we started the Campaign for Size Freedom with our colleagues at FLARE, which is the fat legal advocacy organization, and with some support from Dove. And, you know, Dove had this research that showed that about 34 million Americans report experiencing size discrimination every year. ... That's like if you took the 20 biggest cities in the U.S. and everybody in those cities was experiencing this form of discrimination.

GILGER: Wow.

OSBORN: And we also know that people tend to underreport size discrimination. Some of the things that happen that are really discriminatory, like wage discrimination based on body size, someone might not identify as discrimination.

They just think about it as like, you know, an individual unfair thing that happened, not part of, like a thing that happens all the time.

GILGER: That's so interesting because it does affect so many people. So let me ask you, lastly, about the broader scope here. It sounds like a lot of work left to be done in your mind. A lot of, sort of, paradigm shifting. But as you mentioned earlier as well, a lot of that has happened at this point, even in small ways.

What's next? Like, how do you incrementally make those changes? Or do you think this is something that will happen in a big way all at once?

OSBORN: I'm not sure if it will happen in a big way all at once, but I know that, you know, the next steps for us are to continue working through the Campaign for Size Freedom on changing some of those state laws. But also, we know that when we even attempt this legislative change, it creates more media stories.

And the media stories can help change hearts and minds. And the hearts and minds change is what we really need, right? Because no law can actually protect you from anything ever happening to you. What's more preventative is changing mindsets around you, so that people don't want to do those discriminatory things in the first place.

Or people think about making physical spaces more accessible to people in larger bodies, Or making products that are for people with larger bodies. Or just treating people in larger bodies with more respect. That goes, in some ways, just as far as the laws go.

... So we're always working on that, like, narrative change that, like, how can we show more of those examples of what fat folks are going through and also what fat folks are overcoming.

So it's not always the story of the discrimination. It's also the story of the joy.