Fatphobia and Diet Culture w/ Virgie Tovar

one of my sons. And there was no question of this child on the verge of pubescence, like what's going on, why are you what are you doing differently? This is alarming. There was none of that from anybody. Hello everyone, I'm the Verne Cox and welcome to the Laverne Cox Show. On this episode, we're discussing fat phobia and diet culture. Now.

As an actress, I've been very lucky that I've worked on productions where no one's ever asked me to lose weight, and I haven't ever been body shamed in the context of my acting work. But when it comes to fashion and red carpets and magazine shoots, it's nothing very different. When I've had photo shoots, particularly for higher fashion magazines, I've gone in and there have not been closed that fit me. And I'm generally a size ten or twelve.

Occasionally I've been a size eight, but um my weight has probably fluctuated within thirty pounds since I've been in the public eye. It is very difficult not to internalize feelings of being less than because I'm not sample sized. But what changed my perspective on all of this was the work of my guest today, Virgie Tobar. Virgie is the author of the books You Have the Right to Remain Fat and The Self Love Revolution, Radical Body Positivity

for Girls of Color. She is also a contributor for Forbes dot Com, where she covers the plus size market and how to end weight based discrimination at work. Her podcast, Rebel Eaters Club investigates the North American relationship to food and body. I couldn't be more thrilled she's here to discuss this important subject matter. Please enjoy my conversation with Virgie Toba Virgie. How are you doing today, daring, I'm so good. I was just reading your piece in paper

and it's filled me with inspiration. And I really want to talk about horror movies. But whenever you want to talk about let's do it. The funny thing is so the funny thing is that in Bad Hair, the film that I talked about in that Paper magazine cover story, I play a character named Virgie. Yes, I know. It was so exciting, So I okay, so I do want to say this. I became aware of your book and then my friend Matt mcgory shared an excerpt of your book on Stagram and it stopped me in my tracks.

And the moment I saw it, I was like, oh my god, this is me. So I went and write your book immediately, and I cried a lot, and I made me think and I knew that we needed to have a moment like this some day, and I'm so excited that we're having it now. Can we start with language, Because you use the word fat in the title of your book, you have the right to remain fat. You call yourself a fat activist, but there are a lot of people out there who do not embrace the word fat.

We have where it's like curvy, we have where it's like overweight plus size. I was on Twitter one time and I used the word overweight and someone was like, that's problematic. Can you tell us in the fat Activist movement, What language do we want to let go of, what we reclaimed, what language we using to talk about this? Yeah, I think that fat really is the word that we

use to talk about bigger bodies. And there's definitely a lot of interrogation and criticis them, and you know, just kind of like critical awareness of medicalizing and pathologizing terms like overweight or obese, which are just essentially ways of medicalizing a type of body. But I think another important thing is when you are somebody who is living in a bigger body, you get to decide what language you

want to use about your body. So I think that there's a political vernacular that is useful to understand, but when it comes to the individual experience, whatever language feels right is really the language that people should stick with. And I think also there's a code switching element, right, Like I might not use the word fat to talk about myself the first time I meet somebody if I don't know where they stand on this, or if I just don't want to have a thirty five minute conversation

about whatever their attitudes about it are, right. So I think there's a lot of fluidity, there's a lot of change that's happening both on the individual and the political level, and I think that there are people who would say plus size is offensive, there are people who say fat is offensive, or even within the movement, there's a lot of disagreement, and I think that's really powerful because we're trying to create an identity in a culture where our

humanity has just been fully denied. Oh and I think that is what I hope to get across to people that reading your book, it is so clear your humanity and what this struggle is, and I hope people will go out and read You have the Right Roomain Fat. It totally changed me. But can you talk to us about that journey how you came to be a fat activist. What were some of the first times in your life where you even realized that fat was a thing and

that it was an issue. Yeah, I come from a fat family in some ways, like my journey to being a fat activist started with being born into a culture that hates brown people, hates fat people, hates women and girls, and I'm at the intersection of those things. And I think growing up I did not learn fat phobia from

my family. I learned a lot of love and self acceptance. Actually, but it was when I was about five, when I was introduced to kindergarten, when the word fat became part of my life and I had no I had no context for that word as a negative thing. It wasn't in my world before then, and then it was all of a sudden, it was everything in my world. And I mean, looking back on it, it was really lavern.

It was like an onslaught, you know. It just felt like this united front of people who wanted to put me in my place, and it just felt like they didn't stop until I mean, they didn't stop even after I had internalized the message and something was wrong with me and I was working actively to try and not be that thing. And the way that I was introduced

to it was no one will ever love you. You are ugly, you are monstrous, and like when you think about a five year old here about the idea that they're never going to get love is just it's like unthinkable, right, And so the steaks felt so high, and the thought was right, if I just became thin, the torture, the abuse would stop. And so it was my fault. It was my job then to become the kind of person

who didn't get tortured by these people. And I really took that on, that kind of ideology of like victim blaming. I completely accepted it. I had no alternative, and so I did what a lot of that people do, which is diet work really hard. I mean, the thing that's really interesting now looking back as sort of somebody who does this work all the time, Like dieting pretty much always is progressive because the body is fighting against the

impulse of food restriction. So as you diet, it might start out my old quote unquote, but it will get more intense over time because your body is actively pushing against it, assimilating reassimilating. For somebody like me, it was inevitable that I was going to end up essentially having an eating disorder, like an undiagnosed eating disorder, where I was starving myself for very long periods of time. I just want to slow you down a little bit because I told everyone to be with you and to feel

what I feel. First of all, what you just said. You said you developed a neating disorder where you were starving yourself for a long period of time. At what point did that develop? Yeah, Honestly, the first time I ever experimented with starvation was I think I was ten years old, maybe eleven. I remember it was the summer before sixth grade, and I really wanted to go back to school and have that beautiful American transformation story where I would go from this ugly duckling to this swan

like in a matter of three months. And I had seen it on so many movies it felt possible. In the book, you talk about a movie at the time, I forget the name of the movie that was your life where this transformation happened. Do you remember this? It was Greece. There are two movies like the two movies that informed my dream. We're like She's out of Control starring Tony Danza, and then Greece, like the moment where

she transforms into this total like rockabilly babe. That was gonna be my swan song or whatever, Like when I finally became a thin sixth grader, that was going to be my dance. Right. So I knew even at that time that if I wanted those extreme results, I had to take extreme measures. And I was like, the fastest way to do it is to reduce food to pretty much nothing. And I ate only like lettuce and toast

for three months. And then I remember going to my doctor after that summer and I was I had changed sizes pretty radically, clearly that's what happens when you don't eat anything. And he just said, congratulations, and if you just keep losing weight, maybe you can date one of my sons. And there was no question of this child on the verge of pubescence, like what's going on, why are you what are you doing differently? This is alarming.

There was just none of that from anybody. It really hit me when I just rewad your book over the weekend and they hit me again that story that because it was tied to love, it was tied to you get to date one of my sons if you become acceptable. And then it reminded me of another story in your book when you I think you were meant alluded to earlier when you were five years old and you noticed that this boy was looking up all the girl's skirts,

but he wasn't looking up your skirts. And I believe in the book he was one of the first people who called you fat if I recall correctly, yes, totally, And I write about this in the book that even then I felt a connection between understanding that it was no coincidence that the boy who looked up girls skirts was the first boy who called me fat, Like I completely understood the connection between gender desirability, misogyny, rape culture, and fat phobia, like intuitively as a child, and it

kept coming up from me over and over again, this desire for love and how it and we all want to be loved, right and the relationship between that diet culture and fat You can you just define for us, though, what is fat phobia and what is diet culture so people have a real understanding, because that is the piece

that really hit me hard when I read that excerpt. Yeah, yeah, fat phobia is a form of bigotry and discrimination that essentially says that fat people are morally, intellectually and physically inferior in our culture. Right now, we don't see it as a form of discrimination. We see it as an attitude that emerges out of health concerns, and there's this false belief that if we stigmatize and abuse fat people enough that they will fall into line and become like

the right kind of person um. In terms of diet culture, what makes something a culture is once and when it's ubiquitous and you can't escape it. So it's like the general messaging that's all around us every single day that weight loss at any cost is positive, that no matter what, things will be better if you are a thinner person, and that essentially the worst thing that you could be is a fat person, and anything that you can do

to not be that you should undertake it. And the diet industry has a very robust, multimillion dollar industry that is proportionately predates upon women. So that's how I would define those things. Wow. The section in your book that got me was that basically when you say that we either let me just read it and let girl let me just read it to you, you write, you write fat phobia targets and scapegoes fat people, but it ends up harming all people. Everyone ends up in one of

two camps. Is the piece they got me. They are either living the pointed reality of fat phobic bigotry or they are living in fear of becoming subject to it. And when I read that, I was like, I just I stopped breathing. I was like, because it was the fear. I was like, this fear is so real, especially for me as I've gotten older. Um in my mental is a mis slowed down and like, I ate whatever I wanted to when I was younger, and being in the public eye and having people comment on your body just

hit me. And I feel like that is the piece that I would love people to understand and take away from this conversation. That we are all implicated. And I am a little critical of the idea of a binary, but I think in the context of fat phobia and fat phobic culture, maybe that binary stands right. We're either experiencing the bigotry of fat phobia or we're in constant fear of it, and it like polices our bodies. That fear that mentality constantly has us policing our bodies. Other

people are policing our bodies. Medical professionals are policing our bodies. I want to talk about the health stuff, but I think the pain of it for me is what hits me when I read your work and when I think about my own journey around weight, body image, all that stuff. Yeah, I think to your point, we live in a culture that forces everything into a binary, and that is a

method of control. And we see the inescapability of how these binaries really impact us when it comes to fat phobia or really anything, every single person, not just the group that is the target of the stigma or the abuse of the oppression. We are all impacted and touched as human beings by the experience. If we're on the receiving end, obviously we're experiencing a very extreme version of

that impact. But the people who are witnessing and colluding, who are forced to collude by virtue of the way the system is constructed, how can their experience also not be eroded? How can they also not be impacted? And I think, and first of all, right, it hurts our spirits and our hearts and are collective whatever, like our collective unconscious if you will to be enlisted in that process.

And then I think the fear peace really is like even if you are not somebody who's on the receiving end of that today, you could be on the receiving end of that tomorrow. And the body in particular is something that does change, right, Like it changes every day. This idea that you could become a victim of it,

it's like the whip, you know what I mean? Because I think there's like the carrot side of that phobian diet culture, which is like, these are the social benefits you get if you comply, and this is what your life could look like if you don't. Yeah, And I think what's really crucial about your work is how clear it is that this is something that is systemic, right, This is something that is structural, that is enforced by

so many different systems. On this podcast and in my life, I always like to think about things in terms of structural issues and and and systemic issues. But then also where's my part in it? Where is my sort of personal responsibility in relationship to it? I eat the potential for resistance, So where is the resistance piece? And where is my personal responsibility? But I think like just making

something personal responsibility doesn't acknowledge how something is systemic. And I think thinking about it in relationship to systemic racism, which people have been having a lot more conversations about lately, it's it's a great way to begin to think about fat phobia and diet culture as something that we're all

implicated in, whether we want to be or not. Yeah. Absolutely, And I think one of the things that I think about even in my own work as someone who really does try to teach people tools on how to navigate

these systems. One of the things that's really complicated is like these tools rely on resiliency, which I mean, resiliency is beautiful, but resiliency is not going to end systemic oppression, right, Like there's over reliance upon the people who are experiencing the oppression to work their way through it and somehow

make it work and make it cute. Fundamentally, Like, I don't know what else we could do, Like, surviving is the only option we have, but it's not fair to put that burden on the people who are experiencing the oppression to also end the oppression. Hopefully we can begin to raise awareness and raise consciousness so that once we have the information and we know better and hopefully we'll do better. Time for a quick break. When we come back, Virgine and I talk about how people's concern for the

health of fat people is just an excuse to stigmatize. Alrighty, then let's just dive right back in. Most people say, is what about health concerns? Right that, Like, what does it mean to be healthy? That fat is unhealthy? That is the immediate thing that people go to when they address your work and people who are in a space

of body positivity that this is unhealthy. What do you say to those people, Darling, Yes, I mean, on the one hand, right, I do find that the health argument is mostly a decoy, and I think for me, I talking about human rights. I've always been talking about human rights.

Like if you're somebody who can look at the reality of the fact that like plus size women make nine thousand dollars less annually than their in their straight sized counterparts, when you look at the reality that that people experience romantic discrimination, are refused proper medical care, if you can kind of look at that scenario, and your primary concern coming out of that is are these people cardio metabolically healthy?

I think you've really missed a crucial point, which is that when people are being denied basic human rights and dignity, that's a very urgent issue. And so I find that, like some people actually do have legitimate concerns about you know, what are the implications of this politic But I do find that a lot of people weaponize the health conversation as a way to derail a conversation that's really about a systemic problem. And again, with the health issue, going

back to the individual versus the system. I'm somebody who has had to deep dive understanding health a lot more. I mean, that's not my area of expertise at all, but I've had to equip myself to be able to talk about it. And one of the things I often point out to people is I'm like, Okay, if you look at the CDC guidelines for health, you can easily and quickly begin to understand that health doesn't happen in a vacuum. Health is a collective thing that happens, right.

Health is something that you have when you have access to a doctor, when you have access to transportation, when you don't have trauma, when you're not abused, when you don't have to live in fear of whether someone's gonna hurt you when you leave your house, And that very individual argument of the individual is responsible for having good

heart health, living a long, good life, right. And we have a system where there's no universal healthcare, there's not even universal access to clean water, and we're looking at a rollback on resources for women's health, you know. So for me, I'm like, what does the word health mean to you? Even the c d C understands that health is a community based entity. Individuals don't create that on

their own. And I think the last thing I'm gonna say is actually have two more things I want to say, Like, one really compelling piece of research that I found was that the chances of a woman who is classified as overweight becoming a normal weight is less than one percent. And that's like looking at all of the studies. And then what happens with dieting with food restriction is that

people don't actually lose weight. They actually cycle through gaining and losing, regaining and losing the same amount of weight over and over again, with a longitudinal trend upward. Can I sell you down there? Because I want you to say that one more time because I think that everybody knows that's the truth. That is the truth. We know that. Yeah, I mean a lot of THEO will call it weight loss, but it's actually weight cycling. And what's really hard is

this is something that people don't realize. And again, if you've been in this cycle, you know it is like the emotional ups and downs are very damaging. Right, Dieting is correlated with anxiety. Depression is not correlated with long term weight loss. I think that's what people don't realize. And so what happens is like the emotional process of you lose the weight, you're so happy, everyone's telling you

how incredible you look. Maybe that person you've been flirting with all of a sudden wants to like hang out right, And then you gain the weight and you feel like a failure and you feel like your world is ending, and you feel like something's wrong with you, and you begin to evaluate and those compliments go away. And if you can imagine that over a lifetime, how many times that happens. It's very, very debilitating. But I think what's interesting is from a social perspective. I mean, it really

is like bootstrapping and assimilation. It's like that American dream of I can make myself anything if I work hard enough. And so you're in that cycle over and over again, and each time you think this is gonna be the time,

this is gonna be the time that it works. I think what's interesting is this process of disappointment success disappointment success that keeps us believing that all these other process is in our culture that don't fundamentally work because their social injustice built into the system, like it normalizes those processes too. So we do capitalism with our bodies through diet culture. We do white supremacy through diet culture. Right.

I love that. What I want to emphasize about what you just said, the aha that I just had, is that whether or not someone is healthy is actually none of our business. If we're lucky enough to have a doctor, that's between us and our doctor. Dealing with someone else's health should not be my concern. All the people out there who want to sort of police people's bodies and say they're unhealthy, and then because they're unhealthy, we should shame them, we should stigmatize them. That is what we

need to let go of. Yeah, And I think another thing when you were talking, I was thinking about this finding from a U c l A professor named Janet Toma Yama. She did this meta study, which is essentially like looking at all the studies that are in that area of findings, and she found that there were over seventy million Americans who were either fat and were misdiagnosis unhealthy,

or sin and misdiagnosed as healthy. And this has like these incredible implications, right because right now, both socially and medically, the biggest way that doctors understand health is by visually checking are you thin or are you fat? That's literally like the most important factor in whether or not a doctor is going to ask how are you eating? How are you feeling? Do any tests around your blood sugar? Do any tests around whether you have high blood pressure?

They just look at a thin person and think, oh, that person doesn't have high blood pressure, and they look at fat person and say, oh, that person probably does. I think, really what has become clear to me is that this approach is both bigoted and it's anti scientific. Right, It's not like there's it's not winning on any front. You know. Wow, It just makes me think about so

many issues with our healthcare system and how that's another conversation. Wow, virgin, So you alluded to white supremacy, and I love the ways in which you talk about the relationships between sexism, patriarchy, fat phobia, white supremacy, classism. Can you break down some of those intersections. Yeah. I think for a long time I thought diet culture and fat phobia were really about beauty ideals, because that's still the dominant idea that somebody

who is fat or thin. It's about whether they're beautiful or they're not beautiful, But like when you really unpack it, you begin to see that it is totally attached to all of these very very ingrained systems and ideologies that make up like the West and the United States in particular.

And I think for me, one really big breakthrough was around understanding that dieting was away that people of color could express a desire to be in line with an ideology that white people really promoted, and that Americans in particular promoted, And just seeing that even in my own family, Like you know, I grew up in an immigrant family from Mexico, and I saw that dieting was a way that they could perform American nous, and I saw that they undertook it as a way to be socially legible.

They had internalized the idea that weight loss was a positive thing, but more than that, it was a way of fitting in. And I think this actually leads really well into gender right, Like dieting is a way that women have been socialized to create intimacy, like our body dissatisfaction, that moment in front of the mirror, that moment when we're going to the bakery and we're like having that experience of, Oh, my god, should I shouldn't I? That's so evil? Right? Am I going to be good? Am

I going to be bad? That is a way that women have been taught to create friendship. And I think what a distorted, disgusting like shaming and being anxious about food should not be a thing that people are expected to bond over. But that's kind of the reality that

we have going on. Like I mean, like my academic background is actually in sexuality studies, and as I was doing the work, I was being introduced to all these historical figures, right, and like two of these really incredible historical figures, interesting I should say historical figures were these really intense anti masturbation advocates who, like in the eighteen hundreds were just obsessed with everybody not masturbating and and they were like legit like haten pleasure. The stuff that

they were proposing was like really intense. But the whole idea was, you know, you shouldn't masturbate. Respectable white men had to have control over their sexuality. Okay. Then I become like interested in studying fatness and food and all these kinds of cultures around dieting and stuff, and these same dudes resurface. They're also clean eating advocates. These anti masturbation dudes who hate sex are the same people who are promoting clean eating. And all of a sudden, I

was like, hau, what's that about. That's weird, that's an interesting connection. But it all came together in my head. I'm like, right, you gotta control how you eat, you gotta control pleasure. All forms of pleasure have to be controlled. Why because you had to be distinguishable from the savages who you were enslaving and murdering. Right, So it's like, okay, yes.

So this idea was like, these Europeans come and they meet indigenous populations, and these Europeans have these extremely Christian puritanical views, and these native folks have a much more spiritual, much more integrated, holistic They don't believe in private ownership like in general, and there's not taboos around sex. And the way that Europeans begin to rationalize they're essentially what will become a genocide is to say these people are

subhuman and how do we know? Because we have this discipline relationship to our animal selves and these people do not the same as true slavery, colonialism, slavery genocide. Right, This kind of like trifecta behaviors really relied upon a rationalizing ideology that said, some people are subhuman and we can take everything from them, and we can kill them with impunity. And some people are superior and they get to not only rule the world, but they get to

rule the future. And I kind of think like this is like what manifest destiny is really about. I think what's interesting about that connection between like white people owning the future is sold. You can kind of see it.

It's ripples in diet culture all over the place, but like one of them is the preoccupation with the future self, right, the idea that someday, I'll be able to wear that skirt, Someday, I'll be able to wear that elliptic Sunday, I'll be able to smile in photographs or do that thing I

really want to do in the future. And I think that preoccupation with the future has a real connection with that manifest destiny kind of ideation of maintaining a future that is white, that is slender, that is athletic, that has all these sort of characteristics. Girl, you have just said a mouthful, and like my mind is sort of racing this whole of in the future. When I'm thin enough, right,

then I can begin my life. In the last half, you have a book you talk about freedom, and you talk about what freedom is, and that you thought at that dieting and thinness were freedom, and you learned that

they're quite the opposite. And I kept thinking about those what Renee Brown calls the prerequisites to worthiness, and Renee Brown, it's a shame research or who I have referenced all the time, and she defines shame is the intensely painful belief that we have about ourselves that we're unworthy of connection and belonging. She says that guilty is I'm sorry I made a mistake, and shame is I'm sorry I am a mistake. So as I was reading your book, I was just like, oh my god, this is shame.

This is just like one two threes of shame. And she said, the way with that we bill shame resilience is to understand when we're in shame. And so knowing the prerequisites to worthiness is our way of knowing our shame triggers right. The prerequisites to worthiness, I e. I will be worthy when I lose twenty pounds. I'll be worthy when I change my hair or get this degree

or whatever. And the beautiful thing she says in her work is that worthiness has no prerequisites, that worthiness is a birthright, that we are worthy because we were born. And so building shame resilience is about letting go of all those prerequisites and diet culture and thinness. For me, it's it's certainly been one of my big prerequisites to worthiness. I will be ready when and having to consciously let go of that on a daily basis. Some days I

do better than others. Yeah, absolutely, I think that that preoccupation with a future self. I remember reading a study that actually Dove did around the percentage of women who opted out of important life events because they didn't feel like they were satisfied with their bodies, right, Like, what do you call that? Just even saying that just brings chills. That is dehumanization completely, And I think going back to a colonial concept of ghosting, right, the idea that like

these people are still here, which you're pretending they're dead. Um, Like, can we talk about indigenous people as if they don't exist anymore? And I think a lot about how diet culture is ghosting us. We're not here. The bodies that we have right now are imperfect and therefore they shouldn't exist.

And how do I know, because this body doesn't even be deserved to be documented, like this idea that you don want to even be photographed, like you don't want to have you don't want to get married, you don't want to go to the prom, you don't like, you don't want to do these things that are important markers not only of societal participation, but that have really important

meaning for people. You don't want to participate in them as a fat person, as the person that you are right now, means that you don't want to be like documented in history. And I just think there's something so intense about that realization and that kind of like that process of just waiting around for you to be the kind of person who is worthy enough to be documented, to have joy and all of those things. You know, it's so sad, it's so sad. Is their way out?

What is our resistance? What is the thing that we can do as individuals to begin to free ourselves, to do colonize ourselves, if you will, from a culture of fat phobia Yeah, I think that there's so many things I want to start with sort of like the highest order thing, which is that we can imagine something different.

Like one of the most powerful things that people can do is actually envision what would And there's this thought exercise in the book where I'm like, imagine a world where you don't feel like there are any conditions to enjoying food, to wearing the clothes that you want, to going after the relationship that you desire, to expecting more from the people around you. What if there were no conditions? Right?

And I think what's powerful we when we imagine we create space, and the collective unconscious we create space in the universe. I do believe that there's that sort of metaphysical power, and so I think that's like a labor that we can all easily do that's so joyful and beautiful and fun. And I think what's hard that when we live in a culture that is so steeped and oppression, one of the most heartbreaking parts of that is that, like diet culture, it kills our spirits, It kills our

ability to imagine a world that could look different. And when we resist that and we say, like I'm an imaginative, creative human being who can literally imagine like different structures, a totally different way that society functions, a totally different way to engage with the world, a totally different way.

To date, we have that power. I just want to pause you there because I love the idea of that, and I love the idea of doing it collectively, right, and then we can maybe begin to change this distance because we have to visualize at first, we have to be able to see it, and then we can create it. So I just wanted to pause on that, because I think that's really powerful. Go on, Virgie, I think that

actually dovetails perfectly. You know what I was just going to say, which is like, when we imagine, we create the tools to build it, right. I mean, I can give you tactical tools right now, and I want to give tactical tools, like some basic ones that help us navigate the culture as it exists right now. But what's so incredible is that the tools that we need to build that gorgeous future, they maybe haven't been built yet, Like maybe that somebody listening is going to build those tools.

I don't know, And I think that's what's so rad is that there's innovation on that other side, But like tactically, I think it starts with really beginning to ask yourself, what are the things in my life that I feel I have to do and do they bring me joy? What do they give me? Almost like that Marie Condo sort of ideology, where it's like, if you want to have room for new stuff, you've got to make the room. So it's like, what are you going to let go

of in order to create that other thing? And I think in terms of like diet culture and actually engaging with like food, for instance, I think it's important to begin to really stop engaging in moralizing like this food is good, this food is bad, this food is evil, like all these kinds of things, like these things actually have age or impacts not only on our psychology but

the people around us. Right. One of the most astonishing things that I found when I started working with women was when I asked them, I was like, where do you experience the most triggers? I was shocked that they set the workplace. It was just this constant sense that they couldn't eat their lunch without somebody watching or saying something or commenting. They couldn't have a birthday cake for

their coworkers that everybody like losing their minds. What I want what they brought up for me is a moment in your book when you I think you were at a conference and how how culturally sanctioned it is to shame, culturally acceptable to shame fat people. So our fear of being on the other side of that derision. I think often for those of us who may have found ourselves, you know, shaming or dehumanizing someone who's fat, that comes up our own fear and trauma around being on the

other side of that. Yes, yeah, it's it's a really shitty way that we create a sense of belonging, right, like we're in this group and you're not, and like survival is tied up in that mechanism. Like if we're not on the other side of that, we actually are feeling the sense of relief. And it's it's just really intense right to think about it that way. And I think really, like when you're thinking about fat shaving or transphobia or homophobia, the ubiquitous kind of punchline groups, you

really can tell. I can tell people don't even hear what they're saying. They have been taught this is completely acceptable and it's completely harmless. And I think that taking that moment to sort of interrogate, to sort of have that reflective moment and being aware that you do have power and what are you going to do with that power? I love it. It's that time again. Coming up after the break, Virgie and I get into the social effects

of fat representation on runways and social media. Okay, we're back, Let's keep the conversation going. Do you think there's been progress in terms of representation and when we see models like Ashley Graham and test Holiday? I mean, do you think visibility is helping? Visibility is you know, an interesting trap. I think for trans people we've been very critical of that. Do you think things are getting better? Yeah? I really do.

I'm a very hopeful person. I'm somebody who thinks that fat shaming could be a thing of the past in my lifetime. I really do so. Yeah. Absolutely, I think that, like the representation piece is really important, and I think that it's, like you were mentioning, it's got like a shadow side for sure, because what it does is it creates another beauty ideal sometimes which could be its own trap. But when you think about Test Holiday, you think about

Ashley Graham. These are people who emerge through a groundswell demand that we really began to see that had a platform finally on social media because for the first time, fat people were like, actually I have a PhD. Actually, this is me looking super cute. Actually I've got fourteen booze actually right, Like you know, it's like if you

can see it, you can be it. And I love that saying because I think, at the end of the day, right before all this happened, the only possible image of a fat person was somebody who you did not want to be at all. And I think that like when we create these Ashtagram or test Holiday or any number of the people who are really popular, like it really matters because they're creating a space in which dignity, beauty, autonomy,

and style are possible for fat people. And that, I mean literally, that is revolutionary in a culture that has only ever really seen and represented fat people as abject and pathetic and ugly and evil dignity and being beautifully human.

Oh my gosh. So okay, one other thing I wanted to bring up because I was thinking about the intersections again of colorism and racism and sexism and then men because my friend Matt McGorry I mentioned earlier is the reason I write your book, and he's done such beautiful work around talking about masculinity and fat phobia and expectations around what men's body should be as well. That this isn't something that just affects women, it's something that affects

all of us, which we've said here. But can you talk a little bit about I guess that men and then um, colorism. Yeah. I think it's interesting because my work is definitely focused on like women and feminine people. But what I have found when I've done research, like the first people who were pathologized around weight weren't women. They were men, and they were specifically Jewish men. It

was considered like a Jewish disease among men. So yeah, so the anxiety really rested in the sort of masculinity to begin with, and then I really think that as the twentieth century in particular unfolded, it became an issue that was more a feminine issue. Um. But yeah, one of the things that I noticed when I was researching how fat phobia intersected with masculinity and with men for

the book was. I was really compelled by the fact that fat men were also experiencing misogyny and sexism, because one of the biggest concerns that people seem to have with that men is not about necessarily health or beauty. It's about feminization. It's about the fact that, like a fat man's body is a soft body. And I think it goes back to the gender binary, right, like this idea that I have to be able to tell exactly

if you are masculine if you're feminine instantaneously. And I do think that fat men and fat women to be fairly blur that line a little bit, right, because like fat women are in the domain quote unquote in the dome to masculinity through our largeness, and fat men are in the domain of femininity due to softness. But like the memes that I kept seeing as I was doing the research were three that that really like really astonishing

in some ways. Like one was like the meme of fat men having breasts, which again it's about gender anxiety. The second most common one was around the invisible penis, the way that the stomach covers the penis, and again it's about feminization. And then the third one, which was really bizarrow finding was that there was this study that I would argue it is very poorly done, but it was about like this idea that fat men lasted longer during intercourse because they had more estrogen than thin men.

And so again estrogen, which is like this totally misunderstood hormone right, Like it's connected to women in femininity and our culture, and this idea that like fat men have more of it and all of it just pointed to really, fat men are experiencing both fat phobia and also misogyny. Um. And so it was fascinating to realize that intersection was

so clear. And in terms of colorism, there's an incredible scholar named Sabrina Strings, and she wrote a book called Fearing the Black Body, and it's all about how fat phobia and anti blackness are essentially the same thing, I

mean the same thing. Yeah. So she talks about how when Europeans landed on the shores of Africa to essentially enslave people, that they saw these big bodies and they made the connection between the big bodies, their blackness, and this untamable animalistic nature that couldn't be disciplined out of a person. Um and I have to name check another really incredible scholar, day Shawn Harrison, who is writing a

new book called Belly of the Beast. They write about the fact that there's a really explicit connection between fat phobia and police violence and murder of black men because a lot of the black men who have been murdered by police, and some of them been boys, were fat, or they were bigger people. And I think there's this really intense moment, for instance, give me a second, give me a second, give me a second. Yeah, I have to read that one in I just go on. I'm sorry.

I wanted to hear everything you're saying, but I just thought about Eric Garner, and yeah, I mean I think like I've been in the weeds with um doing research around this, and I've been going through that cycle to

uh to speak about Eric Garner. So one of the reasons that the police officer who murdered Eric Garner was exonerated was because the NYPD union lawyer argued that he died of obesity related cardiac arrest and that if he had been a healthy man, that he would have survived a choking maneuver, which is just like so vile, and

so I mean just so disgusting. Um. But like you know, when you're talking about anti blackness, any kind of largeness exacerbates anti blackness because blackness is considered a threat in our culture. Anything that adds any component of largeness, whether it be body fat or height or any number or even like even volume, right, like even like sound, like the sound of my voice, the sound of my laughter,

or largest is not just about physicality, it's metaphorical. And so any kind of largeness is going to be experienced in our white supremacist culture as a further threat. I mean, excessive force is not exclusively for larger, fat black men, but like that element creates a sense that like you get to be extra extra aggressive and violent and murderous.

And I think that maps onto the reality that fat people are already always seen as capable of handling more emotionally physically, right, and and the same is true black people.

It's essentially a form of dehumanization. Um. And I think the last thing I want to say on that is when you think about the literal ways in which dark skinned boys, um have been targeted by police, there's also this component of that is shared between anti blackness, and that phobia, which is the phenomenon of adultification, right like, essentially the projection of an adult like level of understanding,

level of you know, responsibility, control, and potentially malice. And you see how that combination becomes deadly in certain cases. That was so deep and so necessary to hear. I'm so glad to ask you about that. Thank you for that research, Thank you for sharing that. I like to end the podcast with the quest, and then the question is what else is true? And this question comes from the idea of both and that yes, there are things that are challenging in the world, but what else is true?

And this comes out of my somatic therapy of resetting my nervous system, and specifically it's a kam out of what else is true in my body? Right that if I might have anxiety, and I might feel that anxiety in the pit of my stomach, where in my body is a neutral or positive And if I can focus on what's neutral and positive, I can reset my nervous system. I can reregulate. Right, So I like to ask people what else is true? So virgery right now for you?

What else is true? I think? Right now I'm thinking about the relationship that I have with my cactus is I feel um, I started with one cactus named Lumpy, and I feel like we have this like I feel like they teach me the grounded nous and like the joy of being round and prickly. So that's gonna be my what else. That's what else is gonna be. That's that's what my what else is true. I love that your relationship with your cactuses that help you embrace being

round and prickly. That is absolutely brilliant. That is absolutely brilliant. I love it, and I love you, Virgie, and I'm so utterly excited we got to have this conversation that was so brilliant. I love you. Um. Can you tell the folks where they can find you? What else you got going on? Yes? Um, so I'm pretty active on Instagram at Virgie tovar v I R g I E t O V as in Victor A R. And I also have a podcast called Rebel Eaters Club and you

can check out my books. You have The Right Term in Fat, which is an audio book and a digital book and a physical book, and also The Self Love Revolution, Radical Body Positivity for Girls of Color. YEA, thank you so much for thank you have a beautiful rest of day. Bye. I love Virgie Tovar, and I love this idea that Virgie spoke about around imagining something different, that perhaps one of you listening out there will have the idea the innovation to move us closer to a world without fat phobia,

without discrimination and stigma. If we can imagine it, we can create it, we can manifest it. Here's to a world where worthiness has no prerequisites. Thank you for listening to The Laverne Cox Show. Be sure to subscribe and rate us. You can also follow me on social media at Laverne Cox on Instagram and Twitter and Laverne Cox for Real on Facebook. Join me next week as we talk about moving beyond the gender bineering with internationally known poet, writer,

and performance artist a local Baide Minute. Until next time, stay in the love. The Laverne Cox Show is the production of Shondaland Audio in partnership with I Heart Radio. For more podcasts from Shondaland Audio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.