Not Good Enough

[Content Note: Fat hatred.]

After a number of complaints, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has temporarily shelved a website called "Lean Works!" which "offered an 'obesity cost calculator' to help American bosses tally financial losses linked to their overweight employees."

The federal program drew recent criticism from some nutritionists and advocates for [fat] Americans who claimed the site and its obesity calculator fueled workplace discrimination and perhaps even led some companies to fire fat people.

...[CDC spokesperson Brittany Behm] said via email that content once posted at Lean Works! "is under review," adding: "The calculator is also under review and will be potentially updated with new information, technology."

"The recent attention to the LEAN Works! program caused us to put this part of the website at the top of the list for review, hence why it is currently down," Behm wrote. "…The potential misuse of this information is something we will certainly consider in our upcoming content review."

Not good enough. This website needs to be blown the fuck up and never even proposed as a serious policy measure ever again.

There is no sound justification for the argument that fat people are costing their employers more money, in actual dollars or productivity. (Though, coincidentally, there sure are persistent stereotypes of fat people being unhealthy and lazy!) But here is the CDC using tax dollars—the same precious tax dollars that fat people are supposedly wasting with our very existence—to build a website in order to calculate something that isn't actually happening, in order to underwrite a prejudice that will only create more barriers to employment and equal pay for fat people.

This shit doesn't exist in a vacuum. This is part of a sustained eliminationist campaign against fat people in the United States, which has seen the American Medical Association declare obesity a disease and the First Lady writing in the pages of the Wall Street Journal that fat people are a "problem is solved once and for all" for American businesses.

We are continually and dishonestly identified as a drain on society, a threat, a problem that needs to be solved. This is the language of eliminationism that has been used by privileged classes against marginalized groups for as long as such political, social, and cultural scapegoating has been documented.

There is an abundance of evidence that most fat people will never be able to achieve and/or permanently maintain a not-fat body. There is an abundance of evidence that the stress of being incessantly shamed and policed negatively affects fat people's health. There is an abundance of evidence that fat hatred kills.

And the insistent refusal of policymakers to acknowledge that evidence tells me that they're pretty much fine with that.

[H/T to Shaker MMC.]