Today in Fat Hatred

[Content Note: Fat hatred; child abuse; moving gifs at link.]

In news that will surprise no one who has been a fat kid, parented a fat kid, or had even a modicum of awareness about how fat kids are treated, a new study has found that physical education teachers have a bias against fat students:

The study of nearly 240 PE trainees and non-PE trainees found both had anti-fat bias, but PE teachers were almost four times as likely to hold implicit negative beliefs about [fat] children, and almost three times as likely to think they were not as clever as other children.

Study author Marita Lynagh, a senior lecturer at the University of Newcastle, said her research tested the trainee teachers for both explicit bias—that is, negative views they were willing to admit—and implicit bias, using word association to see what concepts they associated with excess weight.

"What we found was [the trainees] almost expect obese children not to not be good, even in things that don't have anything to do with physical activity," Dr Lynagh said. "They actually expect the children to not be as good socially, or with things like reasoning skills, things that have nothing to do with weight."

...About 30 per cent of the participants in the study said being obese was "one of the worst things that could happen to a child."

"In their view it was pretty much worse than dying," she said.

This is something that comes up in studies on fat hatred over and over and over: That being fat is worse than death.

There are studies showing majorities of thin people who believe being fat would be a worse fate than dying. There are studies showing majorities of respondents who believe that fat people would be better off dead.

And, as I have pointed out many, many times in this space, much of the "war on obesity" in this country (and other countries) is explicitly eliminationist and centered around promoting weight loss even when weight loss can only come at the cost of a fat person's life.

This is the level of alarmism that fat hatred has reached: There are people tasked with the education of children who believe that fat children would be better off dead.