The Re-Rise of Fat Hate

How Fat Hatred Is Being Re-Weaponised Through Policy, Health, and Power 

It is January 2026 and we are witnessing a renewed wave of fat hatred. Not just in mean online comments or body-shaming social trends, but in policy, institutions, and state rhetoric. This isn’t simply cultural bias: it’s woven into law and public policy in ways that extend far beyond individual prejudice. It’s political. It’s institutional. And it’s getting louder. 

Fat Hatred Isn’t New But Its Expression Is Evolving

Fat stigma and anti-fat narratives have deep historical roots. Early fat acceptance movements emerged in the late 1960s with protests against anti-fat bias. Scholars see fat activism in waves, periods of resistance and backlash, much like other social justice movements.

Cultural histories show that stigma around the fat body didn’t spontaneously appear with diet culture; it evolved over centuries in relation to ideas about morality, health, race, and worth, and these ideas have been weaponised politically before.

From Stigma to Exclusion: The Language of Elimination

Over the past couple of years, we have seen a huge shift away from the body positivity movement. And now, we have moved so far beyond that. Body positivity movements are dissolving and, as a global society are, we are well into active elimination rhetoric.

An incredibly overt example of this elimitation rhetoric came in October 2025, when U.S. Defence Secretary, Pete Hegseth, publicly derided “fat troops” and lamented the presence of “fat generals and admirals” in the U.S. military, framing their bodies and physical appearance as a failure of discipline and leadership.

Hegseth’s remarks were delivered to hundreds of senior military commanders and tied fitness and appearance directly to “lethality” and military effectiveness, with an explicit call to return to the highest physical standards while dismissing diversity initiatives as distractions from readiness. This was not a throwaway insult, it was a high-level political statement that officially linked body size with worthiness to serve, normalising the idea that certain bodies are unfit not just socially, but institutionally and morally

That episode in October seemed like a preview of what was to come. In November, visa restrictions began to reflect similar exclusionary logics when the U.S. State Department issued guidance allowing consular officers to consider body size as a reason to deny visas, supposedly under a “public charge” framework that judges the potential cost of long-term care.

A similar logic surfaced in the UK in December, when a government adviser publicly suggested that restaurants should serve women smaller portion sizes as a response to concerns about public health. Framed as a “helpful” intervention, the proposal relied on deeply gendered assumptions about women’s bodies, appetites, and self-control, positioning restriction as both a moral good and a social responsibility. While less overt than border exclusions or military fitness purges, the message was clear: certain bodies require surveillance, regulation, and enforced moderation in public spaces.

This kind of rhetoric normalises the idea that bodily autonomy can be overridden in the name of health, laying cultural groundwork for more formalised restrictions to follow.

These policies and proposals don’t just stigmatise; they excludes bodies from belonging.

And these aren’t fringe examples.

The Health Discourse as a Tool for Harm

This rise in exclusionary policy isn’t framed as hatred; as always, it’s framed as health concern. That’s exactly the danger.

A wealth of research shows that weight stigma itself causes harm, including stress, avoidance of care, and worse health outcomes, often independent of body size.

Public health discourse has always been something other than neutral. It often embeds moral narratives about individual responsibility, discipline, and risk, treating fatness as a personal failure requiring correction.

But when governments use exclusionary criteria to deny basic civil rights like visas, this health rhetoric becomes a political lever.

Australia’s “Polite Violence”

Here in Australia, the fat hatred looks different; quieter, more institutional, and medicalised rather than overtly combative like in the U.S. and UK.

Just this week, the Federal Government announced it will be subsidising a brand of so-called “weight loss jabs”.

This state support for subsidisation of weight-loss drugs, that are hailed as health breakthroughs, is a targeted intervention that reinforces the message that equates thinness with desirability and health. Yet this also shifts the burden of proof onto people to prove their worthiness through weight loss.

This is not overt hatred. It’s state endorsement of thinness.

While the rhetoric may be more subtle, the effect, which positioning some bodies as deserving and others as burdens, is no less harmful.

The Global Movement That Can Resist This Narrative

Despite the rising tide of policy-level fat hatred, something unprecedented is happening: we are networked.

Today’s fat liberation activism is globally connected through online platforms, shared vocabularies, and organisations that span continents. Groups like NAAFA have been around for decades, but the current connectivity is vastly broader, faster, and more intersectional.

This connectivity is not incidental and it shapes how we perceive our bodies, share evidence, and organise resistance.

This moment is different not because fat hatred is new, but because our collective visibility and shared language make coordinated resistance possible at a scale that earlier movements couldn’t access.

What Comes Next And Why It Matters

If we do not speak clearly about what is shifting at this point in time, fat hatred will continue to escape scrutiny by hiding behind the language of health, economic burden, and “public charge.”

We are already seeing:

• state policies that exclude bodies from belonging,

• institutions demanding conformity to narrow body norms,

• and public health campaigns that equate health with size.

But the re-rise of fat hate is not inevitable. Being able to name it, trace its mechanisms, and connect it to politics is one of the first steps toward disrupting it.

While the scale of the backlash is immense, so too is the scale of our connection. Social platforms, international advocacy organisations, and weight-neutral health movements mean that when exclusionary policies appear in one country, they are named, analysed, and resisted across borders. That connectivity does not neutralise the harm being done, but it does change the terrain.

Fat hatred thrives in silence and fragmentation. Collective visibility, shared frameworks, and global solidarity make it harder to quietly erase bodies from public life.

If the re-rise of fat hate is political and coordinated, then resistance must be too.