Society preaches kindness – unless you're fat. Why is this the last acceptable prejudice? | Kate Manne

It shouldn't be controversial to expect equal treatment in education, employment and healthcare - whatever the size of your body

I've been fat my whole life and in the early 2000s, I discovered fat activism. It opened my eyes to just how badly fat people are mistreated and subjected to widespread discrimination: in education, employment, and healthcare, just for starters. But many people of my liberal and progressive ilk simply haven't caught on: the kindness we preach doesn't seem to extend to people who live in larger bodies.

It's not just my impression: hard data backs up how entrenched fatphobia remains in society. When it comes to race, skin tone, disability, age and sexuality, both conscious and unconscious bias against marginalised characteristics appears to be on the wane, according to research undertaken at the Harvard department of psychology. There is one notable exception: body size, which was the only form of unconscious bias that is actually increasing. And conscious bias towards larger people was found to be decreasing the most slowly of any of the categories investigated.

Kate Manne is an associate professor at the Sage School of Philosophy at Cornell University. Her books include Entitled: How Male Privilege Hurts Women and Unshrinking

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.