Janae Pierre: I'm Janae Pierre, in for Melissa Harris-Perry.

Speaker 2: What do we want?

Crowd: Size freedom.

Speaker 2: When do we want it?

Crowd: Now.

Speaker 2: What do we want?

Crowd: Size freedom.

Speaker 2: When do we want it?

Crowd: Now.

Janae Pierre: The New York City Council may soon pass a bill intended to protect people from discrimination based on the size of their body. Here's the bill's primary sponsor, Councilman Shaun Abreu.

Councilman Shaun Abreu: I'm here this morning to declare that we're all bright and beautiful, and even if someone else doesn't think so, it still shouldn't make any difference to whether somebody can get a job, or an apartment, or do anything else they damn well please.

Janae Pierre: While this bill addresses height and weight, its impact may be most strongly felt by fat people. About one-third of American adults are considered overweight. Studies show that they're more likely to be bullied in school, stigmatized by doctors, and convicted of crimes by juries. Fat people are hired less, promoted less, and paid less, and they can face dehumanizing bias and assumptions about their abilities in nearly every sphere of life.

Tigress Osborn: My name is Tigress Osborn and I'm the chair of NAAFA, the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance.

Janae Pierre: NAAFA is one of the organizations leading the support for this bill, along with the Retail Action Project in New York.

Tigress Osborn: The three areas where it bans size discrimination are housing, employment, and public accommodations. We hear a lot of stories anecdotally, in our world at NAAFA, and the folks in labor echo these stories about discrimination based on size, comments made in the workplace, hostile work environment kinds of things, but also accessibility issues around the physical needs of folks who are larger, and whether or not their workplaces will be accommodating.

We see size discrimination show up from the very beginning of the employment process. In the interviews, when we walk in to ask for an application, in retail environments, that's an in-person environment. People are seeing you when you walk in to get that application, or if you apply online, they're seeing you as soon as you show up for the first interview. Sometimes, biased attitudes about people of larger size influence folks most in workplaces where they're going to be public facing.

Even if an employer may have no problem at all with your size, they may be still worried about whether customers will or not.

Janae Pierre: I'm looking at the other side of this. What might body size discrimination look like outside of the workplace?

Tigress Osborn: People's attitudes about larger people are based in some really negative stereotypes about perceptions of how hard we work, perceptions of whether we take care of ourselves, and what that means about whether we're going to take care of other things. We especially see that show up in housing. Concerns about whether heavier size means more wear and tear on things, which are generally unfounded. A floor is not built to only hold someone who is 50 pounds.

It is built to hold an entire household full of furniture, so, probably, my 300-pound body is not going to damage your floor. In public accommodation, we see this in everything, from people's, again, attitudes about interacting with fat people, to actual accessibility things. Are the chairs large enough to be safe and comfortable for larger-bodied folks? Are the public bathroom stalls big enough for people without having that toilet paper dispenser digging into your leg on the side of the stall?

If you are in a space that is crowded, is there ample room for you to move around the space, and is it easy to navigate the spaces? Often, accommodations are really simple. It's just a matter of actually believing that people deserve to be accommodated and be welcomed in those spaces.

Janae Pierre: With anti-fatness being so normalized in the dominant culture, how simple is it for someone to recognize what might be at the root of the discrimination that they're facing?

Tigress Osborn: It's challenging, because I think there are situations in which people will tell you very directly. I'm thinking of someone who contacted us to talk about how their landlord was receiving complaints that they were walking too heavily in their apartment, and their weight was being blamed for that. It wasn't just, "Oh, you're marching around your apartment." It was like, "That fat lady is too heavy and I can hear her walking."

Sometimes people are that explicit, because we often have the misconception, as a culture, that being impolite to fat people, or even being vicious to fat people, will help motivate them to lose weight. Other times it is just like it is with some other forms of discrimination. You know it because your lived experience has taught you to discern the difference between when someone is just unfriendly, or when someone is unfriendly because of your body, and there's more behind that.

Janae Pierre: We'll be back with more from Tigress Osborn after this. It's The Takeaway. I'm speaking with Tigress Osborn, the chair of the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance. We're talking about anti-fat bias in workplaces, employment, and public spaces, and how civil rights legislation can address it.

Tigress Osborn: It starts in our institutions, in the fact that fat bodies are not thought of in the creation of the institutions. Of course, for our institutions that have been around for a really long time to, say, for example, a public school that was built 70 years ago, it's much more common to not have been thinking about the diversity of bodies that would need to be using that space. Anything that's being built now, or anything that's being adjusted now, people should be thinking about.

A huge percentage of the US population is classified as overweight, and even if you don't like some of the ways that we measure those classifications, we still know that there are fat people in our communities. When we're creating physical institutions, we should be thinking about that. When we're creating social institutions, we should be thinking about that. What are the policies and procedures that govern who gets to be here? Are we thinking about that? Are we examining our own bias when we're thinking about that?

The way that this shows up in all of our systems, it shows up in our healthcare system, and anti-fatness shows up in the criminal justice system, always in the medical system. It shows up in education, in terms of desk sizes, accessibility in classrooms, or public bathrooms, all of those kinds of things. The attitude piece is really important, because the people who control the power of institutions, if they have negative attitudes, that has a huge impact on fat people, but the physical space piece is really important as well.

Janae Pierre: I want to get back to this legislation moving in New York City. I've seen this framed as a weight discrimination bill, and I'm wondering, can legislation like this also be helpful to others with visible attributes that are often stigmatized? I'm thinking of disabilities or gender.

Tigress Osborn: Well, 0209 in New York City is specifically about height and weight discrimination. It's height, weight, any combination of those two things, and perception of those two things is often written into the definitions and implementation, because sometimes, you could not be fat or not be short in some environment, but in a particular environment, you're considered that. It certainly is broader than just weight or fat.

This particular law is not looking at that, but in the few places, in the US, where height and weight is protected against legal discrimination, that is sometimes done as part of appearance-based law rather than just adjusting the civil rights code in general. There will be a law about appearance-based discrimination, that includes lots of other ways that people show up physically, and height and weight is just counted amongst those ways.

For example, in Washington DC, there's a law like that. There are only eight places in the US where there are legal protections that prevent, or at least address anti-fatness, six cities, then Michigan State, where it's been a civil rights law since 1979, and the state of Washington, where a Supreme Court decision, a few years ago, classified being fat as a disability. Folks with disabilities are covered by the Americans with Disabilities Act, which is a federal law.

There's no federal law against anti-fatness, or any other kind of size discrimination. In cases where your fat is considered a disability, disability law can sometimes be applied, but that's not always effective. We think that just writing size into the civil rights law is the most comprehensive way to do this.

Janae Pierre: Folks who oppose this legislation in New York have said that this puts too much of a burden on employers. What would you say to that?

Tigress Osborn: I'm not sure what they're doing in their workplaces, that they think would be a burden to change, in order to make qualified people for those jobs be accommodated, and feel welcomed. I think that when we look at the cities and states where these kinds of laws do exist, where people have already committed to this kind of equity, we are not seeing the business community in those places collapse, because there's just such an extreme burden on the system.

What we are instead seeing is people do preventative things, in order to not have to bear the costs of discrimination lawsuits. For example, often, accommodations look like things like-- Get a ladder that has a higher weight rating, or make sure your vehicles have seatbelt extenders. These are $10 fixes, $30 fixes, maybe $100 fixes. Things like be fair in your hiring practices are actually free fixes. It's not something that we've seen come up in the places where the laws already exist.

The reality is that the cost to individual fat people, and the cost to society, of having fat people who are qualified for things, or who are important members of the community, valued members of the community, like everyone should be, the cost of the absence of, depending on how you measure it, 60 to 80% of the people in your community, that seems like a bigger cost, to me, than you buying a new chair.

Janae Pierre: As we know from past experiences with discrimination, passing legislation is only just the start. What needs to happen next?

Tigress Osborn: It's always that circle. Attitudes change a little bit, so that makes it possible to change the laws. Then, when the laws change, attitudes change even more. That's part of the cycle that we're looking forward to. When the government says, "We're not going to allow this kind of discrimination," then people who've never thought about it go, "Oh, well, maybe I should think more about how I'm doing that, I didn't even realize I was doing that."

The implementation piece is really important, but the public education piece is equally important. One thing I love about the Human Rights Commission in New York City, which is the department that will oversee this law, they testified at the New York City hearing, and they talked mostly about education and implementation. They did not come out expressing major concerns about the law. In fact, no one showed up at the public hearing to oppose this law.

The Human Rights Commission, their testimony was overwhelmingly positive from our perspective, and most of what they talked about was educating the public. Educating employers, landlords, and people who oversee other public spaces, to make sure that they were behaving in ways that didn't get them landing at the Human Rights Commission with a discrimination case. We'll be happy to see not a lot of people using this law, because instead, people are using the law on the front end to inspire them to make the changes before folks have to have a grievance.

Janae Pierre: Tigress Osborn is the board chair at the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance. Tigress, thanks so much for joining us on The Takeaway.

Tigress Osborn: Thanks for having me.

Copyright © 2023 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.