NEW YORK — Fat is in. Tats, not so much.
Top officials in Mayor Eric Adams’ administration on Tuesday signaled support for a bill that would prohibit workplace and housing discrimination against people based on weight and height. But they offered a lukewarm response to a similar bill seeking to ban discrimination based on tattoos.
The legislation, sponsored by Councilman Shaun Abreu, D-Manhattan, would amend the city’s civil rights law to include people who are overweight, short or have tattoos as members of a protected class and would increase the liability risk for employers and landlords who make hiring and housing decisions based on those traits.
“The administration supports the intent of the bill to ensure that New Yorkers do not face discrimination based on the physical attributes of height and weight,” JoAnn Kamuf Ward, a deputy commissioner with the city’s Commission on Human Rights, said during her testimony to the City Council.
Ward offered a neutral response to the bill focused on tattoos, though, saying only that the Adams administration “looks forward to learning more about this issue from stakeholders.”
In the only other testimony offered on that bill, the pro-tat legislation also got pushback from Andrew Rigie, executive director of the NYC Hospitality Alliance. He said it would leave businesses with concerns over the appropriateness of certain tattoos open to lawsuits.
“If an employer decided not to hire or to terminate an employee with a swastika tattoo on their neck or the N-word on their knuckles or ... genitalia tattooed on their face, they would be subject to legal action,” he said.
“That provides a lot of liability and a lot of concern for small businesses that are often the target of many types of frivolous lawsuits,” he added.
Rigie, whose group represents restaurant and bar owners, said giving people with tattoos protected class status would also “trivialize” already-existing city human rights laws because those rules are focused primarily on “immutable” traits like race, national origin and sexual orientation “that individuals cannot change.”
Abreu pushed back on Rigie’s testimony and during his questioning asked if someone shouldn’t have a job if they have a tattoo of a butterfly on their face.
“No, but that’s not what this bill says,” Rigie said. “We’re just talking about the liability that exists as the law is drafted. I don’t think the examples that I gave, while they are real, anyone would want to deal with a situation where someone had one of those very offensive tattoos there, then the business to be sued it they terminated them or didn’t hire them.”
The bill banning discrimination against short and fat people got a much warmer reception during testimony before the Council’s Committee on Civil and Human Rights.
Most of Tuesday’s testimony focused on the bill’s provisions regarding weight.
Tigress Osborn, chair of the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance, said it would make the lives of fat people better.
“Anti-fatness doesn’t just break our hearts — it drains our wallets, steals our opportunities and limits our lives,” Osborn said. “We’re prevented from doing jobs we’re skilled at, from living in communities we love and from participating fully in the lives of our own home towns because people don’t make space for us, and that has to stop.”
He noted that his organization embraces use of the word “fat” as a “descriptor, instead of an insult.”
Kimberly Singh, an eating disorder dietician, highlighted some of the misperceptions that go along with being outsized and said it’s much easier to gain weight than to lose it.
“For somebody my size, the chances of me being in a quote-unquote normal-size body is 0.155%,” she said “So if I have to wait to be at that size to be treated equally, I’ll probably be waiting my entire life.”
Singh recounted how as a graduate school student with a 4.0 grade point average, she couldn’t land many unpaid, volunteer positions because of her appearance.
When she did, her supervisor expressed shock that she got the job given how other portly people who applied for the post were told they didn’t get it because of their size.
“Here in New York City hospitals, this is completely unacceptable,” she said. “In my work as a fat-positive eating disorder dietician, I see this happening day to day.”
