Society preaches kindness – unless you’re fat. Why is fatphobia still on the rise?

Plus-size model Tess Holliday, who has appeared on the cover of Cosmopolitan, which sparked a debate about fatphobia. Photograph: Jordan Strauss/Invision/AP

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.