Tanya Barlow is a multi-disciplinary artist and podcaster, and the owner of Hello Tanya. She’s contributed to Ensemble before, exploring beauty, size-inclusivity in fashion and Lorde.
Your Fat Friend is not just a documentary about the charming and prolific fat activist, writer and podcaster Aubrey Gordon. It’s also a must-watch documentary about fatness, anti-fat bias and parental dynamics.
Made by UK filmmaker Jeanie Finlay, it opens with a voiceover from Aubrey: “Just say fat. Not ‘curvy’ or ‘chubby’ or ‘chunky’ or ‘fluffy’ or ‘more to love’ or ‘big guy’” or ‘full figured’ or ‘big boned’ or ‘queen size’ or ‘husky’ or ‘obese’ or ‘overweight’. Just say fat.”
Within the first minute of watching the film (which streams on DocPlay from today), I felt seen, safe and heard. Having a pre-existing parasocial relationship with Aubrey, I was exhilarated for what was to come; arriving at the screening a big fat fangirl already.
“My aim is to provoke people to question the things that they always thought were true,” Aubrey says. “I want them to change the way they treat fat people in their lives, and that starts with recognising that all of their judgements are based on faulty and cruel ideas.”
Occupying and existing in a fat body is inherently political. There’s a sense of trepidation that lies beneath the surface at all times, a hare-trigger hotspot of defence, waiting for – sometimes expecting – judgement. But Aubrey’s sentiment is the crux of Your Fat Friend. It’s about questioning judgements you might not have thought of, and things you’ve been afraid to look directly at: how you speak about your own body in the company of others, to your parents, to yourself. Allowing grace for people in your life, especially family members, to question old beliefs, and reflect on how to move forward.
Director Jeanie follows Aubrey through moments over the span of six years, from anonymously sharing her experiences as a fat person in her humorous and candid writing as Yrfatfriend, to gaining traction and notoriety and navigating horrendous trolling and doxxing. We watch as Aubrey navigates spaces like the supermarket, with a voiceover telling us how a woman once told her to remove a melon from her cart as it had “too much sugar”.
She shares the experience of flying on a plane as a fat person. “Fat people are shown on planes all the time, obnoxious, elbowing, taking up space, Cheetos crumbs. Our whole existence is designed to make you miserable.” There was a quote that shook me, as I realised I was unconsciously doing exactly what she was describing, right there in the cinema: “One arm holding the other firmly over my chest so I will make no physical contact with the person sitting next to me. I am watched and judged harshly as I try and fail to fit into a space made for someone else.” I choke back one of many sobs.
Intercut with stunning cinematography (a tender and loving gaze of Aubrey’s body submerged in water), moments from her life (childhood videos, her first book deal, the beginnings of Maintenance Phase, grappling with no longer being anonymous at her first author event) and thornier milestones (conversations with her separated parents Pam and Rusty) knit together a full picture of life not just as a fat person, but a fat person with complicated relationships, career success and internet trolls.
In the first conversation between Aubrey and a wary Pam, we learn that her mother hasn’t read all of Aubrey’s writing as it’s “hard on her heart”. They reflect on how the strongest bonding women have is talking about how much they hate their bodies. “If you feel that way about how you feel about your body, how am I supposed to feel about mine?” asks Aubrey. Pam reflects, “I think that’s how it gets passed along.”
We witness other difficult moments through Aubrey’s eyes: Father Rusty’s girlfriend Zach using air quotes to say the word “fat”, mentioning she has beautiful skin (a classic fat trope) and a Thanksgiving dinner where someone at the table joyously announces that they should “turn your scale 15 pounds” and “I’m going to regret this tomorrow morning”.
We see a parental dynamic that is flawed and real, and a rare thing: parents capable of change. In the last moments of the film we see Rusty as a proud dad at Aubrey’s author event, boasting to his seat neighbour, “I’m her father”. We witness Rusty, tears in his eyes, seeing Aubrey maybe for the first time, realising the genuine impact she’s made on people’s lives. Aubrey reflects on her parents’ changing attitudes. “Pam and Rusty are doing the thing! They’re asking themselves, ‘I’m not sure I got this right. Is this what you need?’”
The documentary closes with another voiceover from Aubrey. “Fat people have spent their entire lives changing to fit the world around us. You could be the one person that we don’t have to change in order to be with. You could be the one person who’s like, ‘it’s okay, I don’t care. What can I do for you?’”
Throughout the screening I attended, there was laughter, murmurs of agreement, frustration and empathy, sniffles sprinkled through the poignant moments, and rapturous applause at the end. There were giddy debriefs afterwards, and a desire to make everyone we know and love watch this documentary. It was healing, anger inducing, thoughtful, beautiful and full of jumping off points for us all to start having uncomfortable conversations. What a joy. Fat joy!
A week later, I was lucky enough to have some big fat Zoom chats with Aubrey and Jeanie about the film, fatness, diet culture and feelings. I wore Miss Piggy T-shirts to both: one saying “Glam Ham” in honour of Pam (also known as Ham, Hammy, Hambino) for Aubrey, and another with a collage of Miss Piggy outfits with ‘Chappell Roan’ spelt out along the top for Jeanie.
I fangirled over meeting Aubrey. We had matching drink bottles, and took a break to introduce each other to our dogs, Finn and Delilah. She urged me to watch the Miss Piggy clip Snackcercise. Jeanie was thoughtful and candid, telling me about how she’d been spending time with a friend from New Zealand and always wished to visit. I had one glorious hour full of belly laughs and commiserations with each, and while I tried to ask similar questions and compile our chats accordingly, good conversations always wander… Enjoy highlights from our chats, below.
Tanya
How did Jeanie find you? The serendipity of this project and capturing these incredible life changing moments on camera, it feels unbelievable.
Aubrey
She got in touch right around the time that I joined Twitter [in 2016]. She had read the first few pieces that I had written, and reached out. She was working on an essay film and wanted a writer, and asked if I would consider working on the voiceover. She was flying back and forth to the US quite a bit for her work on the Game of Thrones documentary. And once you're in the US, it's really a hop, skip and a jump from LA to [Aubrey’s hometown] Portland. She came up, we did some test filming and the conversation developed from there.
But I was cagey – I had a caricature of a reality show producer, master manipulator, ‘the trap is set!’ kind of person. I had had conversations with other potential collaborators, as anybody does at any point in a career like this. So many of them had been thin people who were like, ‘I'm here to learn’. Which is great and fine. But it was meaningful in a deep and different way to have a fat person directing.
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Tanya
Aubrey mentioned that this was originally a film essay project that transformed into something else?
Jeanie
I really believe you should follow what the film's telling you. The majority of the films I make are because they're stories I really want to tell; they're independent in that I go and raise the money, and I find the form that it's going to take. At the beginning of this project, I'd convinced myself that I was going to make an essay film about the history of dieting, or the way that we view fatness in society right now.
The film critic Roger Ebert said that documentary films can be an empathy machine. Aubrey says it in the film: facts and figures don't move people. Human stories, small details, messy family drama, those are the things I'm interested in.
So the film evolved. I knew I was going to do something about fatness, and when I met Aubrey, I strongly knew I wanted her in the film. There was this moment where she sat at her kitchen table and she read aloud the piece that brought me to her. There was this big difference between this vulnerable inside voice that she used to reveal her writing, and this very loud, Muppety voice with which she usually greets the world, and I think that's interesting to occupy different voices. She was going to be a voiceover but as soon as I met her family it was like, oh ok, this is the film.
Aubrey was becoming this unlikely figurehead, a surprise activist. She didn't seek that out, but when she could see it was working, she leaned into it. But just because you're changing the world doesn't mean that your family gets or understands it. They're proud of you, but it doesn't mean that they see you. That's a very long answer to say that the film's about her being seen, by her family.
Tanya
I was so moved by it. I'm glad that you reached out to her, and that it turned into this whole other thing. The serendipity of you starting this journey with Aubrey together, you couldn't write this: capturing these massive moments on camera, like getting that book deal... Did you feel like you won the lottery?
Jeanie
Making documentaries is like being a time traveller. If you follow small moments in real time, they do add up. There's a momentum to them so you trust the process, and I guess the liberation of working independently means that I can follow the curves in the river of whatever's going on. I made a film called Seahorse, about a trans guy, Freddie McConnell, getting pregnant and having a baby. And although I knew that he might have a baby and that he might get pregnant, you head off on a journey but you're not sure what the scenery is going to be like. With Aubrey, we had no idea what was going to happen but I just kept filming.
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Tanya
Thank you for saying yes to Jeanie. I can't properly express how seen I felt throughout your film.
Aubrey
That's so kind of you. I will say that is so deeply the work of Jeanie Finlay. I just show up for a while and she asks me a bunch of questions, and then seven years later, there is a film. She was so incredibly thoughtful about how to make a film that held space for all of the different viewers who had come to it, but particularly for fat folks. The thing that most filmmakers don't do or think about: how will fat people feel?
Tanya
Exactly. I think that tone really comes through, because at no point was there any element of pity or a cautionary tale, or anything seen in a negative light. That was so healing. I can't even believe how few positive examples of fat representation we have in the media.
Aubrey
Man, oh, man, I feel you on the scarcity in media stuff. We were originally premiering this documentary at Tribeca as the world was abuzz about The Whale. We are still very much living in a time where the representation of fat people that we see is not actually a representation of fat people's lives. It’s thin peoples’ fever dream of what they think it must be like: the terrible fate of being so terrible. When that's the only kind of representation that you get, it teaches people that when they see a fat person, what they are seeing is another meatball sub shut-in. I'm not into it. There are as many fat stories as there are fat people in the world, and we've gotten to tell exactly one of those stories, and we should get like, 5000 more – absolutely, way, dramatically more.
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Tanya
I wanted to talk about the stunning cinematography. I loved all of the juxtapositions of Aubrey and landscapes, and the water running over rocks. The gaze was so tender and loving.
Jeanie
Thank you. I wanted to film Aubrey with main character energy. We had a discussion early on where she said, ‘you can put the camera wherever. I'm not always going to be ready, not going to always have makeup on or my hair dry, but you can film me in whatever way you want’. Once you've untethered yourself from the idea of the flattering gaze, you're a lot more liberated. And because this isn't a film that relies on two camera talking heads, you can throw a lot of that out of the window. It's much more about being with someone.
But I kept thinking about her writing and about bias as the water that we all swim in, and the action on the body and how we reflect that. The Pacific Northwest [where Aubrey lives] is a particularly distinct area of the world. It's lush and rains constantly; a bit weathered. I was thinking about the process of how weathered you are, hearing stuff about fat bodies in the media, in person, on the street, from people that you love – how that wears away at you, and how that could work visually.
This is all stuff that the audience doesn't need to know, but they should feel it. It should feel intentional.
I filmed the social media insults that Aubrey gets, projected onto her wall, because when people say horrible stuff, people go, ‘it's just words’, or ‘it's just the internet’. It's not the internet, it's the phone in your hand, which is close; it's in proximity to your body. It's bleeding into the walls of the environment where you live. So I wanted to see how we project that in, cos it feels intrusive, it comes into your home.
Tanya
As yuck as it was, I am glad that you included that. I think it was important to show that kind of trolling in the context of a human being reading and experiencing that.
Jeanie
I think it's life threatening. If you are someone with anxiety, and that's what you're seeing when you pick up your phone, it's a terrible thing. It felt important. The audience of this film isn't just fat people, it's not just the fat community. I want parents and thin people to sit with their discomfort at some of the stuff because often comments that people hear come from people that they love.
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Tanya
I want to talk about your parents Pam and Rusty. How poignant to watch so many things happen in the relationships between the three of you. You can feel the resistance in both of them at the top of the film, and seeing their own biases come out even in the face of your own work that you're trying to fight against.
Then watching them grow, question and reflect and then, proud and crying. It felt so healing as a fat person to watch, because I think so many of us crave for our parents to reflect on how they might have treated us or treated and talked about their own bodies. How was that for you?
Aubrey
It’s really wonderful. My take home point is that as a fat person, you learn that there's a lot of people who can't be trusted with your body. For me, and many fat people, I have developed a particularly sensitive trigger to that. But one of the most profound learning experiences from this film was that I had really underestimated my parents, and not given them enough credit. There's this default way of talking about parents as being sticks in the mud.
Tanya
You can't change them.
Aubrey
I can't teach an old dog new tricks, and other idioms. I think there is this way of being like, ‘Oh, my parents are never going to come along on this’. I came along for the ride on that way of thinking and talking about parents, and it's not true. Had I taken more space to reflect and challenge my own assumptions about what my parents were capable of, I wouldn't have short changed them and in turn, shortchanged our relationship. I was really nervous about the film affecting our relationship in a negative way.
Tanya
There is the sense of defensiveness, at the very beginning – ‘what is this going to be about?’
Aubrey
Are you doing an impression of my dad? Because you nailed it. Mum was a tougher get. We filmed over the course of six years, and the first three, she said, ‘I'm not going to be in the movie. I'm not going to do any filming’.
It was through knowing Jeanie for multiple years, she went from zero to 60. She was filmed a couple of times and all of a sudden, was like, ‘I don't know why I put her on diets’. She had this incredible breakthrough, and so much of that is a credit to the relationship that Jeanie built with my mum. They still catch up and chit chat.
Tanya
I wanted to ask about how your parents feel about things now, especially with the response to the film. How do they feel watching and reflecting on it, and hearing so many reactions from people watching them change?
Aubrey
There was a period when we had seen the film but it wasn't out in the world yet. And I had told them that they were going to be the stars. I think going to the actual screenings and seeing people's responses was like, oh, wow. I had been like, you guys are going to be it. Not just every fat person, but every person with a body and parents, can benefit from a conversation that's like, ‘did we nail this one? I'm not sure we did’. And [my parents] are the ones doing it, and doing it on camera.
Ok, mum story. We had a wonderful, raucous stop in Glasgow on the tour where our emcee led the crowd, apropos of absolutely nothing, in a chant of ‘fuck Weight Watchers’. Everyone kept going ‘ ‘fuck Weight Watchers’ for two minutes solid. And my mum was like, ‘yeaaaah!!!’ She was very into it. After the show, we were in the car and I asked her who she was texting. She was messaging a little recap of having a great time, at an incredible event, with the crowd chanting. Then I looked at who she was sending it to, and it was to her friends who are on Weight Watchers. Look at you, you little troll!
Tanya
That is delicious. I love that.
Aubrey
Isn't it just? She has gotten to the point where her friends will start talking about what they can and can't eat, and she goes, ‘Oh, guys, you're more interesting than that. What else can we talk about?’ A 76-year-old lady shutting down diet talk!
Tanya
The capacity to change, the capacity to draw boundaries!
Aubrey
Truly incredible. I told my brother the other day, the boomers in our life are lapping us on personal growth. We are getting left in the dust. We gotta do something big and quick. This cannot stand. It's been really extraordinary.
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Tanya
I want to talk about the ‘beautiful skin’ moment with Zach, and the Thanksgiving scene with all of the editing and timing of mentioning those things and then showing them happening in real time. That really solidifies that it’s not just about fat people. It's also reflecting on the people in fat people's lives who are having unconscious bias, who are saying these things to our faces, to Aubrey's face.
Jeanie
My editor Alice Powell is brilliant. The edits are really long, and we leave a breadcrumb trail to some bits and pieces. But the intention is always to allow the audience to view the world through Aubrey's eyes. That's what I want people to do, ask themselves: What would it feel like to hear that? And have you said that?
Love is imperfect. We're all flawed. We all get things wrong, even when we're trying to do the right thing. The thing that I hope audiences take away from the film is that Pam and Rusty are boomers. I think it is easy to write people off, and say, that's it, they're done; they're dead to me. But actually, Rusty and Pam really love Aubrey and they're trying their best. They've done things wrong, but they're trying to do it right. Sometimes it's like a zipper that doesn't quite fit, the teeth are all there but they don't quite connect; sometimes it takes a few goes.
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Tanya
I love how the film is one beautiful invitation to an uncomfortable conversation. Especially when people are scared of the word fat. I really relate to when you describe yourself as fat, and people are like, ‘noooo, you're not!’
Aubrey
Baby, this is indisputable. If your eyeballs are functioning, you can see it. If your hands are functioning, you can feel it. There are so many ways that we can confirm, fat person, yes.
Tanya
How do we invite people who are scared of that word, who associate that word with being baddies, or lazy, or whatever. There was one line in your film in regards to your book launch, where you were saying you are afraid of thin people, and that the response to your body would be an excuse to not engage with these conversations. Does that also apply to the documentary?
Aubrey
That's always a worry, that is easy to misconstrue as insecurity or anxiety. I would invite folks to think instead about how many times fat people are treated as unreliable narrators of our own bodies and our own experiences. That's where that fear stems from.
If you’re having a discussion on the news about quote, unquote ‘obesity’, there will, as a matter of course, not be any fat people on that panel. There will, as a matter of course, be comments on the bodies of fat healthcare providers, period.
I think that's where that comes from. Less from a place of, ‘oh no, will people not like the way that I look’, but much more from a place of, ‘oh no, will people wrongly assume that they can deduce my character from my appearance?’
Which is some real old world, garbage thinking. That is some real utter trash, garbage rationale, and it's something that a lot of us reflexively do because it is happening so constantly around us.
Tanya
Yeah, we are brainwashed into thinking that fatties are the baddies.
Aubrey
Not the good baddies.
Tanya
I love this. I'm obsessed with this.
Aubrey
How was your experience at the screening?
Tanya
I cried so much. I was bawling. It was an audience full of fatties and also straight sized-dies. I left feeling that everyone needs to see it. I left feeling like I wanted to screen this for my mum.
Aubrey
Oh, my godddd. The other thing I will say that has been utterly remarkable is the number of people who have seen the film and then gotten in touch to say, ‘I realised I owed my kids an apology, and I gave it to them’.
Tanya
How do you not cry anytime someone gives you that kind of feedback?
Aubrey
Every mum email is a crier. That is what I have learned. Every email from a mum will make you weak. As a rank and file fat person out in the world, it is easy, reasonable, and maybe the only conclusion to draw, to get a little hopeless sometimes. I am finding myself having overcorrected in the hopelessness direction. Seeing folks’ response to not just what they see in the film, but to rising to the occasion in their own lives. So, be a better friend, be a better mum, be a better sibling, be a better whatever – Doctor. I am honest to god at a loss for words, for how meaningful that is.
Tanya
There are so many teachable moments in this film. There are so many parts that I could lift out and put into conversation: the montage of the diner seats, the buses, the plane seats, theatre seats, things that people don't think about, fat people in those situations. And that line, ‘nothing is made for us. We are never expected.’ I feel like this hasn't been communicated in a way that wasn't kind of like, ‘well, you should fit in here’. It's more like, why? Why not?
Aubrey
Yeah, totally. Well we're now 20 years into being awash with statistics about, ‘oh my god, the world is the fattest it's ever been!’ And it is bananas to me that even with that knowledge, we have not changed our approaches to building things.
It's not just a question of equity or access, it's a question of, are these people good at their jobs? If you're making a chair that can only hold 150 pounds, I question how good you are at making chairs. There's a core job function where I'm like, ‘hey, man, can you not make furniture that holds actual humans at their actual size?’ Maybe time to go back to the drawing board.
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Tanya
At the Auckland Q&A, you mentioned “luxury bitch”. I wanted to ask more about it.
Jeanie
That's what the original film was called, Luxury Bitches. I liked the idea of treating people with main character energy: she's a luxury bitch. She deserves all the good lighting, the care and attention and tenderness – not in some crappy ‘because I'm worth it’ way, but in a ‘you’ve earned this’ way. You need this. We all need this.
Tanya
I love that. Aubrey and I talked about Shrill and the canon of pool parties and fat babes, and the use of water in the film.
Jeanie
The reason why you see Aubrey's swimming lanes is because initially I thought I wanted to get her in water, but I didn’t want it to be like ‘pool party and the fat canon’. Aubrey was an athlete, and she no longer swims. So what does it feel like to have a swimming pool to yourself and to swim lanes in the pool that you trained in as a teenager. That felt like a really different opposition.
Tanya
Those shots of her coming out of the water were so powerful. It’s this powerful energy: this is who I am. You shot Aubrey, and this film, so beautifully. I want everyone to see it.
Jeanie
Oh, tell everyone!
Tanya
I intend to! I love that in the film, Aubrey does bring up so many things that I think perhaps a lot of straight-sized people might engage with because it feels safe for them – things like wellness, the body positivity movement. A line that really stuck with me was, ‘you can't love yourself out of oppression’. It felt so powerful to shine a light on them, especially because, you know, body positivity is bullshit.
Jeanie
It's a marketing slogan. Well, it's nice to love yourself. That's great, but will it make your doctor's appointment go better? Will it make them have a cuff that's going to fit your arm? Will it get you a promotion? I think that it's a mirage. It feels like a slogan to sell fatkinis to small fat women.
It allows brands to feel like they've done a bit of body diversity. When I initially did my first year of research, I found a lot of things that were on the edge of body positivity, and that was not for me. The thing that really sealed the deal with Aubrey was because she was anonymous. We weren't talking about fashion, like fast fashion. The fashion can be a distraction, because I think I wanted to talk about what it feels like to be in a fat body, but also, how does that show up in the world? I like clothes, but it's not enough to make a film about. Well, it's not interesting.
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Tanya
I really enjoyed when you talked about dieting rebranding as wellness, because it is so sneaky. There is so much Jedi mind trickery happening. People are being scammed.
Aubrey
Totally. And it is super sneaky. But it's also not at all sneaky, because what they're almost all doing is going, ‘our diet isn't a diet’. Well, you just said the word diet twice. So yeah, my hackles are maybe up. My radar is going! This isn't a diet, it's science, which is how every diet ever has branded itself. Yeah, right. Like nothing else works, but our thing…
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Tanya
In that same vein of diet and rebranding as wellness, I really appreciated your line about the idea that you can’t love yourself out of oppression. Oooof yeah, that really got me because I definitely have engaged in that kind of culture of, ‘well, if I love myself enough, maybe the world will treat me better’. And it's kind of like, oh wait!
Aubrey
The only thing that has changed is I now have a very clear understanding that I actually deserve better and I'm not getting it. It's like a hell of my own making!
Tanya
Wait, even if I love myself, the world fucking doesn't still!
Aubrey
And no matter how much I love myself, going into the doctor's office this morning? Yeah, I still am seeking healthcare in a country where a commanding majority of healthcare providers hold really significant overt, admitted anti fat bias. Love yourself all you want, but you still have a one in five shot of getting a doctor who thinks you should have the care that they're providing. You know what I mean? It's not great out here, team.
Tanya
The idea that you have to earn the healthcare that you deserve by losing half of yourself, or whatever. It's kind of like Sisyphus…
Aubrey
Totally. It's extra ludicrous in a country where you're paying hundreds to thousands of dollars a month for healthcare. We're paying so much for you to be a jerk.
Tanya
There were so many Spiderman meme-pointing moments in the film. There was a line about how we learn to become useful. We build a charm offensive, and we learn to disappear ourselves. Being the fat friend, I definitely relate to this so much. You learn to be inoffensive and charming and funny and bubbly, and there's also an element of bringing in the ‘beautiful skin’ thing. It's always like, you have such a pretty face. Your hair has got to be beautiful. You smell good. You're building this armour of, don't say mean things to me.
Aubrey
We were talking earlier about how fat representation teaches everybody how to look at fat people, and I think that includes teaching fat people how to look at ourselves, in a way that is often really limiting. Recognising my own things that I think of as core parts of my personality, as also maybe a maladaptive coping mechanism for a hostile world, has been one of the more uncomfortable [realisations].
Tanya
Humour alone – you're building up that muscle of, ‘well, I'm going to be funny, so you can't say shit to me’. I'm going to make a joke before you can say anything bad. You can be like, I'm funny, charming, smell good, beautiful skin.
Aubrey
Beeeeautiful skin. A sparkling personality, yeah.
Tanya
It's a Jedi mind trick. Please treat me with respect, please treat me like a fucking human being.
Aubrey
Even more than that, there's that get you through the day stuff. In any flavour of relationship – family, friend, romantic, whatever. I have had so many conversations with fat friends and colleagues about being hyper aware of what your value is that you're bringing to a relationship and being like, ‘I have to provide something here in order to be worthy of this’. I have to make this person laugh, or I have to, like, pay for things for them.
Tanya
I've definitely been guilty of that. I'm a former people pleaser, a former overly generous person, because how else will people find value in me if I'm not providing something for them?
Aubrey
I think it's easy to read that as an individual problem of self esteem, or whatever, without really grappling with the large scale monolithic messages that are telling us, ‘this is the limit of the fat people in your lives’. What is their utility to you? Jesus fucking hell. There was an article in the goddamn motherfucking New York Times a couple years ago during Covid lockdowns that drew upon this data that people love to draw upon that says, if you have fat friends, you yourself are more likely to be a fat person. Hey, another way of saying that is, fat people like to be around other fat people. We're not out here making you catch fat.
Tanya
We're not contagious!
Aubrey
What kind of logic is this? I am also a fat person who also read that article, right? When you read that as a thin person, maybe you think, good point, or maybe you think, this article's bad, or maybe you think any number of things. When you read that as a fat person, you're like, what is about to happen to my friends? This is seriously the argument, people are too fat to have friends? I think people see one single, solitary Lizzo, and think we've really made it. But we’ve got a long way to go.
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Jeanie
There's so much bias that is held generally in society about the motivations, abilities and identities of fat people that need unpicking. There's been decades of work by fat activists, but I hope that this film will add to public conversations to help people unpick what that means. Aubrey probably spoke to you about the New Zealand immigration policy with BMI?
Tanya
She didn’t!
Jeanie
If your BMI is over a certain limit, you basically can't immigrate to New Zealand. There's a BMI weight limit because of the implication that you'll be more of a health burden on healthcare resources. Obviously these aren't things that I'm addressing in the film, but these are things that I hope that the film can open the door to discussions about.
I think that if you see fatness as a disease that can be fixed, it creates a barrier in your mind in terms of accepting people in the present tense. My greatest desire is for people to be accepted in the present tense, in the bodies that they have right now – not some fantasy future one that is a Sisyphean diet or an injectable away. That seems like an incredibly terrible barrier. Fat people have always existed, and they always will.
Interviews have been edited and condensed for clarity
