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I have known sexual assault more intimately than I have known most of my sexual partners, both when I was being forced into boyhood and now as a fat Black trans-nonbinary person. And part of what caused me to be slow in recognizing these encounters as assault/rape is the thought that I had to be grateful. For a long time, I had not processed those abuses because I was still working past the crossroad at which the hypersexualization of Black boys and the gaslighting of fat survivors meet. There is an exhaustive history of Black boys, bois, and men being fetishized and hypersexualized because of their dicks, their “hard” demeanor, and the animalistic characteristics assigned to their being and existence. This is exacerbated when the Black masc person is a fat one or is read otherwise as “large.” While there is no clear evidence that Mandingo or warrior fights were real or used as forms of entertainment, the very idea of such a reality is always already violent because it is formulated by the belief that Black cisgender men and other Black people to whom the illogics of “maleness” are assigned are necessarily expendable and their bodies are useful only as punching bags and modes of punishment. And as we will explore later in the book, it is this that so often leads to the murder of the Black fat.

There is also a long history of fat Black people, especially Black women, not being believed when they accuse men of rape. Many are even assaulted by police when they report. So for the Black fat, which lives with the heightened fear of being hypersexualized while simultaneously never being desired, this story rests heavy in our hearts.

To this point, sexual violence is not foreign to me. What is necessary for me to contend with, however, is just how much my body being read as that which belonged to a Black woman caused me to be assaulted by the type of men who engaged me.

bell hooks defines patriarchy as “a political-social system that insists that males are inherently dominating, superior to everything and everyone deemed weak, especially females, and endowed with the right to dominate and rule over the weak and to maintain that dominance through various forms of psychological terrorism and violence.” In Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book, Hortense Spillers writes of the “loss of gender” or an altered reading of gender for Black people—particularly and especially Black women—after slavery through the “ungendering” of their body.

This made evident to me that the violence my body has long endured was the ungendering of my Being, particularly due to the ways in which patriarchy shows up through anti-Blackness, anti-fatness, heterosexism, and misogynoir—a term coined and proliferated by Moya Bailey and Trudy. Black women, while mostly described as “strong” and thought to not be able to experience pain, are still oftentimes viewed as “vulnerable” and “weaker”—the latter most often being what informs the former. They are weak because they are strong; they are strong because they are weak. They are assaulted because they are strong; they are weak, and therefore, they are assaulted. They are fast until they are slow; too slow until they’re fast. They are girls until they are women; they’re always women, even when they are girls. Cisgender men, and the way they rationalize these violences against so many bodies, are walking contradictions.

They are fast until they are slow; too slow until they’re fast. They are girls until they are women; they’re always women, even when they are girls.

It is this that forces me to grapple more deeply with my assaults. The type of men who engaged my body, who I understand as down-low (DL) and straight-assumed, still held intimate relationships with women, or led others to believe so. My body—full and weighted—waited for no one to touch it, and yet it was touched anyway. Over. And over. And over. And over again. It was engaged in such a way, in part, due to the fact that this body is and has always been removed from gender. For these men, my body provided a comfortability usually found only in “fast” girls void of any and all perceived vulnerability. Said again, my body was welcoming—even well into my adult years—because, frankly, it made these men feel that they were fucking a woman, without engaging the power dynamic therein. And this is not to say that men who are DL are into boys, nor is it to excuse the violence of trespassing against someone else’s body, but it is to say that the only need for a DL identity is to protect the masculinity of those not directly assumed to be queer while harming those of us for whom queerness is inescapable.

To provide a point of clarity: this is not intended to compare my experience to that of little Black girls robbed of their girlhood and Black women robbed of their womanhood, but rather this is to name the severity of the violences transgressed against them and the overall harm of applying gender to flesh always already being ungendered or experiencing “racialized disgendering,” as Milo Obourn names it in their book Disabled Futures: A Framework for Radical Inclusion:

Disgender is neither an assimilation to dominant gender identities, nor a complete rejection of or removal from dominant narratives of gender, but rather a way of thinking about the complex and disabling (in both the sense of limiting access and in the sense of providing a social identity and epistemically valuable way of being in the world) ways that gender intersects with our other social identities.

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In March 2004, during a news conference with widespread coverage, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) published a report that claimed that obesity was “killing 400,000 Americans a year,” and that it was becoming America’s “number one preventable death”—surpassing tobacco. The CDC defines obesity as “weight that is higher than what is considered as a healthy weight for a given height.” Body mass index (BMI) is used as a “screening tool” to determine who is and is not obese. The report was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) which, at least at the time, was the most prestigious medical journal in the nation. Since Julie Gerberding, director of the CDC at the time, and other top CDC scientists co-authored this report, it had the credibility it needed for waves of reporters and news outlets to publish it. It would soon lead to egregious and violent headlines across the nation about fat people, fat bodies, and the alarming rate at which they were allegedly dying from obesity. It would also be cited repeatedly by officials including then Secretary of Health and Human Services Tommy Thompson, several members of Congress, and creators of weight loss drugs seeking to draw attention and funding to anti-obesity efforts. From that moment forward, throughout the rest of that year, public officials and other media platforms used that report as evidence that obesity was the greatest threat facing the American people, and as justification for what would eventually become a forceful and strapping diet industrial complex. This was the start of “The Obesity Epidemic.”

There were a few public indictments of the JAMA report, starting with Science magazine in May 2004. In a report of their own, they wrote: “Some researchers, including a few at the CDC, dismiss this prediction, saying the underlying data are weak. They argue that the paper’s compatibility with a new anti-obesity theme in government public health pronouncements—rather than sound analysis—propelled it into print.” This became, at least on record, the first acknowledgment of an emerging anti-fat theme within government, health, and science institutions. Soon after Science magazine’s report, the Wall Street Journal published a story of their own that covered the errors in the study published in JAMA. On November 23, 2004, they opened their story with “America’s obesity epidemic may not be as deadly as the government has claimed.” Continuing, they wrote that the study “inflated the impact of obesity on the annual death toll by tens of thousands due to statistical errors.” On April 30, just a month after the later-disputed report was published, Dr. Terry Pechacek, who was the associate director for science in the CDC’s Office on Smoking and Health, wrote in an email to his colleagues that he was “worried that the scientific credibility of the CDC likely could be damaged by the manner in which this paper and valid, credible, and repeated scientific questions about its methodology have been handled.” After stating that he had warned two of the report’s authors along with another senior scientist, Pechacek wrote, “I would never clear this paper if I had been given the opportunity to provide a formal review.”

According to J. Eric Oliver in his book Fat Politics: The Real Story behind America’s Obesity Epidemic, Dr. Pechacek was right to worry. A more intentional look at the method the CDC used to produce these calculations indicated that the numbers were far from accurate. In his book, Oliver says:

… the CDC researchers did not calculate the 400,000 deaths by checking to see if the weight of each person was a factor in his or her [or their] death. Rather, they estimated a figure by comparing the death rates of thin and heavy people using data that were nearly thirty years old. Although heavier people tend to die more frequently than people in mid-range weights, it is by no means clear that their weight is the cause of their higher death rates. It is far more likely that their weight is simply a proxy for other, more important factors such as their diet, exercise, or family medical history. The researchers, however, simply assumed that obesity was the primary cause of death, even though there was no clear scientific rationale for this supposition.

In other words, the CDC contrived this number from an estimation after reviewing data that was thirty years old. It was never a calculated number concluded from their own intense research; it was a scientific guess made with the hope to punish fat people for their bodies. And it worked. The damage had already been done. The people and institutions who would stand to benefit from that report had already won, and it was the start of the modern genocide of fatness and fat people. As Oliver states, fat people do tend to die at higher rates than their thin counterparts, but it isn’t because of their weight. Fat people tend to die at higher rates than thin people because doctors misdiagnose them, or refuse to treat them, due to their fatness.

In April 2005, just a year after the initial report was published, the CDC released another report—also through JAMA—wherein they not only offered a much smaller number of deaths per year due to obesity, but also claimed that “moderately overweight people” live longer than people at a “normal weight.” The new report in JAMA cut the death toll to 112,000, which was well under half of what was initially reported, but the damage had already been done. Around the world, people were using the CDC’s original numbers as fuel for the war waged on fat people. The government allocated more money to scientists for research on the “harmful effects” of obesity; the number of plastic surgeries, particularly abdominoplasty—best known as a tummy tuck—and liposuction doubled in number from the start of the decade to the end of it; gym memberships skyrocketed that decade; major diet industry companies, like Jenny Craig and Weight Watchers, changed their marketing schemes, which resulted in them raking in millions of more dollars for the diet industry.

The diet industry, at the time, was already well over a century old. Americans had been dieting and trying to lose weight for decades. But with this war waged on obesity, the early-to-mid 2000s is a pivotal moment in history for the creation of this modern diet industrial complex. The CDC’s report cemented a growing belief: fat people were dying rapidly and the only solution was to kill them quicker—either through forcing them to transform their bodies or to die trying. Despite how theatrical that reads, that is what was being demanded of fat people. The goal was, and continues to be, to eradicate fatness. To do that, one was to either overinvest in dieting—which has proven to be ineffective—or die trying to reach an ideal weight defined by organizations like the CDC and WHO, either on an operating table or in a gym.