Gone are the days when ‘fat’ was used in a negative way to shame someone who is a plus-size person. T’is the time of ‘fat-positivity’ and the San Francisco Department of Public Health is all for it!
The San Francisco Department of Public Health has hired a self-described "anti-weight-based discrimination" expert to consult on "weight stigma and weight neutrality." Virgie Tovar, the author of 'You Have the Right to Remain Fat" and other published works on "fat positivity and body acceptance" announced on her Instagram Monday that she was hired to consult for the department, calling the collaboration an "absolute dream come true."
Tovar wrote, “I’m unbelievably proud to serve the city I’ve called home for almost 20 years in this way! This consultancy is an absolute dream come true, and it’s my biggest hope and belief that weight neutrality will be the future of public health.”
However, it is unclear what role Tovar will play within the department. The San Francisco Department of Public Health did not reveal much about details of Tovar's consultancy.
Who is Virgie Tovar?
Virgie Tovar, born in 1982, is an American author, lecturer and weight-based discrimination speaker. She writes about fat acceptance, and anti-fat bias, and was the host of The Virgie Show (produced by CBS Radio) and the Webby-nominated podcast, Rebel Eaters Club (produced by Transmitter Media). Tovar has received Yale's Poynter Fellowship in Journalism.
Tovar has struggled with weight issues since childhood. In middle school she struggled with an eating disorder.
Tovar completed her bachelor's degree in political science at UC Berkeley and master's degree on "How Fat Women of Colour Queer the Feminine" in Sexuality Studies at San Francisco State University.
In 2013 Tovar criticized the American Medical Association for classifying obesity as a disease.
Tovar began the #LoseHateNotWeight campaign to highlight the impacts of diet culture and educate people about the importance of ending weight-based discrimination.
Tovar has advocated for legal protection against weight discrimination.
Tovar is an ongoing contributor for Forbes and was the host of the Webby-nominated podcast, Rebel Eaters Club, produced by Transmitter Media for three seasons.
What defines Tovar?
Tovar’s website lists her as a ”plus-size Latina author, lecturer, and leading expert on weight-based discrimination and body positivity with over a decade of experience.” She is also known as someone who “covers the plus-size market and how to end weight discrimination at work.”
As per the same website, in 2011, Tovar completed a Master's degree focused on the study of how weight-based discrimination impacted lifelong gender trajectories in women of colour. After building an academic foundation at the intersections of body size, race and gender, Tovar left academia in pursuit of creating solutions for and working closely with individuals impacted by weight bias.
In 2012, she edited the anthology Hot & Heavy: Fierce Fat Girls on Life, Love and Fashion (Seal Press). In 2013 she started the hashtag campaign #LoseHateNotWeight, and in 2018 Tovar gave a TedX talk on the origins of the campaign.
She's the author of You Have the Right to Remain Fat (Feminist Press, 2018), which was placed on the American Library Association's Amelia Bloomer List, The Self-Love Revolution: Radical Body Positivity for Girls of Color (New Harbinger, 2020) and an interactive book, The Body Positive Journal (Chronicle Books, 2022). Her most recent project, a living digital memoir on Substack titled Fat Girl Gets Married, chronicles the experience of being a plus-size, anti-diet bride in the year leading up to her 2024 wedding.
Tovar has been named one of the 50 most influential feminists by Bitch Magazine. She has received three San Francisco Arts Commission Individual Artist Commissions, the Inspire Award from Project HEAL, as well as Yale's Poynter Fellowship in Journalism. Virgie has been featured by the New York Times, Tech Insider, BBC, MTV, NPR, and Yahoo Health. She lives in San Francisco.
Tovar and her activism:
Tovar has been vocal against diet culture and BMI metrics on her social media platforms. In a video posted by Project Heal, Tovar discussed how medical professionals pressured her to lose weight since she was a child and that she had falsely believed they were doing so with her health in mind.
She said, “I really believed that this was about my health. I really believed my doctor was right and so I was using the language of getting “better” but I was actually deeply in the throes of anorexia.”
In July, Tovar posted that she conducted a weight bias training for unidentified government workers, sharing 4 tips she taught to help decrease “stigma around food and bodies at work.”
In a separate Instagram post, Tovar held up a sign with the words “I don’t want Ozempic,” sharing that she was offered the weight-loss drug free of charge but declined it because it would not “solve weight bias.”
Her most recent articles include features about hosting a “size inclusive” Thanksgiving and alleged “fatphobia” in current TV shows. She has also been critical of the characterization of obesity as a “disease.”
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