Illustration by Olivia Thomson

In 2021, Aaron Beaumont decided it was time to create more queer connections in New Brunswick. While doing their undergrad at St. Thomas University in Fredericton, Beaumont’s work in fat studies led them to learn more about fat activism online. After realizing that most groups were based in the U.S., and the few Canadian groups that existed were decidedly not in New Brunswick, Beaumont took matters into their own hands.

They created QT Fatties, a mostly online, and sometimes in person, community for queer and trans fat folks living in New Brunswick. Four years later, it has transformed into a space Beaumont had been dreaming of: one where trans fat folks across the province can connect.

QT Fatties uses Discord to plan both virtual and physical events geared towards other fat, trans queers. They’ve hosted clothing swaps and art markets, and have had online monthly meetups. They’ve also run mutual aid fundraisers for people in need of gender-affirming care.

Sam Walsh, who does administrative work for the group, explains that their Discord channel is where most of the community gets together. “There’ll be messages in the Discord sometimes like, ‘I want to do this. Anyone available to meet up and we can just hang out?’ Which I think is really awesome. It’s changed from being all on Aaron organizing, to being a little bit more community based.”

Beaumont founded the group in the hopes that more queers could find and help each other navigate being fat and queer in a largely rural province. “There was no activism happening in the province, more specifically, [around] accessibility. By that I mean clothing, gender affirming items, access to healthcare. All of the things that are already hard to access in this province—but you add body size and fatness on and that makes it more challenging,” they explain. “So, I wanted to make some of those things free and supportive and more accessible for folks.”

Walsh also says it was important to have a group based in the Maritimes, since a lot of resources are based on the West Coast. “Having something that’s local, where you’re able to connect with people that are in the Maritimes is really nice because some of the experiences that we’re dealing with are a bit different. Particularly when it comes to the medical system or accessing gender-affirming care.”

Some of these needs, Beaumont explains, stem from much of New Brunswick being not only rural, but also conservative, and generally lower income, especially compared to other provinces. Because of that, they make sure QT Fatties events take place in the province’s three major cities as well as virtually to remain accessible to all who need it.

“Fat activism is really grounded in disability justice. When we think about accessibility, online platforms, chats, whatever it may be, is what’s most accessible to a lot of disabled folks. I’m disabled myself and sometimes, in-person events are just not possible for me. [Online meetings] help in terms of rurality, but also disability accessibility,” Beaumont says.

The feedback QT Fatties has received from those it serves has been positive—but not everyone understands why it needs to exist. Beaumont says that simply means there’s more work to be done.

“There has been general questioning around like, ‘Why do we need a group specifically for fat people?’ Also, people being uncomfortable with the word ‘fat.’ I don’t think that has been a barrier to our events, but that has been things that come up online. Even though we’ve been doing this for four years people are still uncomfortable with just the idea of using the word fat.”

Still, members and organizers of QT Fatties feel grateful for its existence, especially in a politically tense time where we need activism and community more than ever.

Photo by Knape

In the summer of 2020, for all the obvious reasons, I didn’t have much to look forward to—aside from the packages of clothes.

Online shopping was a popular crutch during the harsh days of COVID-19 restrictions, but I felt adamant that my situation was different. I was nothing like the social media influencers showing off their massive hauls to impressionable followers. These women were ordering much more clothing than I was, much more often. They were rich, they were excessive—and they were skinny.

After being what clothing companies nonsensically refer to as straight sized during my youth, I had gained weight in my late teens, and spent years grappling with the reality that this was my new body. I clung to my old wardrobe until the buttons on my blouses popped off and my leggings were worn out to the point I had to keep my legs crossed to hide the bare skin of my thighs peeking through. Most of the stores within my budget went up to only an extra large; and on the rare occasion a piece fit me, it would come with the condition that I refrain from lifting my arms above my head, bending down, or zipping it all the way up. Every single shopping trip involved crying tears of embarrassment in the privacy of the dressing room.

My first foray into the world of ecommerce fast fashion started early on in the pandemic with the long overdue acknowledgement that my body needed plus-size clothing, but quickly snowballed to replacing my entire wardrobe within the course of a few months. It’s impossible to look back at my fast-fashion era as anything more than a cringey, isolation-induced abandonment of my personal values, but it didn’t feel that way in the moment. I knew that buying fast fashion was wrong, but the packages arriving at my door every few weeks offered me respite from the shame I felt shopping in person. For a while, that felt something like empowerment.

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Corporate propaganda videos are rarely as memeable as Dani Carbonari’s. Known to her hundreds of thousands of TikTok followers as Dani DMC, Carbonari is a self-proclaimed “confidence activist” whose online identity strongly hinges upon her status as a fat woman. In 2023, her posts about a sponsored trip to China to explore the facilities of the fast-fashion retailer Shein made her the main character of the Internet, prompting her fervent defence of the company.

In a now-deleted video, Carbonari claimed that the company’s detractors were motivated by xenophobia, as Shein is a Chinese-owned corporation. This claim completely ignores two very important points. As of 2022, the company outsells brick-and-mortar fast-fashion empires like Zara, Old Navy and H&M, and makes up nearly one-fifth of the global fast-fashion market, according to one analysis. If Shein is being targeted, it’s for their objectively singular impact, not their country of origin. Secondly, many, if not most, of Shein’s exploited workers are also Chinese, meaning criticisms of the company’s labour practices are in defence of Chinese workers, rather than xenophobically targeting them.

Carbonari’s co-opting of social justice language didn’t stop there. In another video defending her choice to partner with the company, she described the challenges she had faced as a plus-size content creator, and credited Shein for valuing their partnership and offering a wide range of plus sizes, admittedly a rarity in the fashion industry.

When Teresa Giudice of The Real Housewives of New Jersey fame and three of her daughters received backlash for partnering with Shein on a curated collection, a representative of the family told media an eerily similar narrative, calling the collaboration “size-inclusive” and “made to amplify the voices and creativity of young women.” (Teresa is also a convicted fraudster who has been criticized for marketing weight loss pills, although that’s beside the point).

It’s easy to see how this messaging appeals to plus-size shoppers, who have dealt with a lifetime of being publicly shunned by fashion’s most powerful voices, from Karl Lagerfeld to former Abercrombie & Fitch CEO Mike Jeffries to Lululemon founder Chip Wilson. The majority of women in Canada are not so-called straight sized, and most U.S. women wear at least a size 16 (although the arbitrary sizing of clothing is often its own headache for shoppers to navigate), and fast-fashion brands have taken note of this underserved demographic.

At the same time, it can’t be ignored that fast fashion is responsible for up to 10 percent of global carbon emissions, according to the United Nations, and generally fails to pay its factory workforce a living wage. From top to bottom, Shein (and other fast fashion brands such as ASOS, Zaful, Temu and Fashion Nova) is built on exploitation. The evidence that the industry exploits garment workers, our environment, and independent designers is insurmountable.

When influencers and celebrities jump to defend these brands in the name of body inclusion, they exploit plus-size customers too. They essentially use us, a genuinely marginalized demographic, as a shield from criticism, not unlike the practice of pinkwashing. If the term fatwashing takes off in the next few years (in relation to clothing, not the niche cocktail-making technique), remember you heard it here first.

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According to Heather Govender, an environmental educator with the Hamilton-based non-profit Green Venture, the low-quality nature of fast fashion is about more than cutting corners—it’s also about maximizing profit in the long run. “They’re made quickly and cheaply so that people will buy lots and then throw them out and buy more and more,” she explains.

Govender says that fast-fashion items continue to cause environmental damage throughout their life cycle, even if they don’t end up in a landfill. Due to the plastic fibres used in most fast-fashion clothing, every laundry day produces microplastics that end up being released into the ocean.

If you struggle to find clothes for any reason—whether it be your size, location, budget or anything else—it can be easy to tell yourself that fast fashion is complicated. The more I learned about the industry, however, the more it feels like the only complicated thing about it is how layered and multifaceted its societal harms are. Its entire business model requires a detached, nihilistic worldview—a belief that the planet is melting and there’s nothing we can do to stop it; that every piece of clothing everywhere involved exploitation, so it doesn’t really matter where you shop; that the best you can do in this broken world is find a little bit of happiness in poorly stitched polyester and free shipping.

While fully acknowledging that I once bought into this nonsense, I know now that everyone, including the plus-size community, deserves better than clothes that contain lead and other toxins. We deserve better than to be “included” while simultaneously being othered—log onto any major fast fashion retailer and you’ll find the plus-size section is neatly separated from “Women” and “Men,” insinuating that our size somehow sets us apart from everyone else. We deserve better than fast fashion, and fortunately for us, fat organizers already know this, and are creating budget-friendly, community oriented alternatives to the status quo.

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It’s estimated that at least 80 billion garments are produced each year, yet any fat person can tell you how difficult it is to find clothing that fits. Eco-conscious influencers are quick to recommend thrifting as a way to save money and be gentle to the environment, but for larger people, the pickings are slim. To make matters worse, evidence indicates that weight bias can sharpen the already steep wage gap that women experience in the workplace, leaving shoppers desperate for both options that fit and that they can afford. In my experience, the plus-size selection in thrift stores is particularly minimal, which has always struck me as odd considering the sheer volume of clothing that already exists. This may be changing, though.

Brenna Strohschein, a co-owner of Fat Sisters Vintage, a plus-size consignment shop that recently opened in Victoria, B.C., shares some of her insights into the fraught relationship between plus-size people and donating clothes. “Plus-size folks are hoarding [clothes], because we have a scarcity mentality that we will never find it again,” Strohschein says. “It’s so hard to find a quality piece, so we can never let it go.”

According to Strohschein, creating a safe, welcoming space for plus-size shoppers has helped encourage consignments. To say the least, opening the store has been an emotional process. Every day, customers cry when they discover the abundance of plus-size options. Some tell Strohschein that they finally have the opportunity to explore their personal style, rather than taking a “whatever fits me” approach to shopping.

This hit home for me. I had gone from wearing threadbare clothes from my high school Tumblr era to having infinite options available at my fingertips, and my strategy was to try anything and everything. Instead of allowing me to discover my own style, fast fashion had only encouraged me to chase microtrends and, for the first time in years, fit in with the crowd. The truth is, I still don’t know how to tell the clothes I love from the clothes I’m just relieved to know fit me.

Strohschein’s shop is no accident: she, too, has struggled to find professionally appropriate clothing in her size, leading to fears that any perceived sloppiness would be attributed to her weight. Stories like these are why even well-educated, socially conscious fat people find the allure of fast fashion hard to resist. Nobody likes to wear ill-fitting or unstylish clothes, but the stakes are different for fat people. Too many people already assume that fat people are lazy and unprofessional, leaving many looking to the massive inventories of fast-fashion retailers for a wardrobe that will challenge rather than reaffirm these preconceived notions. The cruel irony is that, while fast-fashion giants might have office-friendly blazers and slacks, the poor quality often leaves many people unable to truly look and feel put together, and in a constant cycle of trying to shop their way out of fat discrimination.

The community efforts to combat fast fashion don’t stop at thrifting, though. Isobel Bemrose-Fetter and Heather Glasgow are the co-founders of the YVR Fat Clothing Swap in Vancouver, a sustainable initiative that aims to dismantle the shame that often comes with occupying a fat body. “We’re about bodies, and seeing bodies and normalizing them—let’s have them be seen,” Bemrose-Fetter said of the swap’s efforts to normalize fatness. “Bodies are inherently neutral.”

Of course, meeting a community’s needs is always an ongoing process. Both the YVR Fat Clothing Swap and Fat Sisters Vintage are actively involved in expanding the options for superfat people, who often face additional barriers when searching for clothing. Govender, who works on a twice-yearly clothing swap for all sizes, says that her organization is also continually looking for new ways to encourage plus-size participation.

Sustainable fashion brands are also slowly catching up and increasing their plus-size offerings. As budget is still a top concern for me, my primary strategy to curb consumption has been to take care of my current wardrobe rather than search for ethical options, but I’ve still stumbled upon resources that can help people of all sizes shop according to their own values. For example, a $2 (U.S.) digital guide from L.A.-based stylist Lakyn has helped me find sustainable brands that cater to a diverse range of sizes and budgets.

Clearly, the fat community has been hard at work to find ethical alternatives to fast fashion. That makes it all the more disgusting to hear the language of fat liberation being twisted by influencers and B-list celebrities to defend multibillion-dollar companies. Fatphobia has shaped my life in so many ways, and I’m still on a journey to get out from under its grip. I can confidently say, however, that indulging in fast fashion hauls won’t be a part of this journey—even if the alternatives do require a little more work.

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While consignment and clothing swaps might not be accessible for everyone, there are plenty of small acts we can take to get us on the right path. For those still looking for a fat community, Glasgow says that there can be power in starting small. “Even if it’s you and two other people and you’re like, let’s swap clothes and be fat together … that’s really all you need. You don’t really need a lot of pre-established community to start building.”

When I think back to the days I spent in my room, trying on clothes all alone, I realize that the only thing fast fashion ever offered me was another form of isolation, a new way to hide from a world that didn’t want me.

Rejecting fast fashion can be scary as a fat person. It means rejecting a scarcity mentality that tells us we need as much as possible, whenever possible, because our resources are finite. But it also means embracing a community that’s eager to support us in finding what we need. It means remembering that our liberation is all tangled up with everyone else’s—we can never achieve fat liberation at the expense of environmental justice or the dignity of garment workers. It means deciding that we all deserve better.

IVORY, PHOTO BY CRAVE BOUDOIR

Body positivity can be a harrowing but joyful process. Shana Myara made it a life goal. “I gave myself a project where I could fully explore fat liberation with other queers,” says Myara, director of the documentary, Well Rounded. “Particularly from the lens of racialized queers who might also have a critique of how bodies are expected to conform.” In her first full-length feature film, officially released during the pandemic in May 2020, Myara offers an unapologetic and honest look at our culture’s obsession with diet culture and the systemic issue of fatphobia.

Over the phone, Myara acknowledges she is calling from the traditional territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples (Vancouver). She explains that she came to the idea of Well Rounded when she started to hate her own body—outside of her home. “I realized I was not taught to hate my body in my home,” she admits. Myara remembers growing up in her Moroccan household as they spoke about themselves as “large” and fondly referred to their thighs. “Quickly, I learned from a young age, the way I had to view my body outside the home was very different.” This contrast became the catalyst for Well Rounded, as Myara explores how our cultural backgrounds affect our relationships to our bodies.

Using a mix of personal interviews with queer Indigenous comic Candy Palmater, multidisciplinary artist Ivory, model and stylist Lydia Okello, and queer Taiwanese-Canadian activist and storyteller Joanne Tsung, juxtaposed with playful, colourful animations by Hungarian-Russian illustrator Alexandra Hohner, each emotional story weaves together over 60 minutes of compelling facts and narrative in a genre-bending flow. “It turned out to be one of my favorite parts of creating the documentary,” Myara gushes. “The surreal and the fantastic sometimes more accurately represent what we experience internally.”

Since the film debuted in October 2020 at the Inside Out LGBT Film Festival in Toronto, Ontario, during the COVID-19 pandemic, Myara admits it has been a hard season and that since shifting online, some festivals have scaled back their programming. She believes there has been a lost opportunity for discussion related to body politics, and the chance to have a collective celebration of our bodies. But in the meantime, Well Rounded is being shown across Canada, with screening and festival applications underway for 2021.

As the years passed, the birthday outfits my mum bought me collected in my closet, and with them I began collecting memories of similar incidents. But that first incident was my introduction to a society that reminded me often of my weight problems.

I learned at an early age that people made judgments about others’ habits, personalities, and identities based on appearance. We live in a country where eating disorders affect anywhere from 150,000 to more than 600,000 people; many feel the weight of this judgment. I learned to expect this when we would go on summer vacation to London, Malaysia, and Pakistan. Flight attendants would help my sister and me with our seatbelt, and remark: “Maybe sometimes you should let her eat her own meals,” suggesting I picked from my sister’s plate.

But I managed to escape the prying, judgmental eyes of others with the help of my favourite sportswear. Under the folds of an over-sized tracksuit, I found a way to disappear. These days, I know putting a tracksuit on can’t stop other people from judging me. But clothing served—both then and now—as a way to gain control over my identity, the person I wanted to be.

The day I found my first tracksuit everything changed. I was 10, at home in Mississauga, Ont. School was cancelled: the streets were blocked off with mounds of freezing snow. I finished the book my mom had purchased for me for the month earlier, and I thought the snow day would be the best opportunity for me to look for next month’s book, which she often hid in the house.

After searching the whole house, I headed to the storage room in the basement where we kept my dad’s old suits and our salwar kameez, traditional Pakistani clothing. There was no book, but I found a Reebok tracksuit. That navy blue sweatshirt and its matching wide-legged sweatpants were three sizes too big for me—but it was my escape. I grabbed it, went up to my room, and put it on. It hung too loose and too long everywhere. It was perfect. Wearing something that was too big on me (for a change) hid the flaws people said I had—a kind of invisibility device. I believed no one could see anything in me that I didn’t want to reveal. I wasn’t just choosing what to put on my body; I was choosing who I was going to be that day.

For the next seven years, I wore only tracksuits. Most of them were hand-me-downs from my brother, over-sized and blue, black or grey. When the seasons changed, my mum took me shopping hoping that I would change my mind and buy a dress or jeans. But I always met her at the cash register with my athletic wear. Until I was 15, most of my classmates assumed I played a lot of sports; some decided my parents owned an Adidas store.

By the time I was 16, I stopped caring about what people thought of my body. The transformation occurred when I decided I wanted to be a writer. I studied the writers I read as a child and saw a pattern: they all used the way people spoke, walked, and even dressed as tools in character development. I decided to take the narratives I consumed and the influence of the people in my life into my wardrobe, an exercise in storytelling. I created my own therapeutic process: I wore my brother’s band shirts to school to carry a part of him with me every day. I dressed like Dean Martin to claim his song lyrics as my own.

After my high-school graduation in 2011, I took a trip to Italy with my family and transformed again—this time into somebody who wanted to be visible. There, the philosophy that bodies are vessels to be filled with good food and art ran rampant. Italians didn’t eat to stay alive: they lived to eat. While each city I visited was different on the surface, its heart was always at ease—a contentment I carried back with me to Canada.

This summer, at 22, I donated my navy tracksuit. My mom had already given away the others years ago, and this was the last one in my collection. Before folding it and placing it in a paper bag, I wrote a note on the tag inside the collar: “Served as invisibility cloak since 2003. May it bring you magic.” I no longer wear tracksuits. I’m no longer interested in concealing my body based on society’s expectations. Now, I am visible.

Photo by Steve Payne

Words of wisdom from fat activist Jill Andrew

Jill Andrew wants to start a fat revolution. When she was a kid, says Andrew, she used to play around with euphemisms to make herself feel better about her body—PHAT (pretty hot and tempting) was a popular one. “As I grew up,” says Andrew, “I realized, ‘No I’m fat.’ I’m fat, I’m beautiful and I’m talented and I’m accomplished.” She wants other women to feel the same way. As part of promoting the size-acceptance movement in Canada, the 35-year-old Scarborough, Ont. resident has founded a bunch of fat-forward events and festivals, including the Bite me! Toronto International Body Image Film and Arts Festival and the Body Confidence Canada Awards. She also runs the fat fashion blog Fat in the City with her partner Aisha Fairclough, has won a slew of awards, and is in the process of completing her PhD. We caught up with Andrew in September to talk all things fat and feminism.

On what the anti-fat argument’s really about: We need space. At it’s core, the anti-fat argument is not only about women sucking up the medical system’s funding, it’s also an issue of women not being allowed to take up space. It’s an issue of women not being allowed to take up space. It goes back to the classic, ‘a good girl will be seen and not heard.’ Well now I think it’s, ‘a good girl will be invisible and silent.’

On why fat activism has to be a feminist issue: Feminism for me is about exposing the patriarchy that we live in. It’s about exposing how sexism, racism, homophobia, classism, ableism: about how all of these -isms of inequity work together to hamper women’s lives, to silence our stories, and to create obstacles for us getting forward. Fat discrimination fits into all of those areas. It needs to be a feminist issue because that’s the only way it can highlight how women’s lives, particularly girl’s lives, are impacted negatively by size discrimination.

On the grey areas of fat acceptance: There comes a point as feminists where we ask ourselves, ‘Hmmm. Where’s the grey area when it comes to promoting fat acceptance?’ We want to promote acceptance, we want to promote loving our bodies but, at the same time, part of the feminist project was that we didn’t only focus on the aesthetic and the material of our bodies. We focused on our minds, we focused on what our bodies could do: such as taking us to work, allowing us to buy property, allowing us to bear children, and allowing us to create policies to better women’s and girl’s lives. There’s a bit of a paradox. We want women to love their curves, love their rolls, and claim fat proudly. We want women to care about how they look—by that I mean care about loving the way they look—but at the same time we cannot lose footing on some of the, dare I say, ‘bigger’  issues.

On using euphemisms, like curvy and plus-sized, for the word “fat”: These words make the fat body invisible. They depoliticize the fat movement, or the size-acceptance movement. The language waters down and makes the fat body invisible. What it is really is fat hate. It’s a message of: it’s there, we recognize it, but we don’t want to see it—so we dress it up and call it above average, call it something else, something prettier, something frillier, something that’s ‘mainstream’ that we can ingest.

I’m not saying that these words—curvy, voluptuous, plus-sized—are the most terrible thing in the world. What I’m saying is that when we push those out first, and only those, to the detriment of calling fat fat, we lose the political and the personal element that fat has for us. We need to get the word fat out. F-A-T. Language is a tool that society uses to further the medical agenda of pathologizing fat as an obesity epidemic. Fat as the terriblest thing you can be in this world. Fat as asexual.  Fat as out of control and irresponsible. And fat as loser. And all of these things we know are just not true. They’re just not true and we have to stop drinking the Kool-Aid.

On the danger of “get healthy” campaigns: The sad thing is, I’m not against a healthy lunch. I’m not against fruits and vegetables, right? But where the problem comes in, is that the fruits and vegetables become a means to an end, and that is: lose weight, lose weight, lose weight. What the means to the end should be instead is: Have healthy food, your brain functions better. It shouldn’t just be about the looking body. It should be about the doing body. What are we doing?

On why she teaches kids to be aware of the media: I teach kids to dig deeper, and to always ask the question: Why? Who is benefitting from a piece of advertisement? Who is the implied audience? Who has the gaze? Is this a picture that is for women to feel empowered about themselves? Or is it a picture for them to stand up in front of the mirror and say, ‘Oh crap, what do I have to change now?’

On why a call to action is also a call to reality: This is the way the world is set up. We can’t turn our face to it. We can’t think that what’s inside a woman is all that counts, because that’s not the case. The body is the site of so much social capital—it’s what you are read by instantly. But we can educate useage to know not to take it at face value. If you’re a person of colour who feels that you’re ugly, rather than saying to yourself, ‘Just buck up Jill. Where’s your self esteem? Come on, Jill, don’t be so dumb,’ educate yourself and try to peel it away: ‘Why do I think being darker skinned isn’t as beautiful? Where is that coming from?’

On privilege: I do not tell children it’s what’s inside that counts. That’s a phony piece of reality to give a child in this consumerist culture. What I tell them is these are the images you’re going to see and are going to be told are better: white is better, thin is better, able-bodied is better, straight (as in heterosexual) is better, straight teeth are better. These are all the messages you’re going to get. If you happen to fit into those categories, it’s not your fault. You can’t be blamed because you’re white; you can’t be blamed because you have straight teeth. What you have to recognize, though, is that you have a certain amount of privilege having any of those boxes checked off. Therefore your responsibility becomes: How do I use this privilege to educate and draw awareness to the fact that all those who don’t have those boxes checked don’t have that privilege?

On who should be the face of plus-sized fashion blogs: We have to be able to say, ‘Who’s getting the press? Who’s being put out there as the face?’ It’s not the 50-year-old, it’s not the First Nation, Metis, or Inuit blogger. Even though size is being put out, we also have to be critical of how it’s being put out. We don’t want to just recreate another Marilyn Monroe, but this time fatter. We want to show there are women of all sizes, all races, all abilities, and all ages who are actively participating in the consumer culture of plus-sized fashion.

On keeping the body-size acceptance movement diverse: It’s all about getting the histories of women out. If we’re not careful—if we create yet another pigeon hole with the plus fashion thing, the industry thing, the blogger thing—we run the risk of silencing yet other groups of women, too. That’s the scary, cautionary tale that we have to hold onto. It’s okay to love our size, it’s okay to promote the social aspects of the movement, but we have to keep a political and a critical head on our bodies, as well. And that means ensuring that diversity’s present, that it’s not tokenistic, and that it’s intersected: that we’re telling many stories, and not letting one story encapsulate all of them.