Left-wing activists have described weight loss jabs as “fascistic” and “imperialistic”.
A panel of self-described fat activists spoke at Harvard University in a discussion titled Against the Pathology of Unruly Bodies.
Harvard’s highly reputable medical school was founded in 1782, but the panel, hosted by artists-in-residence Roxane Gay, included speakers with no scientific credentials claiming weight-loss jabs, such as Ozempic and Mounjaro, are a “fascistic tool to eradicate fatness”.
Da’Shaun L Harrison, a self-described “queer and trans afropessimist and anarcho-communist”, featured on the panel, along with Alisha Steigerwald, a medical student at Harvard who identifies as a formally fat person, and Ragen Chastain, who writes a blog called Dances with Fat.
Mr Harrison went viral earlier this year for his claims that GLP-1 weight-loss medications are a form of “fat genocide” and “body fascism” at the Socialism 2026 Conference.
The activist explained how five Western countries – Israel, Britain, Nazi Germany, France, and the US – had moulded the idea of a healthy body.
He directly named “Eisenhower and Nixon and Michelle Obama” as individuals who “indoctrinate fat children into a culture of fitness to be prepared for military”.
Mr Harrison, who penned the 2021 book Belly of the Beast: The Politics of Anti-Fatness as Anti-Blackness, added: “This practice of forcing people into manipulating and changing or shifting how they look is oftentimes about making bodies militarisable. Building up a military to defend an imperialist state.
“A lot of doctors, medical professionals and folks who collaborate with them – be it through the government or media – are advocating for atrocities that are directly impacting our citizens, but also citizens around the globe.
“It then becomes about creating this ideal body that you are always being pushed and pulled towards, as a way to represent this patriotism that is intended to indoctrinate one into the military, into the defence of the country.”
He also noted the top 50 countries for the highest rates of obesity in the world – which does not include the United States – have a high rate of “black and brown countries”.
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Those nations, Mr Harrison said, are being classified as “obese countries based solely off of the World Health Organisation and the world obesity federation classifying these spaces as obese because of BMI”.
He added: “There’s no consideration for the ways that apartheid or genocide or whatever else might be directly affecting or impacting how people are engaging with food or with size”.
Ms Gay, who chaired the meeting, said weight loss jabs had been presented as “the silver bullet that’s going to fix the problem that is fatness, which is of course predicated on the notion that fatness is a problem”.
Ms Chastain, a “multi-certified health and fitness professional”, holds the Guinness World Record for the heaviest female to complete a marathon.
She took aim at medical research which “tries to blame weight for health issues” but “scrupulously ignores the confounding variables of weight stigma”.
She added there were “basic problems with the research that tries to blame fatness for ill health” or research that claimed weight loss is a “treatment or cure”.
Jonathan Turley, professor at George Washington University Law School, has long criticised such activism in scholarly discussions, and said the event is a “continuation of a trend of medical schools to substitute hard science with virtue signalling”.
The event warned that the “views and opinions expressed during this event are those of the panellists and do not necessarily represent the official views of Harvard”.
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