John Walsh: Is 'fat' really a term of hate speech?
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Your support makes all the difference.On my last surgery visit, my GP was in a cautious mood. "Your cholesterol is up," he said, peering at a printout, "and your blood pressure too. Let's see what a change of lifestyle will do over three months."
"What do you mean, lifestyle?" I didn't like the sound of this.
"Oh you know," he said guardedly. "Diet. Abstinence. Exercise."
"Are you suggesting, Doctor," I asked coldly, "that I'm too fat?"
"Not at all," he said. "I just think you might like to assess your ingestion of certain foodstuffs."
"You mean I'm too fat?"
"No, though you might wish to monitor your patterns of consumption, of both liquids and solids..."
"You mean I'm..."
Only now do I see what he was up to. He'd clearly got wind of a new report from an all-party Parliamentary group. Called Reflections on Body Image, its main Reflection is that people shouldn't be allowed to call other people "fat". The group wants to discuss amending the Equalities Act to put "appearance-based discrimination" on the same footing as racism, ageism, sexism and prejudice over disability or sexual orientation. If they do, it'll become a "hate crime" to draw attention to a person's size or weight – even a doctor telling a patient (eg me) he ought to lose a few pounds.
We don't, by and large, go around calling fat people "Fatso" or "Lardarse" or "Gutbucket" even if their silhouette is less than Greek. We left such childish insults behind in the playground. We are sensitive about each other's peculiar bodies. But to call any reference to someone's avoirdupois a hate crime is nonsensical. It will ensure that, when considering applicants for future jobs, employers won't be able to ask important questions: "Do you think your weight might be a problem when pursuing villains down the high street?" or "Do you think you ought to lose half a stone before taking on the crushingly rude Year Eights?".
My father, a GP, favoured a direct approach. He told people they were "in danger of falling into obesity".
Most heeded his words and resolved to change. One didn't – an Irish roofer called Pat, who refused to accept he was morbidly huge, until the day my father gazed at a Height/Ideal Weight graph on the wall. "According to this, Pat," he said, "you should be 8ft 11in. Do you think you could manage that?"
It did the trick.
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