Few educational institutions are as prestigious as Harvard Medical School. At its best, the school is a bastion of evidence-based medicine and excellence in human health. It’s hard to square that reputation, however, with a recent panel hosted by HMS and titled “Against the Pathology of Unruly Bodies.” The event encouraged distrust of doctors and cast weight loss—one of the most effective health interventions—as a project of coercion, “eradication,” and fascism. Panelists portrayed medical science as biased, overly reliant on empirical data, and unable to account fully for lived experience, racism, profit, and other systems of power.
Despite a warning that the “views and opinions expressed during this event are those of the panelists and do not necessarily represent the official views of Harvard,” the event calls into question the judgment of one of the nation’s top medical schools, especially because it included a Harvard M.D. candidate and a board-certified patient advocate. The panel raised questions about how seriously Harvard is taking medical education and how extensively far-left ideology has captured the institution.
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The event was moderated by Roxane Gay, a New York Times columnist, artist-in-residence at Harvard, and cousin of former Harvard president Claudine Gay. It even featured a panelist from the Socialism 2026 conference who went viral for claiming that GLP-1s are contributing to a “fat genocide.”
Alongside Gay were Da’Shaun L. Harrison (who appeared shirtless on the event poster), Ragen Chastain, and Alisha Steigerwald. Their stated intent was to discuss the “intersection of fatness and healthcare,” with a focus on how “fat bodies are pathologized by medical professionals with grave consequences” and, ultimately, how fat people can be treated “more ethically” rather than as “problems to be solved.”
The talk was cosponsored by Harvard’s English Department. Gay and Harrison are known for their writing on the fat experience, among other topics. Chastain is a “multi-certified health and fitness professional” and holds the Guinness World Record for “Heaviest person to complete a marathon (female).” Steigerwald is a Harvard M.D. candidate and was the only panelist to identify as a formerly fat person, describing the experience of dramatic weight loss as carrying its own “psychosocial ramifications.”
Harrison took the panel in a notable direction with his discussion of “body fascism,” also the subject of his forthcoming book. Harrison considers body fascism a bipartisan effort that began in the 1930s and continues today with the MAHA (Make America Healthy Again) movement. He claimed that councils created by Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, and Michelle Obama were meant “to indoctrinate children into a culture of fitness.”
Steigerwald responded to Harrison by arguing that, while science portrays itself as “objective and scientific,” it fails to account for a patient’s respective “social and cultural structures.” For Steigerwald, this was personal because, at Harvard, she started “obesity treatment” for fear that her body was unsuited to medicine, implying that doctors must be thin. Steigerwald’s weight loss was, she said, not a long-imagined “promised land” but instead a source of “grief.”
Panelists challenged the link between weight and other health outcomes. Chastain, for example, argued that research linking weight and poor health “scrupulously ignores” factors such as health-care inequality and weight cycling—the repeated loss and regain of weight. She sees these as “basic problems with the research that tries to blame fatness for ill health.” Gay lamented that Americans no longer believe in science, mocking those who “do their own research.” She went on to discuss how she was receptive to “evidence-based information” from her doctor but would not discuss weight loss and considered her blood work healthy.
The panel also raised the specter of “fat genocide,” a topic that drew headlines after Harrison’s comments at Socialism 2026. Harrison described GLP-1s as a “fascistic tool” designed to “eradicate fatness.” Chastain, meanwhile, characterized the pharmaceutical industry’s mindset as, “we don’t want fat people treated badly, but we absolutely must eradicate them from the earth and make sure no more ever exist.” Harrison warned that governments likely will see refusals to take these drugs as not only unpatriotic but “in many ways suicidal.”
The intersectional nature of the panelists’ activism emerged in a discussion of Chastain’s work on “gender-affirming care,” which can evidently be denied to patients whose weight makes them an anesthesia risk. Chastain’s tactic for dealing with doctors who redirected fat patients toward weight loss, such as before a major surgery or gender transition, was to ask: “Does this happen to thin people?” and to demand “weight-inclusive care” and the same treatment afforded to thin patients. In her view, “Thin people get ethical, evidence-based care and fat people get told to lose weight.”
Others shared this view. Harrison explained that a visit to a new cardiologist, who assumed his longstanding heart condition was related to his weight, ended with his telling the doctor, “I will never have an interaction like this with you ever again. And if I do, I will report you to your board.”
For a panel on how to treat fat patients “more ethically,” the suggestions were surprisingly thin. They consisted of eliminating routine weigh-ins, providing appropriately sized equipment, and focusing less on body size and more on patients’ immediate concerns. Harrison suggested a personal boundary, saying, “Do not talk to me about what could happen two years from now.”
Gay, meantime, has moved on to concierge medical care and a doctor who does not question her. She later responded to a question about the insurance industry by saying, “Free Luigi.”
Ten years ago, fat theorists were championing health at every size and pushing for a more holistic vision of health that included remaining fat. A few years later, they focused on socially constructed beauty norms and labeled concerns about weight as byproducts of colonization. Today, they assert that “genociding” of fat people is being perpetrated by an industry that developed a miracle drug to help people lose weight.
Confounding as all this is, what’s most telling is Harvard’s role in it. The prestigious medical school will evidently continue to play host to those decrying health innovations as oppressive.