Beyond forced translation: obesity, disability and the case for autonomous protection against weight discrimination

Legal and public health debates on obesity move between three distinct objects: a clinical condition, a functional limitation, and a process of social exclusion. Explicit protection against discrimination based on body weight remains exceptional across jurisdictions, and legal systems in different countries have turned to disability law as the available route for people with obesity who face exclusion. This perspective argues that protection against weight-based discrimination should not depend on prior demonstration of disability. Where an explicit ground is absent, people harmed by weight discrimination must translate their claim into the language of disability, and that translation reaches only the portion of the harm expressible as lasting functional limitation. The Obesity-Disability-Discrimination Triangle is proposed as an analytical framework that maps the configurations in which the three phenomena combine and assigns the normative response required for each. Although disability framing brings substantial benefits in terms of justiciability and clinical orientation toward actual functioning, it also introduces serious risks. Among them are the overmedicalization of corporeality, the reinforcement of paternalistic stigmas of "incapacity" and a legal substitution effect that makes invisible the discriminatory violence exercised against people with large bodies who do not have any functional restriction. The ideal ethical and legal solution must be hybrid. Legal systems should maintain disability protection for cases with real and lasting functional limitations. However, they should urgently institute weight discrimination as a category of autonomous exclusion in employment, education, and health, protecting bodily diversity as a fundamental human right, independent of health or ability.