Germany runs a tidy little argumentative loop, and it has been spinning for almost twenty years.
The General Equal Treatment Act, the AGG, names six protected characteristics: sex, ethnic origin, religion or belief, disability, age, sexual identity. Body weight is not one of them. Because it is not in the law, the large government-commissioned surveys do not ask about it. Because they do not ask, there is no solid data. And because there is no solid data, the argument for adding the characteristic to the law is missing.
The loop stalled once. In the largest discrimination survey ever conducted in Germany, weight showed up even though nobody had asked about it. The researchers ended up recommending that the law be widened. Nothing has happened since.
What the study is
The Federal Anti-Discrimination Agency commissioned the study “Diskriminierungserfahrungen in Deutschland” from the Berlin Institute for Empirical Integration and Migration Research (BIM) at Humboldt University. The authors are Steffen Beigang, Karolina Fetz, Dorina Kalkum and Magdalena Otto. Fieldwork ran in autumn 2015; the 340-page results report appeared in 2017.
The study has two parts, and the distinction matters:
- a telephone representative survey with 1,007 participants,
- a survey of affected people in mixed-mode design with 18,162 participants (16,798 online, 1,364 on paper), open to anyone living in Germany aged 14 and over.
The second is the largest of its kind in Germany, with 14,765 usable first-hand accounts of discrimination. It is not representative, and it was never meant to be. People opted in themselves. Respondents could describe up to two experiences from the previous 24 months that mattered most to them.
The preset characteristics were the six AGG categories plus social position. Anyone whose experience fit none of those boxes had to write it into a free-text field and name it themselves.
How weight got into the study anyway
That free-text field is where advocacy groups went to work. In autumn 2015 the Gesellschaft gegen Gewichtsdiskriminierung (Society Against Weight Discrimination) called on people to take part under the slogan “Deine Stimme hat Gewicht” and pointed explicitly at the free-text field. It was not the only organisation doing this.
That belongs on the table, because it shapes the numbers that came out. And it is not an outside accusation: the research team says so in the report itself. The varying frequencies of characteristics may “also reflect how strongly particular associations promoted the survey”. The absolute figures, the report says, serve “expressly only to present the data basis” and must not be read as a statement about which kind of discrimination happens most often.
Christine Lüders, then head of the Anti-Discrimination Agency, framed it the same way in an interview: the number of accounts is “first of all not an indication of how frequently these things occur, only that these experiences exist”.
That is the honest version. It makes a worse headline than “this many cases”, and it is the only one that holds.
The number, and the two other numbers
Table 9 of the report, page 128, lists appearance with 935 reported cases. Indented underneath it, as a sub-category: weight, 634. That is the figure that has circulated since 2017, and it is correct.
Two variants float around next to it.
643 appears in a single secondary account; two sentences later the same text says 634 again. A transposition error.
534 appears in a specialist article by the research team itself. In 2017, Beigang, Otto, Fetz and Kalkum re-analysed the data for exactly this question in the series “Wissen schafft Demokratie” published by the Institute for Democracy and Civil Society (DOI 10.19222/201702/6). There the count is 534 cases of weight discrimination and 558 cases of discrimination based on a physical impairment, 1,092 cases in the analysis.
The gap between 634 and 534 is not a contradiction but a different base population. The online appendix states the selection rule: cases naming both weight and a physical impairment were excluded, as were cases where neither characteristic was clearly identified. How many cases fall under which exclusion is not published. So the difference of a hundred cases can be explained, but not recalculated.
Where these cases come from: the doctor’s office
The raw count is the least interesting part of the finding. What matters is where the cases cluster, and for that the research team built its own measure: the transfer factor. It compares how many reports for a characteristic actually come from a given area of life with how many would be expected if all characteristics were spread evenly across all areas. A value of 1 means as expected. A value of 2 means twice as often as expected.
For weight in the health and care sector, Table 29 on page 230 reports:
- Doctor’s practice, psychotherapy and similar: 5.95 (114 cases)
- Hospital: 2.27 (25 cases)
- Health, long-term care or pension insurance: 2.11 (17 cases)
- Social services: 0.93 (2 cases), other: 0.26 (1 case)
In medical practices, in other words, weight discrimination is reported almost six times as often as the distribution would lead you to expect. That is higher than the value for appearance overall (4.32) and higher than every other characteristic in that column. For comparison: disability, impairment and chronic illness come in at 1.65 there, being trans at 2.45.
This holds inside a non-representative sample. It does not tell you how many fat people in Germany are discriminated against at the doctor’s. It tells you where the experiences of those who did report concentrate, and that is unambiguous: not at work, not at the public authority, but at the doctor’s. What to do in that situation is something we have written up separately.
A second finding from the same report fits. Where discrimination is co-caused by the physical setting, meaning a lack of accessibility, 31.1 per cent of all such cases in the health and care sector are linked to weight. Examination tables, chairs and equipment are frequently not built for people at higher weights.
What else holds up in this data
The second solid piece is a comparison inside the same dataset. The research team set weight discrimination against discrimination based on a physical impairment. The choice is deliberate: both attach to the body, both accuse the person of deviating from bodily norms, both are experienced particularly often in the health system, and in both a lack of accessibility plays a large role. The decisive difference is legal. Disability is named in the constitution and in the AGG. Weight is named nowhere.
The results:
- Took no action at all against the person or condition causing it: 37.8 per cent of those affected in the impairment group, but 65.7 per cent in the weight group. Two out of three.
- Sought counselling afterwards: 17.0 per cent in the impairment group, 4.9 per cent in the weight group.
The obvious objection is that this might be down to different circumstances, different areas of life, different age groups, different forms of discrimination. The team tested that objection in multivariate regressions, N = 1,092. For four of the reasons given for doing nothing, the difference survives controls for situation and person: the expectation that reacting would achieve nothing, the burden of having to deal with it further, not seeing a need to react, and not knowing what could be done.
For two other reasons, fear of negative consequences and fear of not being believed, the difference disappears once situation and person are controlled for. That belongs in the picture too. The team limited its own finding here rather than pushing it through.
The models explicitly explain only a small share of the variance; the team puts the adjusted R² at 0.04 to 0.15 and writes that important explanatory variables are missing. So the finding is not: we know why fat people do not fight back. It is: the fact that they do it less often is not because different things happen to them.
The loop, said out loud
The four reasons that survive describe precisely what a missing law does.
“It wouldn’t achieve anything” is not resignation when there is no legal protection; it is an accurate reading of the situation. “I didn’t know what to do” is not an information deficit on the part of those affected; it describes a counselling system built along the AGG characteristics, which has little to offer for a characteristic that does not appear there. And “I saw no need to act” is the most uncomfortable point: when a society treats high body weight as self-inflicted, people affected partly adopt that attribution and consider the disadvantage understandable. Citing qualitative interviews, the research team calls this “solidarity with those doing the discriminating”.
The recommendation that followed was in the report back in 2017, on page 97, and it came from the researchers, not from an advocacy group:
The many experiences of discrimination that people have had on the basis of external characteristics, and in particular on the basis of weight, demonstrate the urgent need to create a way for these people to defend themselves against their experiences of discrimination. In order to offer these people protection against discrimination as well, the characteristics protected in the AGG should be extended to include external characteristics.
The team also proposed turning the AGG’s list of characteristics from a closed list into an open one, so that courts could recognise comparable characteristics that are not explicitly named.
Nothing has happened since. The AGG still does not know body weight. Legal protection exists only by detour: someone whose obesity requires medical treatment because of accompanying or consequent illness may under some circumstances be protected via the characteristic of disability. That construction goes back to a 2014 ruling of the European Court of Justice (FOA v Kommunernes Landsforening). It means protection exists if you are ill enough. Being fat alone does not get you there. The same pattern shows up in coverage decisions for weight-loss drugs, where France pays and Germany does not.
What this means for readers
First: if you experienced disadvantage because of your weight and had the impression that no office was responsible, you did not imagine it. That is the documented state of affairs, not a personal failure. And you are not alone in it; we have described where fat people in Germany meet offline.
Second: the organisation working on exactly this legal question in Germany is the Gesellschaft gegen Gewichtsdiskriminierung. It demands that “body weight” be added to § 1 AGG, that the membership threshold for anti-discrimination associations under § 23 AGG be lowered, and that the advisory board of the Anti-Discrimination Agency be expanded by a 17th seat. Two things belong disclosed alongside that. In the Bundestag lobby register (R007584), the organisation has been listed as a former interest representative since 24 October 2025, so its active registration has ended. And for financial year 2023 it reports project funding from the Anti-Discrimination Agency of 70,001 to 80,000 euros, for developing training that qualifies anti-discrimination counselling centres on weight discrimination. The same agency whose study never asked about the characteristic is funding the training on it.
Third, and this is the unsatisfying part: as long as the characteristic is missing, the route via existing characteristics remains the only legally solid one, and it fits only in exceptional cases. We will expand on that in a separate piece once the legal position has been worked through properly.
Transparency about this research
Every figure from the results report used here comes from the report itself (340 pages, checked 19 August 2026): the 634 from Table 9 on page 128, the transfer factors from Table 29 on page 230, the recommendation from page 97, the method behind the transfer factor from page 129. The response data (65.7 versus 37.8 per cent, 4.9 versus 17.0 per cent) and the regressions come from the research team’s specialist article and its online appendix, not from the results report.
One trap belongs on the record: the official summary of the study contains a different five-fold figure, namely that women report sex-based discrimination almost five times as often as men. That has nothing to do with weight. Pulling the two together produces a false statement.
Sources
- Federal Anti-Discrimination Agency: Diskriminierungserfahrungen in Deutschland. Ergebnisse der Repräsentativ- und der Betroffenenbefragung. Beigang/Fetz/Kalkum/Otto, 2017. https://www.antidiskriminierungsstelle.de/SharedDocs/downloads/DE/publikationen/Expertisen/expertise_diskriminierungserfahrungen_in_deutschland.html
- Beigang/Otto/Fetz/Kalkum: Eine Frage von Gewicht. Wissen schafft Demokratie 2/2017, IDZ Jena, DOI 10.19222/201702/6. https://www.idz-jena.de/wsddet/wsd2-6
- Online appendix to Beigang et al. 2017 (case selection, operationalisation, regression tables). https://www.idz-jena.de/fileadmin/user_upload/Anhang_Beigang_et_al_5.pdf
- Bundestag lobby register, entry R007584 (Gesellschaft gegen Gewichtsdiskriminierung e. V.). https://www.lobbyregister.bundestag.de/suche/R007584
- Gesellschaft gegen Gewichtsdiskriminierung e. V., collected posts on the Anti-Discrimination Agency. https://gewichtsdiskriminierung.de/tag/ads/
- Gesellschaft gegen Gewichtsdiskriminierung e. V., interview with Christine Lüders. https://gewichtsdiskriminierung.de/gewichtsdiskriminierung-eine-alltaegliche-erfahrung-in-deutschland/