There is a comfortable assumption in body-positive circles: that queer community is where the thin ideal loses its grip. A study published last October asked twenty-four queer women to tell their lives, and what came back was more complicated than the assumption. Queer spaces were where several of them first felt their bodies were allowed to exist. They were also where some of them met a new set of rules about what a fat body is permitted to look like.
The paper is Fowler and colleagues, “If I can accept my queerness, I can accept my body as it is”, Frontiers in Psychiatry 16:1687680, published 2 October 2025. It is open access, so we read all of it, including the tables and the limitations section. That matters, because, as we explain at the end, the other recent study on this group is not readable in full, and we are not going to pretend it is.
Who was asked, and how
Twenty-four cisgender women living in the United States, all identifying as something other than heterosexual, aged 22 to 46. They were recruited through a flyer on social media, mainly Facebook and Instagram, which linked to a screening survey. The researchers then chose from those who responded, deliberately selecting for variety in sexual orientation, age, body size and ethnicity. There was no body-size requirement in either direction: the study did not recruit fat women specifically, and did not exclude thin ones.
Each woman gave one interview of sixty to ninety minutes, by video call, with the first author. The interviews followed a life-history format: participants were asked to walk through their lives and point to the moments that mattered for their body and for their sexuality. Four coders analysed the transcripts, and a six-person advisory board of queer-health and weight-stigma specialists, some of them community members, was paid to review the questions before the interviews began.
What the sample is: three quarters non-Hispanic, and 58 percent non-Hispanic White. One quarter Hispanic or Latina, several of them also identifying as Black, Native American or White. Multiple sexual identities were allowed, and half chose “pansexual”. Fifty-eight percent had a bachelor’s degree or higher.
One small thing we noticed. The paper’s own text and its own table disagree twice about this sample. The text gives a mean age of 32.0, the table says 33.0. The text counts eight lesbian and six bisexual participants, the table has those two numbers the other way round. None of this changes the findings, which do not rest on counts. It is the kind of discrepancy that peer review is supposed to catch, and we note it because we would want it noted about us.
Three places where the rules are learned
The women’s accounts sorted into three settings where weight stigma was taught, enforced, and sometimes resisted.
The first is the culture at large: media, healthcare, public space. Women described pools they never went back to after being laughed at, clothing that was not made in their size when they were children, and doctors who attributed everything to weight. One participant, who is Black, Latina and fat, told of a Lyme disease infection that went undiagnosed for a long time because the rash was not visible on her skin and the physicians defaulted to her weight instead.
The second is the family. This section of the paper is the hardest to read. A mother who weighed her daughter from the age of about five and kept her on one diet after another. Cabinets locked so a child would not eat. A father who used the words “eat like a pig” about a daughter who was, by her own account, an athlete. A mother who, one participant said, measures her life not in years but by what she weighed at each stage. Brothers, several women noticed, were not weighed and not restricted.
The third is queer community, and this is the part the study is named for and the part we want to dwell on.
What the queer community gave, and what it took back
Several women said queer spaces were the first place their bodies were not a problem. One described Pride and gay clubs as places where everyone wears what they want and nobody judges. Another said the queer and polyamorous community was where she had seen the most openness toward her fat body of any community in her life. One woman, who has a woman partner, said that having a partner who shares the experience of being a woman with body-image trouble made the whole subject less shameful, because they compare experiences rather than bodies.
And then the other half. A participant said that in queer spaces a large body is expected to be butch or non-binary, and that being feminine and large was “a no”. Another described the “ideal lesbian” pushed by short-video platforms: thin, long hair, masculine but not too masculine, and said that biphobia and fatphobia arrive tied together through the same feed. One woman said the Pride event in her Western state was not accessible to disabled or chronically ill people: steps everywhere. And the participant who is Black, Latina, queer and fat said that to be accepted she had to be the self-appointed punchline, the entertainer, the life of the party, and that a fat Black queer person who is not entertaining is treated as not valid.
The study’s own summary of this is careful: queer community was “affirming, marginalizing, and both simultaneously”. That last word is the finding. It is not that some queer spaces are good and others bad. The same space could hand a woman her first acceptance and, in the same evening, the new rule that fat is fine as long as it is not femme.
The title sentence
The quote the paper takes its title from comes from a 23-year-old bisexual Latina: accepting her queerness and accepting her body turned out to be one job, not two. Another woman, a lesbian, said that realising she loved all bodies made her ask why hers should be the exception, and that the queer gaze is not the straight male gaze. The study reads these as a resource: the work of coming out gives some women a template for unlearning anti-fat bias too.
We would add one thing the paper does not say in so many words. Every one of those moments of self-acceptance happened after the family and school years the same women described. The resource arrived late. The damage did not wait for it.
What twenty-four interviews can and cannot carry
Twenty-four life histories can tell you what happens. They cannot tell you how often. Nothing in this study is a rate, and the authors do not present anything as one.
The authors list their own limits: the sample is adult, cisgender, US-based and majority white; the results may not transfer to trans and non-binary people, who face body ideals built on cisnormativity; and single interviews of ninety minutes gave less depth on later decades of life than a repeated-interview design would have. They also say plainly that the coding team reads the material through a weight-inclusive, body-liberation lens. We share that lens, and we think it belongs in the paper where they put it, in the open.
The study was funded by the US National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities and approved by the University of South Carolina’s research ethics board.
The other study, and why it is not in this article
There is a second recent paper on weight stigma among sexual minority women, and it is the one with numbers: Gonzalez-Cabrera and colleagues, Nursing Research 75(1):3-9, January 2026. Its abstract describes an online survey of 459 sexual minority women, mostly non-Hispanic White, more than half bisexual, aged 18 to 76, and reports that between 26 and 65 percent experienced external weight stigma depending on the type measured, and 57 percent internalised weight stigma.
We have read that abstract. We have not read the paper, because it sits behind the publisher’s paywall, and we tried. So we report exactly what the abstract says and nothing more: not how the 459 were recruited, not what the response rate was, not what each of those percentages was measuring, and not the paper’s correlations with body mass index, which we would not have reported anyway. “National sample” in an abstract is a description of geography, not of representativeness, and until we can read the methods we treat it as nothing more. If the full text becomes readable, this paragraph becomes an article.
For the longer history behind this, see our piece on what fat and queer movements share, and for the gendered side of self-blame, fat men blame themselves.
Sources
- Fowler L. A., Wang Y., Wall C., Velkovich A., Harrop E. N., Vázquez M. M., Mensah J., Flentje A., Mann E. S. (2025). “If I can accept my queerness, I can accept my body as it is”: Understanding weight-related perspectives and stigma from sexual minority women. Frontiers in Psychiatry 16:1687680, 2 October 2025. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyt.2025.1687680 (open access, read in full, PMC12528178)
- Gonzalez-Cabrera A., Lehan Mackin M., Gilbert P., Cherwin C. H. (2026). Weight Stigma Is Highly Prevalent in a National Sample of Sexual Minority Women. Nursing Research 75(1):3-9. https://doi.org/10.1097/NNR.0000000000000867 (abstract only, full text paywalled as of 4 September 2026)
This piece reports on how two studies were built and what their participants said. It is not health advice, and nothing in it makes a claim about weight and health.