So you know, folks, the mods here don’t watch the kinds of shows people write in to ask us about. We can point you to the articles about The Biggest Loser, and maybe some other shows if we’ve run across them, but we’ve never seen most of these, and often your asks in our inbox is the first time we’ve heard of them. Sometimes we publish these asks to open up the conversation to the rest of you, but usually we won’t, and usually we don’t have any opinion on them.

Here’s the thing: y'all are perfectly capable of figuring out if a show is problematic. Does it humiliate or make fun of fat people? Does it insist that fat people must lose weight? Does it depict fat people as eating huge amounts? Does it assume that fat = unhealthy or skinny = healthy? Does it depict fat people as somehow different from the rest of the population? If so, then it’s fucked up and fatphobic.

If it’s fucked up and you like it anyway, that’s ok, you get to like problematic things. Just don’t deny that they’re problematic. Admit where the show is fucked up.

I really like the show Elementary. This week’s episode had a bunch of fat jokes and shit, and that’s not ok. The previous episode had a trans woman, who was generally well-portrayed, and played by a trans woman, but there was a nasty remark about her having an adam’s apple, which, since she didn’t, was plainly euphemistic for other body parts that Sherlock assumed she had. That was not ok, and was transphobic. I continue to like the show, but I see the problems with it, and acknowledge them as problems. It’s even ok to not see them on your own. What’s not ok to do is ignore or deny the problems when they’re pointed out to you, to unthinkingly defend the show you like.

Seriously, folks, you can tell if a show is fatphobic, if you just pay attention and give it some thought. We are not the arbiters of what is and is not fatphobic.

-MG