A strange paradox about being fat is how, at the same time as people can’t seem to see past your fatness, you can also somehow be invisible. For some, your fatness becomes the only thing about you, the only quality you have. My fatness causes adults to laugh or sneer or hurl abuse in the street, or to say horrible depraved things online. Strangers hate my extra flesh so much that they can’t help but regularly inform me about it as I’m tweeting, walking home, standing in a mall, ordering a drink at a bar – or once, entering my own front door.

I can’t remember every one of the numerous public incidents but I do remember the first time it happened. I was a (lonely) 14-year-old waiting for the bus with a bunch of other kids at 8:30am, and men drove past and shouted “WHALE” at me. It was humiliating, it was stupid (I am clearly a land animal), and in my memory it was the sharp beginning of my life in a fatphobic world. It was the beginning of fatphobia fundamentally changing who I was, who I was growing into, planting seeds that would affect me for decades. Shortly after that, I stopped being able to do public speaking, and even now I have to drug myself, my body going into flight mode when I put her in front of a crowd.

Yet even with all this painful visibility, invisibility is equally bad. A small amount is self-inflicted – the tactics you teach yourself, trying to shrink yourself in spaces and not alert people to the existence of your body. But invisibility is also constantly dished out to us by other people. It’s from those who won’t say something mean, but will pretend not to see you. So many people don’t see you as someone worth engaging with. It is not just personal, it’s societal too. The rise of Ozempic in combination with an already extremely thin-obsessed world means that there are almost no fat – or even kind-of-fat – people on any sort of screen.

This week, Vogue and Gigi Hadid – obviously not people I would rely on for body inclusivity – went a step further in the wrong direction by doing a Hairspray-themed cover and spread, including posting a full lip-sync of the song ‘You Can’t Stop the Beat’ online. If you aren’t familiar with Hairspray, it’s one of the only musicals in existence featuring fat leads, and a big part of the story is fatness being spotlighted. Vogue’s cover and lip-sync featured only thin people. The fat characters were played by Gigi Hadid, Cole Escola (love) and Laverne Cox (love), and everyone else involved was also thin. To be completely and utterly cut out of one of the only fat-focused stories is not just disappointing; it’s a really bad sign. It seems like any acknowledgment that fat people exist in the world, and that it’s OK for us to exist, is sliding back to nil.

All kinds of people hate fatness. I have been prepared for that; I expect it. What I was less prepared for was a world where normal, nice, thoughtful, politically aware, outspoken people seem to care about inclusivity in all areas – except this one. Non-thin people are everywhere, our experiences are real and important, and yet, flicking through programmes for writers’ festivals, women’s festivals, arts festivals, I notice a consistent distinct lack of opportunities to discuss fatness or body image – in a time when it is increasingly necessary to address. These aren’t men on the street flicking a lit cigarette at me for walking near them (real story). It’s people who are otherwise kind and empathetic and knowledgable and politically aware, who aren’t engaged with this issue.

At the moment it feels like we have lost every step of the hard-won progress of the fat movement, like chubby Sisyphus watching the rock roll back down. If you spend any time on TikTok or social media now, you’ll see disgusting, awful, hateful, fatphobic comments on every post from a woman over size 12. Fatphobia is an ugly, blunt weapon wielded against people of all sizes. Almost every woman I know has had issues with hating her body, at literally every size and every age. There’s been a recent rise on TikTok of young fat girls doing videos crying about how much they hate their life, alongside a very scary rise of pro-anorexia accounts, girls obsessed with being as thin as possible. It’s a throwback to the heroin chic, deathly anti-fat era of the 90s and 00s, and it’s dangerous for everyone. These teenage girls are at no risk of ever actually getting fat, yet the conditions of our world have made them dread it to the point of already starving themselves.

The thin-obsessed world is growing more unflinchingly vicious to fat people again, while others stand by and do nothing to stall it. When you hate our bodies, you are teaching everyone to hate theirs. I implore people to start thinking about this, both broadly and specifically. We need people carefully considering how we portray and include different kinds of bodies – and what we are saying when we don’t. If you are someone who cares about us as people, equal to others – now is the time to prove it. We may be big, we may be numerous, but we desperately need allies.

Fat people aren’t going anywhere; we’re not going to stop existing because you abuse us or exclude us. It’s just going to make everything worse, for everyone. We need you to make yourselves bigger with us, to take up space with us. It’s time to open up your big fat mouths.