Weight Stigma Awareness Week should be an opportunity to confront one of the most damaging forces in healthcare: bias against people in larger bodies. This should be a week for data, clinical rigor, and constructive collaboration. Done well, it can highlight evidence-based solutions, elevate medical leadership, and foster collaboration across disciplines. And families who are suffering are the ultimate recipients of this shared wisdom.

Next week’s agenda includes sessions that could help shape our response to stigma and patient care. For example:

• Rebecka Peebles, MD, FAAP, DABOM, & Lauren Hartman, MD — “Healing Without Harm: Ending Weight Stigma in Healthcare.” Practical, evidence-based strategies for clinicians who treat real patients in real exam rooms. The goal is not slogans but practical training rooted in science.

• Leslie L. Williams, MD — “Navigating Eating Disorder Risks in the Age of GLP-1 Medications: A Weight-Inclusive Clinical Approach.” With GLP-1 drugs reshaping public conversations about weight and health, the need for clear, medically sound guidance has never been greater. Families deserve facts, not fearmongering.

• Abigail Pont, MD — “Anti-Fat Bias in Medical Education Through the Eyes of a Medical Trainee.” Change must begin with training. Reforming curricula to prepare physicians to treat all patients with dignity and competence is not optional — it is essential.

These are the conversations that deserve attention, funding, and follow-through. They are the ones that have the potential to save lives.

But here lies the danger: while some leaders are advancing medicine, others are actively working to undermine it. Instead of fostering collaboration, maladjusted activists reject it. Instead of engaging with science, maladjusted activists ignore and dismiss it. Instead of building trust between patients and the medical community, maladjusted activists sow division, reject science, reject collaboration, and replace patient-centered work with grievance theater.

The weapons they use are fatuous ideology and vacuous grievances void of real substance and merit. This leaves patients and families caught in the crossfire.

This is the dark side of the ledger: militant, maladjusted, angry activists, wallowing in such internal pain, who reject collaboration, denigrate clinicians, and weaponize grievance for influence. This sadly is not theoretical.

It played out in 2021 at the Legacy of Hope Summit — a convening of some of the field’s foremost experts intended to build consensus and advance patient-centered solutions. Instead of joining that work, some radical activists not only opposed it, both before and after, but they tried to burn it down.

The most vocal critic was Chevese Underhill Turner, co-host of Weight Stigma Awareness Week, who also serves on the Board of Advisors of Within Health and is “Queen of the Ashes.”

Regarding the Legacy of Hope, Turner wrote:

“The entire ED community is getting ‘upskirted’ by certain men and we cannot put our own FOMO aside long enough to see it. Instead, we attend these men’s meetings and give them power to continue their gaslighting and lack of any willingness to see the intersections affecting our field. I’d love for other women to join me (and a few others) in being difficult when it comes to these people.”

This was not a critique grounded in evidence. It was not a call for better data or stronger collaboration. It was a deliberate attempt to sabotage a convening of experts — through crude language, ad hominem attacks, and an open invitation to disrupt and destroy.

Turner’s misguided viewpoints do not end there. On various podcasts and in social media, Turner has attacked clinicians, mocks evidence, and replaces medicine and science with grievance politics.

Her own words make it clear:

“It bothered me that all the air was taken by a white perspective.”

“My heart is in the higher weight community, whether a person has an eating disorder or not.”

“I believe bodies are political.”

“Everything is political.”

“I came out of the womb as a political beast.”

“When I hear “marketing” in the context of ED services to marginalized communities I hear white folks not learning from colonization and slavery. We need to stand down.”

“We must also be centering and supporting BiPOC, LGBTQ+, fat therapists and professionals. This is no space for white, straight and thin folks to jump in.”

“When we constantly protect the feelings of those who are oppressing then we never actually get to the work needed to undo the oppression.”

Turner, in writing stated that she supported and was working toward the following: “ … providing reparations to Black People, Indigenous people and People of Color, (“BIPOC”) especially queer and transgender BIPOC; hiring a transgender consultant to revise your marketing material; establishing sliding fee scales for BIPOC, transgender and gender diverse clients; redistributing wealth from the for-profit ED treatment world; embracing and incorporating non-western treatment practices; providing access to Hormone Replacement Therapy.”

These extremist radical views come from ignorance and distrust of the medical community. In Turner’s own words:

“The DSM [Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders], it is what it is … it’s not great.”

“Those of us who have done the work around our internalized biases no longer trust the medical establishment to actually help us.”

“That has only grown into a place where we are now. Body Positivity Movement. We don’t want to be judged on our looks and our size. The medical community said, ‘Ok. We’re going to judge you on your health.’”

“Most of the country is at a higher BMI, but when you begin to talk about people above a 35 who are visually fat, the oppression increases — plenty of data on that. People in the 50, 60 etc (superfat) range experience even more oppression. These are the folks who are publicly chastised and harmed continuously by the medical profession. Oh, the stories I could tell. Public health in this country is getting it so wrong and there is a better way, but we need to be willing to actually listen to those being harmed.”

“There may be some things with eating disorders that are brain issues … I don’t know.”

Turner’s harmful, illogical, extreme points of view do not constitute insight – they are ignorance masquerading in cartoon regalia, strutting as wisdom. They demonstrate contempt for medical science disguised as activism, reckless to the point of sabotage. And yet, somehow, they earn you the golden ticket to co-host Weight Stigma Awareness Week. Turner’s very presence doesn’t elevate the cause; it cheapens it, hollowing the message until nothing credible remains.

In the past, Turner redirected organizational platforms away from patient-centered care and toward political crusades. As a former officer of NEDA, one of the largest eating disorder organizations in the country, she proudly declared, “We won’t be deterred in our social justice work.” Under her “leadership,” donors were encouraged to contribute to the Minnesota Freedom Fund — an organization later revealed to have posted bail for accused murderers, rapists, and other violent offenders.

Ask yourself: who benefits from public disruption? Certainly not patients. Nor families. Nor clinicians attempting to balance complex risks and benefits. Disruption for its own sake only produces a cacophony of racket instead of clarity. It produces division where we need partnership and collaboration.

And yet, Turner is annually trotted out as a co-host of Weight Stigma Awareness Week even though her message never changes. She is still handed the microphone. Still made co-host. Still rewarded.

Turner’s destructive, insidious pattern is consistent and consequential. When so called leaders prioritize ideological purity tests over rigorous science, they do more than dispute ideas — they undermine care. When organizational platforms are repurposed for partisan causes, and donors are steered toward politically charged funds with questionable implications, the field’s credibility erodes. When individuals who oppose expert collaboration are nonetheless rewarded with boards, speaking invitations, and opportunity, the message is clear: rhetoric is encouraged; results are irrelevant. And yet, that is the reality in the eating disorder community.

In any other professional community, such conduct would bring harsh consequences. Suspension. Banishment. In the eating disorder world, it brings greater influence and opportunity. But it does not have to be that way.

The way forward is clear but it requires courage and resolve:

• Elevate science-first voices. Medical experts who ground their work in data and clinical care should be at the center of not just this week, but every week and this field.
• Insist on collaboration. Medicine is not the enemy. Progress depends on partnership between clinicians, researchers, and advocates willing to engage constructively.
• Enforce accountability. Organizations must set standards of conduct. Those who undermine collaboration with reckless rhetoric cannot continue to hold leadership roles.
• Protect patient-centered care. Eating disorder treatment should not be a platform for partisan politics. The focus must remain on evidence-based approaches that save lives.

Patients deserve better than empty slogans. Families deserve better than spectacle and disruption. The eating disorder community deserves leaders who are accountable, collaborative, and grounded in science.

Weight Stigma Awareness Week should not be a stage for any one person’s hate filled ideology. It should be a platform for medical and science based workable solutions.

The choices confronting us are simple.

Evidence based treatment over drama and dysfunction.

Clinicians and researchers who do the hard work of translating evidence into care over charlatans who sell social justice snake oil.

Collaboration over spectacle.

Accountability over impunity.

Lives are at stake. Families are desperate for solutions grounded in competent, humane care. Patients cannot wait for ideology to sort itself out. If we allow disruption to replace discourse, we become complicit in the harm that follows.

And the escalating mortality rate.