No, I appreciate your clarification. I'm explaining to you what HAES actually is and where I see the smearing of HAES initiatives as coming from. I have seen threads like this on r/GC for years, typically made by different people and with a large number of upvotes, so I'm assuming people either have no idea what HAES is about or are genuinely upset that a "third way" has been suggested for fat people which doesn't involve obsessively fixating on their looks and the number on the scale. I find it plausible that most people are the former and some are the latter, but someone is leading a smear campaign against a science-backed health initiative and it's upsetting to see it amplified, as someone who 'HAES' ideas have helped tremendously (I am also a scientist and I don't like the smearing of perfectly good science for ideological reasons either).

I don't think thin people who are prejudiced against fat people are monsters, ftr, just like I don't think male-aligned women who throw other women under the bus (e.g. Republican women etc) are monsters. We live in a society that treats some groups of people worse than others and provides handy excuses for those people to perpetuate the bigotry and feel good about it. Some of those excuses are extremely convincing. I'm not going to mince words about how stupid I find the excuses though. I'm not here to be nice and apologetic about my views - I wouldn't be gender critical if I was. I also think GC women should know better than to uncritically accept propaganda that's essentially based on tapping people's outrage that some women (LBR it's mostly women who are targeted) don't look socially acceptable and appealing/attractive, and sometimes don't even want to. HAES is so universally panned as a strategy (even though it effectively improves people's health) because it tells fat people (women, mostly) to prioritize their health over their looks and to reframe their health behaviours as HEALTH behaviours rather than a magical fix for their size. A lot of people are not very happy with this at all.