How’s this for breathtaking disclosure: I am not a woman.

I think of myself as a feminist, in that I think women have the same rights to ... everything despite  centuries of acculturation to the contrary. Now, whether the objective woman would review my record and agree that my actions are consistent with this pronouncement, I can only hope.

But I am not a woman, so I will never be able to experience what it is like to be one. That includes feeling the effects of an unrelenting drumbeat of judgement directed at me practically since the cradle about thinness, beauty, and my role in upholding them for others.

I'm told that reaction to this unceasing stream is a strong factor behind the strongly female Health at Every Size movement. I’ve written about it previously, and will likely continue to, as I try to understand this puzzling-to-me subset of obesity culture.

My default, based on 30 years of overweight and extreme obesity and then 20 years free of it, is that being fat sucks. There is all the fashion and peer judgement crap, yes, but also the physical burden and missed/wasted opportunities.

One can infer from its name that HAES’s advocates abhor any talk of body size, insisting that one’s health, not size, is the only measure that matters. And who could argue? Beyond genes, size and shape are individual choices, are they not?

My opinion — which is just an opinion, for which I welcome correction from those within HAES — is that HAES’s real message is, “I’ll be any size I damn please, and I’ll be the only evaluator of what health is for me.”

I have little argument with the first part of that — my reservation is the public health implications of individual choices — but big argument with the latter, because even within flexible bounds, health is an objective standard. One is not healthy solely on the basis on declaring it.

Deb Burgard, a psychiatrist in California who espouses HAES, recently told me that the HAES declaration of STFU is the battle cry against a society that judges women by body size and shape almost. I relate to having been judged harshly for my size, for decades, but I accept that I didn't have the same experience regardless. Beyond taunts and sneers, my “ideal form” wasn’t being shouted out at me by large swaths of culture.

But health is still health, and being fat still sucks. I have experienced it deeply, over decades, and even allowing for differences in personal taste, I'd be hard-pressed to change that opinion.

One modification I’d allow is that degree matters. I was capital-B Big, closer to 400 than to 300, and unquestionably, the physical burden intensifies as it grows. So I can see room for those who are slightly overweight to declare that the issue, if there is one, is health, not fashion.

(I should point out that I’ve been 205-210 and stable for many years, which conforms to no society’s standard of slender, and ranks me at the high end of overweight, just shy of obese, on the BMI chart. So I would fit right into that group. Perhaps it’s indicative of the sexes’ separate experiences that I don’t feel the need for HAES’s battle cry.)

But of course, there’s no weight standard to join HAES — that’s the frickin’ point! So it attracts not only those who are merely not in conformance with the magazine-stoked ideal but those for whom the issue is an issue. And that’s my problem with HAES — it provides cover and justification for those who would be better off without it, not so they can suffer society’s scorn, but so they can take in their bodies’ signals to be healthier and happier.

To declare that “I’m going to be as fat as I want, and you can go to hell” is a “permissible” stance in the world, in that anyone is entitled to take any stance so long as it doesn’t harm others. But substitute another word — “drunk,” say —  and it would be hard to defend, even if it is within the speaker’s right to say. (And yes, I don’t make allusion unthinkingly. Overeating and overdrinking are not far apart, regardless of the greater inebriation that results from alcohol.)

Just because a stance is within someone’s human rights to take, doesn’t make it a stance I would want a loved one to take. And, I'm sad to say, this isn't merely an academic point with me.

Meanwhile, to say that this stance reacts to male-dominated, thin-dominated culture just makes it worse. It’s akin to declaring that The Man has kept me down for so long that now I’m going to do it myself.