I think there's real danger in the way that GLP-1s for """weight management""" are being discussed, praised, and forced on people, and not just from the more obvious side of megadoses and horrendous side effects.
For a while, we were in sort of a holding pattern where society was still very antifat, but it wasn't as obvious or spoken out loud. Fat models could be in the mainstream public eye, so long as they performed High Femme at all times. Fat athletes were sometimes OK because "they're active", so the thought goes that "at least" they're "healthy." A lot of places covered up their antifatness with healthism and so long as fat people fit into certain pre-made boxes, those places could say, "well, we don't *like* that they're fat, but we won't say it out loud" and still call themselves hashtag Body Positive.
For a while there, places could hide behind "body positivity" because they would admit (to a point and not nearly far enough of one) that "weight loss is hard" and therefore, as long as someone was playing the Good Fatty, maybe the focus wouldn't be on their weight in public.
(Yes, obviously this is a generalization for a quick post, as many places did not, in fact, even move towards "body positive" in the slightest, especially for the fattest among us.)
But now, pharmaceutical companies are throwing money back into public antifatness campaigns to build up a market for their megadose GLP-1s. And now, because they are being forced on so many people, these drugs are the new gallows on which to hang fat people.
Just like the high riding years of Weight Watchers, Jenny Craig, fen-phen, and the rest, we have something that """everyone""" claims works (if you ignore the bad science of the studies, the even worse journalism of the articles about them, the promoting doctors who are literally paid shills for the pharmaceutical companies putting out the drugs, the astroturf "patient advocacy" groups created by the pharmaceutical companies marketing the drugs, AND the fact that the same studies being touted as Proof all conveniently stop before weight regain gets too noticeable to deny or cover up).
With the prescriptions of these drugs proliferating across the healthcare field, suddenly we're back to the old idea that there's "no excuse" for being fat.
"We have something that works," the lie goes. And since the entire field of "ob*sity medicine" hinges on the idea that fatness in itself is a disease (despite not qualifying by any measure used to determine actual factual diseases), a fat person refusing to subject themselves to GLP-1 drugs is now considered even more "non-compliant" than ever.
Healthcare professionals have never needed an excuse to deny their fat patients actual medical care, but now they have an excuse that's being presented as so valid it's not even worth questioning. The push for these drugs for weight loss use has brought the old time moralizing around fatness to a new fever pitch.
Refuse to subject yourself to these drugs in order to qualify for treatment you actually need? Well, I guess you don't *really* care about your health like you claim.
Refuse to temporarily* shrink yourself the way Good People know they should? Well, then you deserve the harassment you get.
Refuse to destabilize your health in order to access gender care being held hostage? Well, your dysphoria must not be so bad. After all, if you *really* wanted it, you'd lose weight.
And it's not just from healthcare that the moralizing comes! Refusing to take part in the office discussions over what are "good" and "bad" foods to eat, whether by silence or actual responses, gets used as an excuse to say you're "not a team player" (and other bullshit corporate phrases). Strangers will give you weight loss advice you never asked for, claim to be Offended when you don't thank them profusely for their meddling, and then congratulate themselves for their cruelty allegedly disguised as """concern""" when they invariably harass you further. Friends, family, neighbors, and acquaintances giving you the cold shoulder because they're taking your refusal to mistreat yourself as a commentary on their decision to take the weight loss versions (but who, of course, would never consider the effects their praising of the drugs might have on you).
It comes in from all sides and it comes constantly.
"I'm willing to suffer for the Holy Good of Thinness," the idea goes, "so how dare you not suffer with me!"
Refusing to take part in diet culture is more threatening than "failing" within it.
And while everyone suffers under diet culture, it's fat folks, disabled folks, and all the overlapping Venn diagram marginalized folks who will suffer the most for their refusal to join in.
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*Because weight loss *is* temporary the vast majority of the time. Because we have a century of research that shows that 95% of people who intentionally lose weight will regain what they lost, with quite a few gaining more. Because we have just so much fucking data that shows that weight cycling, disordered eating, and weight stigma have stronger connections to the negative health effects that get blamed on weight itself.
