I think the rise of weight loss surgeries and drugs has been and continues to be, at a societal level, absolutely devastating to the fat liberation movement, but I don't think there's much chance of reversing that trend. Maybe when the horrific side effects come out, but even then, people will risk some pretty horrific side effects. Even if you completely gloss over all of the ethical and philosophical aspects of bodily autonomy, I just don't think it would work. If the government wanted to ban weight loss drugs (which it doesn't), it would be about as effective as banning alcohol, marijuana, or abortion.
The fact is, when a drug or technology promises to move a person (or worse, their children) out of a despised social class, people will use it. They'll seek it out, wait in line for it, empty their pockets, go into debt, break the law, risk the side effects. You can't just persuade them out of it, especially with abstract political appeals.
I think the only reason the queer rights movement has made as much progress as it has is that every attempt at conversion therapy has failed so miserably. If an even semi-effective "cure for homosexuality" had been invented in like, 1965 -- or even 1995 -- we'd be living in a very different world.
I remember back in like, 2010, when the autistic rights movement was very adamant that we were under a ticking clock -- we had to get the public on board with autism acceptance before the inevitable rollout of a prenatal test for autism, because once society figured out how to effectively prevent our existence, it would be all over. That sense of urgency kind of petered out as the search for a prenatal test ran into scientific roadblocks (but now that Kennedy's war on autism is afoot, now might be a great time to get that sense of urgency back).
And many Deaf people have said the same thing about cochlear implants, Mad people about antipsychotics, people with Down Syndrome and Cystic Fibrosis about prenatal testing -- acceptance and equality for people with a trait that medicine can "fix" is just even more of an uphill fight.
Which does not mean we should give up. We should still be fighting for fat liberation, Mad liberation, autistic and Deaf and all disabled liberation.
I just don't think complaining about and shaming people who choose weight loss drugs/surgeries is an effective tactic at this point. You're not actually persuading anyone, just miring yourself in denial.
By contrast -- and maybe this is naively optimistic of me -- I think we can still smother genAI in its sleep. Its value as a labor-saving or time-saving technology for individuals is minimal, it doesn't work as advertised, and people hate it.
So it's kind of weird to me that the consensus I'm seeing form around these 2020s technologies is "Stop being a luddite, there's no holding back progress, just accept the fact that the machine that takes in scraped data and spits out misinformation is part of our lives now" but also "If we're all just a little meaner to people who take weight-loss drugs, maybe we can reverse the trend and bring back 2017-era body positivity."
I think those predictions are backwards, actually.
To be clear, personally, I'm still holding the line against both. No Ozempic, no chatGPT, just me typing my own emails with my own fat fingers. I'm just saying I think one of those technologies seems easier to kill than the other, and it's not the one y'all think.