Very angry about the discourse that's happening around ozempic and other GLP-1 medications. Like, incandescently incensed at the leftist making pithy posts equating the mere existence of these drugs to fascist eugenics. (It turns out that everything slightly politically inconvenient to one's personal world outlook is equivalent to fascist eugenics, as the conversation on the left around first transhumanism and then AI art has also proven).
Is the overwhelming social pressure for fat people to lose weight a deeply damaging form of institutional and cultural stigmatization, and do we need to work as a society to dismantle fatphobia wherever we encounter it? Absolutely.
Is the way to do this to restrict the body autonomy of individual fat people by banning elective medications in the name of preventing some sort of "opt-in eugenics", because said fat people are too stupid to make correct decisions? Because societal pressure means that people who want to lose weight need to be protected from their own choices? Because we're all too stupid to realize that we'd be better off the way you'd prefer us rather than to be the active decision makers in our own lives? No. Also I'm going to punch you in the face.
I see people implying that giving people an "easy option" to lose weight instead of forcing more people to sit in the stigma of fatphobia will entrench fatphobic attitudes. And maybe it will! But you don't get to force individuals to suffer worse discrimination by limiting their autonomy in the hope that it might make your political goals easier to obtain. That's just the worst kind of accelerationism. It's an argument with the same shape as, "well, maybe it'd be good if the fascists started murdering minorities, maybe then people would wise up sooner and revolt". Volunteering other people to be in any sort of firing line is not woke!
And this is not to even speak about the very real and vigorously medically validated benefits that weight loss can have in many (not all! But absolutely many!) cases. Which are constantly dismissed and downplayed, because people are too afraid to make the actual important point of fat liberation - which is a pro-body-autonomy point! - that it is not anybody else's business if somebody is fat, even if that fatness is "unhealthy" to them! But people aren't brave enough to argue on that alone a lot of the time, so people downplay the medical realities of fatness/thinness (which are complicated, but it seems absolutely true that there are negative medical consequences of carrying more weight outside of just the institutional biases of the medical field) for political convenience to their cause, which is another persistent bugbear of mine.
But anyway, the opposite is also true, which is that, 1. in an absolutist sense, people should be able to modify their bodies however they want, 2. including to make themselves thinner, for whatever reason but 3. including to escape social stigma, if they so wish. And if you care about body autonomy you should be willing to go to bat for that, instead of trying to restrict access to therapies because you personally wish they wouldn't, or because the fact that there's a medication that reduces weight complicates your personal liberation narrative.
There are some asterixes I could add to the above, but I hate having to qualify everything I say, so I'll be bullish about it.
Anyway, GLP-1 agonists totally changed my life, in a complicated way but one that was absolutely my choice, and whether you believe that I made a right choice or wrong one it is none of your business either way, and you should be supporting my right to self-determine.
People trying to reduce my access to my medication because it makes them uncomfortable can equally eat shit.
