u/Eastern_Lie655

I'm curious if others have listened to this episode and had any thoughts or reactions to it. https://open.spotify.com/episode/0y7LBdMSdQFPnYuKNCng49?si=3435e43808784232

As someone who is deeply steeped in anti-diet, body acceptance activism and academic theories, particularly around the intersection of fat phobia, racism, sexism, classism, I had trouble with several parts of the episode. I think the hosts, who I am not really familiar with, were really seeking to understand the perspective of their guest Tigress, and had proposed the idea that maybe there is a "both, and" here (although the title is Glp1 VERSUS Fat Liberation). As someone who started a glp1 last year, I was very reluctant to take it because I didn't want to perpetuate diet culture and wanted to understand the medication before starting it. A few things that sadly made me discredit a lot of what Tigress argued kept recurring throughout the episode.

• Tigress kept comparing Glp1 medications to phen phen. Like on repeat, including recounting a story about a colleague/mentor who had a heart episode in front of her and others. While I know this history sticks in a lot of our minds, she did a huge disservice to her argument because these two drugs are not comparable. Phen Phen was never FDA approved, nor did it undergo the decades of clinical trials that Glp1s have.
• She kept claiming that we don't know enough about Glp1 because they are "new". Which is also not true. They have been around for decades and simply because they are more recently prescribed for weight loss, doesn't mean they are new and that we don't have any data over time on them. This just made her sound uneducated on a topic she is arguing against.
• It seemed she really hoped that over time we would "discover" how dangerous and bad these drugs are for people - like she can't wait for the other shoe to drop, although she herself is taking Ozempic "only at a low does" for blood sugar reasons. But she won't up the dose because she claims the higher doses aren't well studied. It was an incredibly patronizing approach, IMO, about how all these fat liberation activists are going to be right because people are glp1 are going to discover how they don't work and how awful they are for you, even though this isn't want the science is showing after 20 years of these drugs being on the market and being studied.
• She claimed not to be "anti-science" but yet many of her arguments, which kept coming back to Phen Phen were not based on actual science. She also never addressed clinical trials, ongoing research, and real world data about the positive health impact we are continuing to learn about these drugs.

I think I feel frustrated because like so many things in our world right now, we are taking such a binary approach to highly complex things. It can be true that both fat phobia, and how people are treated in fat bodies intersect deeply with racism, capitalism, sexism, and classism and that the medical community has perpetuated this type of discrimination AND that science and can continue to evolve over time, and glp1 use isn't just "to become skinny." To claim that something as complex and intricate as the human body living in a complex and changing society is just one thing feels like a total miss to me. Yes, more people should understand how the intersection of multiple axis of identities and discrimination impact how fat bodies are perceived in a our culture, how food systems are inadequate for health and nutrition, and how diet culture is wrapped up in capitalism. But if you want people to actually hear that argument, you have to make sure you are also stating the actual science and facts about what these drugs are and are not.