Questioning the meaning of trans by comparing it to anorexia.

The Christine McGuiness program on girls and autism had something on the link between autism and anorexia.

If I remember correctly they had a woman on from an anorexia treatment centre. She said that they believed a third of the girls there would meet the threshold for an autism diagnosis.

Given what the figures are like for the Tavi, there's clearly an unresolved issue which needs a hell of a lot more research. There's definitely a problem because the correlation is so high. What the cause is, is open to debate but something is going on which needs explaining.

(Obviously I'm aware LS is a well known author, but JKR definitely has a wider reach)

Great article. Thanks for sharing OP.

I have seen the parallels of anorexia and trans identification a few times now, in various forms. This is particularly well written and very accessible to a wide audience. I wonder if someone like JKR might tweet it to get the reach 🤞🤞

When teaching freshman composition in New York colleges in the mid-Eighties, I picked up a peculiar pattern in one-on-one conferences with my female students. With improbable frequency, they’d confide that they were anorexic. The term had only entered the popular lexicon about 10 years earlier, and public awareness of the perturbing derangement had been given a huge boost by the pop singer Karen Carpenter’s death in 1983. Yet not all these 18-year-old students were disturbingly underweight. It took me a minute to get it. They aspired to be anorexic. Anorexia was a prestige diagnosis.

Yes! It really was an aspiration of mine! Although I liked food too much to go the whole way, I was very, very slim and was never happier than when someone asked me if I “had a tapeworm?” or told me I was “too thin”. That was why I did it! And also to prove my sister wrong, who’d once shaken her head and told me I “could never be anorexic”.

There is also some interesting research underway into the relationship between anorexia and autism. Trans also has autism connections.

That is an interesting read. I meet young trans ( female to male ) people at work ( health setting ) and have an aching worry that having been born ( apparently) into the wrong body is not the problem, or at least not the main or only problem. But being trans is what is seen and talked about.

To voice open concern about this would be transphobic apparently. I think the hands of many working in health ( and across many services) are tied by the toxicity of trans activism and the debates there . I don't know what the answer is but I think we all need to work on it for the sake of the generations growing up now. We are letting young people down.