Questioning the meaning of trans by comparing it to anorexia.

[Fran2023]

Really interesting and very provocative article by Lionel Shriver.

https://unherd.com/2023/04/is-trans-the-new-anorexia/

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.

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

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”.

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 🤞🤞

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

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.

Also, just to add...

From what I understand (I've read a few articles and research papers on it) there is a point at which anorexia and gender dysphoria diverge. There will be some people with gender dysphoria for whom treatment through therapy simply doesn't work and transition is the only answer. However, this will be a very, very small subset and is much more likely to be males who experienced gender dysphoria from a very young age. Not teenage girls (or indeed men transitioning late) such as those in the article.

Trans is another form of self harm, isn't it?

This episode of A Wider Lens also discusses the connections

There was an article on here a while ago by a sociologist I think and she listed a "trend" every 5 /10 years in things like anorexia, self harm, Emo etc and said Trans was just following that pattern. I suppose the difference being the others don't try to impede other peoples rights.

Eating Disorders have definitely been proven to be contagious. Trans has strong similarities and overlap. The desire for control, the rebellious rejection of what society is telling them they should be, the fear and rejection of puberty. The breakdown of their relationship with their mother and fear of motherhood and what being an older mature woman could mean. The rapid need to take it to the next level once a goal is reached.

I thought Victoria's comments on how changevle our bodies are as females was interesting also that stereotypical male traits are involved in refusing to back down and compromise and other male/female splits within the female psyche in EDs. Also then how maturity is postponed and you are out of social wack with your peers and she had to learn in her 20s what others had learnt in their teens.

It has been mooted that there are a few people that cannot be helped by therapy and must therefore transition. I have also heard it said that because transition has been pushed so hard as a solution, while insisting that “trans” is not a mental health disorder and should never be treated as such, newer treatments such as CBT have never been tried.

Paul McHugh was a doctor involved right at the start of this horrendous medical and social experiment. After a few years, it was concluded it didn’t work and the treatment ceased, but by then it had begun to spread and was already too late.

The parallels between anorexia and trans in young people have been noted many times here on Mumsnet.

It has been mooted that there are a few people that cannot be helped by therapy and must therefore transition.

There are people suffering from anorexia for women therapy did not work. Nobody suggested that they should therefore be affirmed in their dysphoria and supported to starve themselves.

Trans, in the sense of actual transition, not the ideology, is indeed self-harm.

Argh - bloody autocorrect and an app that only allows you to see five lines at a time!

There are people suffering from anorexia for whom therapy does not work.

In my view, the most important thing to note in discussions like this is not what is the answer to the question(s) - in this case, is there a social contagion/trend/parallel with other conditions and so on - it’s the fact that gender clinics themselves aren’t asking these questions and attempting to answer them with research.

The shallowness and lack of intellectual curiosity in those who affirm patients without any deep thinking about these vulnerable people is a huge component of the entire scandal.

There's a concept in psychology of a "symptom pool" being a collection of behaviours that people engage in in order to express their distress to others. They are cultural and therefore change over time. So if you are distressed in a culture where you are aware of anorexia, you might express distress through that. Now distress might be expressed through gender dysphoria. It doesn't mean that the dysphoria is just being attention seeking or that the distress is not real and the process is probably subconscious. But the gender dysphoria may just be a symptom of underlying distress which is unrelated to gender. It gets expressed as gender dysphoria because this is now a prominent part of our symptom pool. Stella O'Malley (psychotherapist) talks a bit about this.

Another reason to think anorexia and gender dysphoria (particularly rapid onset gender dysphoria) might be similar is that both typically start just before or at the start of puberty. And both involve changing or wishing to change the physical body in order to address a mental issue.

Interesting article, but saying the 'it's cool to be trans' trend means we should treat all trans people as delusional is just plain wrong.

Gender dysphoria is REAL, and whilst it shouldn't be affirmed blindly and therapy should be sought to work out if that's what's really going on, you'd have to be extremely stupid at this point to not realise that some people just need to transition to be happy.

No amount of therapy could ever help someone who is suffering from crippling gender dysphoria, and it's inhumane to suggest that person should have to live in a personal hell.

Except we're talking about girls / young women and social contagion. Not fully grown adults with their careers and families established who decide to transition for their own reasons and who have been allowed to influence children with their born in the wrong body nonsense.

What's happening to these girls and women is unforgivable with the medical profession in particular bearing a considerable responsibility for their lack of care, research and appalling experimentation on children.

But especially with young people, if you can't reliably tell who needs to transition and who doesn't, you have a big fucking ethical problem.

We can't just trust that a therapist can work out "who is really trans".

As far as I know, we don't have randomised controlled studies, and long term studies, that would really tell us the percentages of how many kids are helped vs how many are harmed.

Also, I don't think we should stop looking for new cures for gender dysphoria. In theory, it's presumably best if we can get people to accept their actual body.

None of us is stupid, @reesewitherspork

There is no compelling evidence that shows that transition works as a treatment. None of the clinical trials has looked at long term effects in what is a lifelong, irreversible, physical treatment for a mental health disorder. What you say might, eventually be demonstrated, but I very much doubt it. I think transitioning will, in a few years, be regarded with the same horror as another surgical intervention for mental health problems: lobotomy.

Longtime lurker here.

I had anorexia in my late teens to mid twenties, and I’ve noticed and wondered about the similarities between anorexia and trans identities/ gender dysphoria. I wonder if I would have manifested my hurt and insecurities through a trans identity if I was a teenager today.

It’s jarring thinking that my very real illness and long term struggle to relearn how to eat and care for my body may not be something that always would have happened, or that it’s somehow social in origin rather than biological. I can see how that seems dismissive and why @reesewitherspork raises those points about gender dysphoria being real. Anorexia was very real to me too.

It was genuine real suffering and it took up years of my life. It was a huge effort and struggle to recover. As a teenager, I genuinely thought I’d just end up dying as a result of my anorexia. I’m sure many dysphoric teenagers feel the same way. But that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t have a social root or elements of social contagion, and its ‘realness’ also doesn’t automatically mean we should lean in to it and seek to transition people. I wholeheartedly 100% believed my life would be better if I just got to X weight. Then it was always five pounds more. But my life didn’t get better until I dealt with the trauma that was causing those issues for me. I worry that the same might be true for a large proportion of trans teenagers and young people, and that by having a healthcare system that affirms their concerns, we are doing untold damage.

@Circe7 the explanation of cultural symptoms / symptom pool is very helpful, that makes a lot of sense and gives me a better idea of how my illness could be both real and rooted in the society in which we live and the time I grew up, so thank you!

@PepeParapluie

This is such a fantastic and thoughtful post. I'm sorry to hear of your illness and what you have gone through. Wishing you well.

I don’t mean this to sound flippant, but I have often wondered recently if converting to Buddhism could help. I am not a religious expert, but isn’t it about releasing the self and ending suffering? I know that a lot of programmes to end alcoholism involve receiving Jesus, so it’s not unprecedented to use religion as therapy.

Sorry, not the right thread, or the right moment, but i just get these ideas that run around for a while and need to blurt them out somewhere!

That's an interesting thought Nellodee. Tbh, we really need to ramp up the available responses for these vulnerable children. Breaking the stranglehold that trans extremism currently has on education, psychology and politics would be a massive start. We've generations of experience in dealing with children with complex vulnerabilities like anorexia. The fact professionals are literally forbidden by the trans lobby to explore any of this with children is chilling and shameful in equal measures.