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Feminism: Sex and gender discussions

To think trans is the new anorexia?

105 replies

SouperMario · 03/05/2023 10:04

Controversial but I just read this piece and cannot help agreeing with a lot of it. Both forms of body dysmorphia, both social contagions.

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

Is trans the new anorexia?

Becoming a woman is an unappealing business

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

OP posts:
Signalbox · 04/05/2023 17:03

This is not an artefact of contemporary , western society.

Do you honestly believe this to be true? What has been increasingly happening is schools since 2013 (or there about) is clearly a modern trend or social contagion. No society has ever seen anything comparable. Most of us know this to be true because most of us were all at school when none of these identities existed.

Dalekjastninerels · 04/05/2023 17:07

Tandora · 04/05/2023 16:41

Ok, on that enlightened note, I need to check out of this thread now.
take care all ✌🏻

When you have suffered through pms suicidal thoughts, agonising period pains and bloated stomach etc

You haven't?

I feel sad for you; but I do not understand you.

Mycatwantsmedead · 04/05/2023 17:40

You can reverse the damage done by Anorexia. There are no similarities between the 2.

not always. Anorexia can cause irreparable harm. Gender identity disorders appear to get a much more sympathetic treatment from medics than eating disorders.

Miajk · 04/05/2023 17:44

RoyalCorgi · 04/05/2023 09:26

I notice that a lot of people complaining about how "offensive" the article is have apparently failed to spot that it's a review of a memoir by Hadley Freeman about her teenage anorexia. In the book (which I've read), Freeman makes the connection between anorexia and gender dysphoria explicit. She interviews three mental health professionals (psychiatrists and psychologists) who are all expert in gender dysphoria, and they also say there are strong similarities between anorexia and gender dysphoria.

Still, what do psychiatric experts with long experience of dealing with troubled teenage girls know about the subject compared with a bunch of easily offended posters on Mumsnet?

You mean a lot of the posters telling their first hand experiences of anorexia?

You're obviously not here for a sensible discussion if hearing an opposing view from a group of people discussing their actual lived experience is reduced to "easily offended posters" by you and you're not even interested in learning.

Keep being ignorant but posters like you should stop moaning about how we can't have a conversation. We can, if you'd be willing to listen.

nepeta · 04/05/2023 22:17

The same mental illness can differ in the way it appears in different cultures. For instance, hallucinations might be equally common in schizophrenia in France and in India, but what the hallucinations are about is going to differ.

So cultures affect conditions which also have a biological basis. I think the same applies here, too, but even more widely:

It's not just social contagion which we should address, but also the unrealistic images popular culture creates about how women and girls should look, and how not achieving that perfection is used to bully girls, and certainly also how the enormous increases in clearly misogynistic porn and its consumption by ever younger boys affects growing up female today.

When you add all that to the upheavals caused by puberty, to the sudden interest even quite old men start taking in your body, to the increase in harassment etc. it's not really very surprising that many teen girls are depressed and sad and feel powerless.

Ways of regaining some power, and perhaps some (non-sexual) attention from their peers can include self-harming, not eating, refusing to become a woman etc. In other times and places different forms of resistance exist, but I see all of them as forms of protest.

If you have little control over how others see you and how they treat you, at least you can control your own body. That would be the shared part in these responses; how that control happens varies and is culture-specific, though the Internet is probably now erasing many of those cultural differences.

There are some commonalities between the various coping mechanisms, but they are not the same. Likewise, there may be other motivations for taking the types of actions this thread discusses.

But gender dysphoria, body dysmorphia, and anorexia all seem to share something atypical happening in that part of the brain which is responsible for self-perception (e.g. what we see in the mirror as opposed to what the mirror objectively shows).

In that way they are in the same wider family of conditions. (I only know personally about anorexia, having had it, but I did have one of those sudden views of myself I had not mentally prepared for (in a shop window) which somehow showed me the real me (frighteningly thin), even though my mirror did not. So I certainly had warped self-perception until that point in time.)

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