Becoming flesh

As always, Victoria Smith says almost everything I've wanted to say about anorexia and gender identity — except that she said it better:

I decided this wasn’t for me and stopped eating. I didn’t bleed or need a bra again until 1996.  In the changing rooms for PE, I’d look down on the other girls, the ones allowing themselves to become woman-shaped. Hips, breasts, blood, surrender; I was better than that. These girls, I’d tell myself, had made a choice. If they weren’t exactly what they looked like — female, normative, inferior — they’d have been like me and said no. 

Back then, no one offered you shortcuts to puberty avoidance. You did it old-style, slowly, like a starving saint. It wasn’t like today, when we are far more progressive.

It’s not that we don’t continue to put precociously pubescent girls on a one-way ticket to sexual exploitation. It’s that we offer a select few — those who do not consider themselves tits and ass and are willing to suffer to prove it —  a medicalised exit strategy.

There’s a lot I can’t reconjure about those hungry years. What exactly did I see when I looked in the mirror? Where did I think it would all end? What was my plan: to starve myself forever? Then what?

What I do remember:

That strange, brittle energy, like a candle burning furiously at the end of its wick. I was an immaterial being. I had crystalline thoughts.

That sense of purity and superiority I had, which was directed in particular at other girls, who lacked my discipline. Merely by filling out their bodies while I whittled mine away they proved that we had nothing in common. My self-image required their submission to what I rejected for myself. This wild idea of mine made me much lonelier than I ever should have been. I cut myself off from other girls, so their experiences couldn’t speak to me. And I remember seething when I read psychology texts that characterized anorexia as pathological compliance with beauty standards. (It’s not pathological compliance, it’s a pathological rejection! But what’s really pathological is acceptance.)

So I get what Victoria writes about here. And I get it when I talk to young women who think they’ve found a new way out through transgender identification. I can recognize an escape hatch when I see one. And I know they’d hate the comparisons I draw. They’d hate to be enlisted in my arguments, recast as fresh examples of a familiar type. Doesn’t my woman’s body speak for itself, telling these young women I have nothing of any possible interest or value to say to their experience, that I ‘ve reconciled myself to the irreconcilable, just by eating just by calling myself a woman? I don’t have those crystalline thoughts anymore.

But women like me will be here when it’s over.