I’ve got a new post up at Genspect on eating disorders and trans identification:
Like trans identification, eating disorders and self harm sweep through social networks. Well-intentioned efforts to raise awareness about these conditions—in the classroom or through the media—may spread the contagion by popularizing templates for young women to understand and express distress, and outline action steps for distressed girls to undertake. Research documents a “near-perfect link” between media exposure and eating disorders like anorexia and bulimia. We see something similar happening with media coverage of trans issues and referrals to youth gender clinics, but few want to talk about the relationship between media consumption (in the case of trans: media celebration), behavior, and identity.
There are other links too many are failing to recognize. Medical professionals have long recognized that peer-support groups can unintentionally fuel disordered eating and spread harmful behaviors. Clinicians often police patients’ speech in group-therapy settings, forbidding “numbers talk” and cutting off discussion of the emotions that drive disordered eating. Medical providers discourage anorexic patients from focusing too much on food or crafting elaborate rituals around eating, and often track disordered eating behaviors through multiple iterations, as patients ‘move on’ from anorexia to fasting for religious purposes or the adoption of restrictive diets like veganism or ‘clean’ eating.
But when an eating-disordered patient comes out as trans, everything clinicians know about how harmful behaviors and identifications spread goes out the window. Suddenly, negative self-talk in group-therapy sessions is OK—as long as the patient says she hates her breasts and hips because she’s not a girl or a woman at all. She’s offered breast binders, even top surgery, to ‘affirm’ her new identity. Her eating disorder suddenly makes sense—she was uncomfortable with her developing body because she was developing the wrong kind of body altogether—and her struggles with weight loss and restriction take a backseat. Suppressing her female form goes from a recognized pathology to a ‘gender embodiment goal.’
And here we can see how the moral imperatives that cluster around trans identities are clouding clinical judgment when it comes to understanding and treating eating disorders themselves.
Read the rest here!
Interesting to note that Dr. Martha Peaslee Levine, (Rachel Levine's ex-wife--Rachel used to be Richard, and works in the Biden administration) is an expert on teens with eating disorders.
Link below, to the 6 papers debunking the bad methodology in the Dutch studies, the Jack Turban publications and Dr. Stephen B. Levine's "Informed Consent Reconsidered" revealing the small sample sizes, the surveys given to natal males that were designed for natal females and the data manipulation by Turban in which the sex of participants is obscured:
https://wordpress.com/post/uteheggengrasswidow.wordpress.com/4879
Ute Heggen, author, In the Curated Woods, True Tales from a Grass Widow (iuniverse, 2022)
Great article. It seems that whenever we get too close to saying "patriarchy is harming women and girls", everyone suffers from a sort of collective denial and silence. To say out loud--or in print--that a trans identity is a way for girls and women to escape objectification/misogyny is almost heretical. Judith Herman talks about a similar phenomenon around the development of "hysterical" neuroses. Rather than admit that many of his female patients were suffering from having been sexually abused by their male relatives, Freud blamed the girls -- they had "repressed desires" to be sexually exploited. Rather than admit that things like anorexia, a trans identity, domestic violence, passive suicidality, active self-harm, and all forms of sexual exploitation are the natural consequences of the systemic oppression of females, we engage in denial. It COULDN'T POSSIBLY be that patriarchy is harmful AF. No. Not that.