Becoming a woman is an unappealing business
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.
While some of those students may have been merely flirting with the
condition, they were canaries in a very dark coal mine. All too many of their
peers were undertaking life-threatening calorie restriction in great earnest.
Anorexia was already known to be the very deadliest of all psychiatric
ailments. (Wanting to be anorexic, then, is like pining to contract necrosis.)
In the Nineties, my natural ghoulish voyeurism inspired me to read several
books about obsessive self-starvation, the best of which was Jenefer Shute’s
harrowing novel Life Size.
So surely this month I jumped at the chance to read Hadley
Freeman’s Good Girls: A Story and Study of Anorexia? Beginning in 1992,
the columnist struggled for many years with the eating disorder, for which she
was repeatedly hospitalised for months on end. Yet before diving into what
proved a compelling and forthright memoir, I resisted. Honestly? The topic felt
dated. Because as a prestige diagnosis, anorexia has been replaced. With trans.
Although Freeman spends half a chapter on the overlap between the two
afflictions — both are “rooted in the belief that if you change your body, you
will no longer hate yourself” — throughout her account I began to notice other
intersections.
Both neuroses are clearly communicable. Ever since a preoccupation with
thinness took off in the Sixties, eating disorders have soared, making
the more
recent insistence that anorexia is more of a heritable genetic
proclivity than a cultural contagion dubious. From the Seventies onwards, an
accelerating number of young women have got the idea to express their
discontent through debilitating hunger from lavish media coverage, and one
another. In kind, since 2010 the number of teenage girls referred to the
Tavistock Gender Identity Development Service increased by 5,000% —
making claims
of a purely genetic explanation equally iffy. Both these afflictions
are social confections. Although tales of people who starved themselves or
passed for the opposite sex exist in the historical record, eating disorders
and transgenderism on a mass scale are recent inventions. Collectively, we made
these dire maladies up.
Freeman identifies her “trigger” at 14 for dropping an alarming amount
of weight as a single moment. Sitting beside a prominently bony classmate in
gym class, Freeman asked, “Is it hard to buy clothes when you’re so small?”
“Yeah,” the girl replied. “I wish I was normal like you.”
“A black tunnel yawned open inside me,” Freeman writes, “and I tumbled
down it, Alice into Nowhereland. ‘Normal.’ Not ‘slim’, not ‘thin’—‘normal’.
Normal was average. Normal was boring. Normal was nothing.”
Nowadays, there’s ostensibly no such thing as a norm. In Left-wing
jargon, the clunky “norm” words — such as “cis-heteronormative” — are
pejorative. A fifth of Americans under 30 identify
as LGBT-whatever. Never mind that Eric Kaufmann has documented the large
proportion of
supposedly bisexual young women who don’t engage in actual same-sex
coupling; today’s young people adopt the label of sexual atypicality the way
earlier generations wore crocodile-logoed Lacoste shirts. As Freeman notes,
normal is “nothing”. Not only heterosexuality but, increasingly, contentment
with your natal sex is uncool. According to the report, 12% of millennials
identify as either transgender or gender-nonconforming, compared to 6% in
Generation X.
Both self-starvation and transgenderism guarantee elevation to a
perceived social elite. At least in the minds of some anorexics, being immune
to the temptations of crisps and biscuits that seduce mere mortals induces an
emotionally nutritious sensation of superiority. Freeman portrays her fellow
sufferers in hospital as competitive with one another over who eats less, as well
as picky about how grimly skeletal one must become to qualify for admission to
their rarefied circle; the same rivalry is readily located online. Public
slow-motion suicide inevitably secures outsize attention from terrified
parents, worried teachers and concerned physicians. (Freeman claims that
anorexics don’t aim to look thin; they aim to look ill.) With its plethora of
frenetic exercise rituals and strict internal rules surrounding food, being
anorexic can readily evolve into an identity, attachment to which makes
recovery still more difficult. A blandly healthy weight threatens the loss of
knowing who you are anymore.
Coming out as trans likewise greatly increases attention from
schoolmates, teachers and a whole industry of therapists, endocrinologists and
surgeons. In a single syllable, “trans” likewise seems to offer a readymade
answer to who you are. Freeman tells us that “when an anorexic says, ‘I don’t
want to be fat, I want to be thin,’ they are saying, ‘I want to be other than I
am, and what I am is unhappy. I want to be someone else.” Clearly, transition
to the opposite sex makes the same statement: I want to be someone else. But is
becoming someone else really an option?
Especially since girls came to dominate boys in paediatric gender
clinics 3:1, both forms of dysmorphia often hit the same population:
suggestible, insecure adolescent girls with a fragile sense of self who are
desperate to forestall all that womanhood entails: painful periods;
vulnerability to rape and pregnancy; sex, often portrayed in ubiquitous
internet porn as female humiliation; and fat. For some anorexics, their refusal
to grow into women is implicit; when girls take puberty blockers, their refusal
to become women is explicit. Having suffered the physical indignities of mature
femininity for over 50 years, I don’t entirely blame them.
Both diagnoses have significant intersections with autism, anxiety and depression, making patients susceptible to a tangible-seeming solution to a generalised discontent. Both populations mistake self-annihilation for a route to enlightenment and rebirth. Both populations seek to salve psychic torment by renouncing the body, the trans child through reconfiguration, the anorexic through evaporation. Both brands of patient embrace the recognisably religious practices of self-abnegation, redemption through suffering and purification via repudiation of the flesh.
It’s in the social sphere where the disorders part ways. When self-starvation
was still a hot topic last century, it might have conferred a measure of
cachet, but few parents these days would boast that their child is anorexic.
I’ve a niece who’s suffered for years from anorexia, and my brother and his
wife have been at their wits’ ends. The experience of having a child who
refuses to eat is abundantly one of helplessness and despair. Ditto many trans
parents — but not all.
For the paediatric gender clinic whistle-blower Jamie Reed testifies
that in America’s liberal enclaves, having a trans kid has become a prestige
diagnosis for many parents — one far preferable to the passé status of having a
child who’s plain old gay. Reed identifies the root of the problem as another
plain old: homophobia.
As for treatment, anorexia is universally acknowledged as an illness.
Doctors regard this potentially fatal form of dysmorphia as a psychiatric
ailment that must be arrested and resolved. Not so transgenderism, which is
often celebrated, if not beatified as a state of higher consciousness.
“Gender-affirming care” doesn’t treat the illness but indulges the patient’s
delusions to the hilt. Rather than coach a child to reconcile with reality,
clinicians twist reality to reconcile it with the disorder. Anyone who dares
describe the bizarre and biologically baseless conviction that one was “born in
the wrong body” as a mental health issue is tarred as a transphobe. Were
teenage anorexics treated anything like trans kids, they wouldn’t be encouraged
to finish their dinner, but rather abjured, “You’re right: you’re fat! Your
true self is even thinner! You will never rise to sit at the right hand of God
the Father Almighty until you completely disappear!”
Anorexics negotiate the universal human challenges of finding identity
and purpose by shrinking their internal world to a simple commandment: don’t
eat. But true anorexics can never be thin enough. Freeman describes a rivalry
between anorexia ward residents over who’s been “tubed” — the gold standard of
really having made it as an anorexic, because the very last medical resort is
force-feeding. Thus the obvious goal of severely restrictive eating is, however
hazily conceived, death. Meanwhile, before this morbid conveyor belt reaches
its inexorable end point, anorexics undergo hair loss, the breakdown of
internal organs, osteoporosis, and mental disarray. Fellow starvelings may
whisper competitive encouragement on those websites regulators are always trying
to shut down, but at least no one in authority is urging that, if a cadaverous
anorexic just loses another 15 pounds, her body and her deep, innate inner
being will finally match up.
Conversely, we’re implicitly dangling the promise that on the other side of transitioning to the opposite sex — or feigning transition, since inborn sex is written in our every cell — all a young person’s problems will be solved. Being trans is now a misguidedly easy-seeming shortcut to knowing who you are. But I’m betting that as an identity, being surgically mangled and hormonally discombobulated rarely goes the distance. Moreover, the physical price of buying this false promise of turning into a butterfly is stupendously high: sexual dysfunction, infertility, surgical complications and infections, and the side-effects of powerful medications for life.
What these conditions have most in common is being dreadful answers to
the questions that inevitably torture young people: who am I, what makes me
unique, what makes me loveable, what do I want to achieve, why does just being
alive seem so hard, am I the only one who feels so dejected, what does it mean
to become a man or a woman, and is there any way I can get out of growing up?
The responsible adult’s reply to that last one must be a gentle but firm “no”.
Is
trans the new anorexia? - UnHerd
