Is trans the new anorexia?

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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.
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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.
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