Gender Dysphoria Is Like an Eating Disorder

Gender dysphoria is like anorexia.

Let me explain.

Anorexia is a condition wherein you are disgusted by the natural processes of your body and fantasize about mutilating them in some way. Gender dysphoria is a condition wherein you are disgusted by the natural processes of your body and fantasize about mutilating them in some way.

Anorexics look in the mirror and see a bigger version of the body they actually have. This false image of themselves drives them to make themselves lose weight so that they can become skinnier. 

Gender dysphorics tell themselves that they are men trapped in women's bodies and vice versa. This drives them to look in the mirror and see every feminine or masculine attribute, respectively, as a flaw, and to seek hormones and surgeries to change them.

Anorexia is often a result of trauma and an urge to take control over something easier as a way to cope. Gender dysphoria is often a result of trauma and an urge to change the body you had when you experienced trauma.

Anorexics and gender dysphorics typically cover up their bodies in public on days of very low self image.

Anorexics proudly show off their ribs, collarbones, hip bones, and skeleton-like limbs on social media. Gender dysphorics proudly show off the scars from their surgeries on social media. 

Anorexics are complimented by concerned comments such as "You look emaciated" and "You look like a skeleton." Gender dysphorics are complimented by insults such as "You look like a boy" and "I can't tell if you're a boy or girl" or even, in the case of gender dysphoric men, bitch, slut, and hoe.

Anorexia is a progressive illness. You begin by experiencing discomfort around your belly, your thighs, your gluteus maximus, hypothetically. Then you reduce your food. Maybe you exercise more. You skip meals. You vomit the only food you eat. You abuse laxatives. Eventually, your hair falls out, you become incontinent, your teeth rot, your bones become brittle, and your organs shut down. Your body uses its last reserves of fat to keep itself alive and then start burning through your muscle, including your heart. Heart disease is the leading cause of death among anorexics.

Gender dysphoria is a progressive illness. Speaking as a female, at first you're mainly dysphoric about your chest, hips, and menstrual cycle. You cut your hair short, you wear a binder, you dress in men's clothes. But you develop dysphoria around the less noticeable details. Your shoulder to waist ratio, your voice, your round face, your small hands and feet. So you take hormone blockers and testosterone, which covers your feminine face with facial hair and gives you a deeper voice. Most likely you'll get a double mastectomy. The result is that removing estrogen from your body gives you vaginal atrophy, which can kill you. You may start balding, your voice will be permanently changed, you will never get your chest back. If you don't want vaginal atrophy, you can always get a phalloplasty, which has a 60% complication rate that can also kill you. Either way, you have reduced your life by at least ten years.

And your anorexia or gender dysphoria persists.

The main difference is that most doctors can and will tell you all the consequences of anorexia, while most doctors don't know or won't tell you the consequences of cross-sex hormones and surgery. All I have mentioned here is what I have scrambled together from older trans men willing to speak out about their experiences.

Many people joke that the trans kids of 2017 and onward would have been the Goth or Emo kids in the early 2000s. I think this is a close comparison but inaccurate. The gender dysphorics of today are the anorexics of twenty years ago. Anorexia became a trend on social media, including MySpace, 4Chan, and YouTube, because impressionable youth were logging into social media and seeing beautiful thin bodies and wanted to be like them. When they closed their eyes, they saw an elegant skinny body. When they opened their eyes, the mirror told them that they were fat. Social media allowed anorexics to collectively share dieting, purging, and weight loss routines, giving each other access to laxatives. They compared pounds and kilos lost. The ones who lost the most were at the op of the hierarchy.

The same-aged kids today log into TikTok, Instagram, and even Pinterest and see girls with short fluffy hair, a flat chest, and muscular shoulders and forearms. They want to see that when they look in the mirror. They open their eyes and see a girl and are disgusted. Gender dysphoria.

Some OG gender dysphorics like Blaire White (ehh) and Buck Angel say that social media cannot give you gender dysphoria. It can only confuse you. 

Let me remind you what gender dysphoria is: the condition of feeling one's emotional and psychological identity to be at variance with one's birth sex

Fine, fine, that may just be the 2022 definition, but most people would agree that gender dysphoria is a discomfort with primary and secondary sex characteristics and feeling a desire to change them.

See? Twelve-year-olds on TikTok really do have gender dysphoria. Because they are both mental illnesses that draw attention to the body, and most people are very sensitive about what their body looks like. Not everyone will develop gender dysphoria or anorexia because they see someone on TikTok, but about one in five will. This is probably why one in five 13-17 year olds identify as transgender, even though gender dysphoria historically only affected one out of ten thousand people.

Anorexic friends connect and enable each other, yet they compete to become the skinniest.

The same thing happens to gender dysphoric friends. I can speak from personal experience.

In the summer of 2021, I became fast friends with a girl on Instagram who lived in England. For anonymity, I'm going to call her Rain Cloud. Rain Cloud and I became so vulnerable with each other that we began flirting playfully until all of a sudden she was like "So we're dating now, right?"

At first I thought I couldn't because I was straight. And then when I fell head over heels in love with her, I decided that I'd just ignore God for a while so I could enjoy a lesbian relationship. Let me tell you, you might feel good in the moment, but throughout the night, the pain of loss of fellowship with God hurts like a stomach virus.

We both admitted to each other that we were gender dysphoric. A few weeks into knowing her, I watched her go from having long blond hair like me to shoulder-length black hair and bangs, and also donning a Victorian boy outfit.

She still looked feminine to me, but when her comments section became flooded with girls telling her she was handsome and asking her to be their boyfriend, I immediately got jealous. To make matters worse, she started--I thought--joking that she was a boy, and I told her that if she was a boy, than I was just as much of a boy as she was, because I was also dysphoric. But she laughed it off, calling me a boygirl, because she had seen my "feminine side."

B*tch, I want to say now, I've seen nothing but your feminine side.

I figured she didn't take me seriously because my hair went halfway down my back. I was already getting my hair cut for Halloween to look like Paul Williams--who was just as blond as me and had only two inches over me--but I moved the hair salon trip to a month earlier.

Now my hair was shorter than hers, and I began getting comments of people not being able to tell what gender I was, or otherwise assuming I was a boy. It was a shot of dopamine that made me never want to go back to being told "pretty girl," "slay queen," "princess."

Then my girlfriend cut her hair even shorter--ear length. So I cut my hair all the way into a round boy's cut.

Whenever she posted pictures of herself looking like a boy (and granted, she had to use filters and make it grainy because she has a very feminine face), I would have to take my own pictures and make them better than hers and make myself look like more of a boy in them.

Because gender dysphoric friends compete with each other.

Eventually, I had to stop talking to her. There were multiple reasons, and I might get into some in another blog post, but one of the four or five big factors was the fact that she was convinced she was a boy. She knew she was naturally feminine, so she changed her personality to act like an F Boy. She stopped showing her face in Facetimes because she hated the way she looked. All she would talk about was that she was a reincarnation of a nineteenth century boy, and if I didn't affirm her, she told me I was calling her a liar and that I must not love her. She flirted with other girls just to get girls simping for her as a boy.

My advice is: distance yourself from dysphoric friends who don't want to recover. Their transitioning will only push you down the wrong path. I would get a panic attack every day I opened Instagram and saw a new post from my girlfriend looking like a cute boy because if I couldn't prove to myself that I looked like more of a boy than her, I would go insane.

Gender dysphoria and anorexia are both potentially fatal conditions, one faster than the other, and these people need regular support from friends and family. But not friends and family with the same condition. Love from a distance, but help yourself first. Offer support, but not at the expense of your own self-image. Your friend needs help, and it might not be you who can help her.