Newsletter #10: Conservatives Don’t Know Anything About Anorexia Nervosa
My friend Irina has asked me more than once if I think testosterone would cure her anorexia…
Let me rewind. When we were in our mid-twenties, we both seemed equally unwell. In fact, if anything I was doing more poorly than she was, in our earliest days of friendship. So sometimes she’ll ask me if what worked for me will work for her. I always counter this by asking her if she would like to be a dude. Her answer has always been a clear, unhesitating “HELL NO.” And so I tell her that no, actually, I don’t think it will work for her. We always have a laugh about it, but deep down I know she’s desperate, and she really would take testosterone, if she thought it could cure this lifelong, debilitating illness she was saddled with.
Irina had a front row seat for something that looked like a miracle cure, for me. Years ago we both had multiply-relapsing anorexia, a disease for which there is no reliable treatment. About half of adults who have it eventually recover, but half do not, and nobody knows why or what to do for the unlucky half. Irina is one of the unlucky people. She’s been through treatment many times. Her hair is thin, her skin is yellow-gray, she’s lost most of her teeth, and she’s got a nervous, obsessive energy to her that pushes most people away. Every time I see her I tell her she should never lose hope, never give up, but I can’t honestly say I think she’s going to recover. She’s been this way since she was still a child. Now she’s 40, and even if she were to get better now, with all the damage she’s done to her health I’d still expect her to die early.
Conservatives like to wedge talk of anorexia and body dysmorphia into the conversation about gender affirming care and trans people. It’s not because they know or care one jot about the people who suffer from the debilitating effects of disordered eating, though. They do it as a gotcha, in a lame attempt to cast gender dysphoria as a mental illness and mental illnesses as disorders that are best treated in a punitive and dehumanizing way. It’s offensive as a trans person, sure, but it’s even more offensive as someone who knows the hopelessness of spending time on treatment after treatment. I’ve had the most expensive, time consuming, life-disrupting treatments fail to help. I was lucky and got better, but not through any program. I was lucky that my discomfort with my body was rooted in my deep-seated discomfort at being (percieved as) a girl. My ED symptoms became manageable when I allowed myself to go back to wearing men’s clothes, which I’d worn in late high school and college and gave up to be more adult and professional after graduation. Of course my gender dysphoria didn’t go away with just a superficial wardrobe change, but it was tamed enough for the disordered eating to lose its hold. When I went on testosterone it faded to the point where it’s not a daily or even weekly issue for me.
Testosterone was a miracle drug for me. For other trans people surgery can be the most important thing, or a combination of surgery and hormones, and for some a wardrobe and name/pronouns change is all they need. Transition care is individualized, with patients talking to doctors and/or therapists about their personal goals and needs and developing a plan that suits them best. There’s no one-size fits all, but a constellation of social adaptations, procedures, and drugs that have helped other trans patients and can be mixed and matched to suit our unique needs. When that happens, trans people have demonstrably better outcomes on a range of scales. Anorexics, sadly, don’t have anything like this, and they and their families dearly wish they did. It’s cruel for conservatives to use anorexia as a blunt object to beat trans people up with, but they’re conservatives. That’s what they do.
ICYMI
WPATH, a cautious mainstream organization that sets the standards and best practices for medical professionals who treat gender dysphoria, released a lengthy statement using scientific evidence to harshly criticize England’s restrictive new NHS guidelines for the treatment of gender dysphoria in youth as being unmoored from medical best practices.
A men’s restroom in Ireland has a tampon machine. The American right wing cable channel Newsmax was on top of that important story!
An official in the US Department of Energy allegedly stole a fancy suitcase at the airport (which was bad, we do not condone silly theft here, no sir). The right wing press’ angle, found in all their headlines, is that this official is nonbinary.
A Christian writer compared trans men to Frankenstein’s monster in the purplest bit of prose I’ve seen in all my days covering anti-trans propaganda. Truly, this was a gift, and you will have to read it to believe it.
Next Week
We actually DID get back to normal this week, a rare case of delivering on the promises we made in this section of the newsletter. Next week I’d like to finally write about the ways the US right covers foreign news, particularly news from the UK. I’ve been seeing a fair amount of it lately and it’s ripe for a more extended treatment.
As usual I will say I’d like to do some sort of data journalism, I doubt I’ll produce anything next week but I am finally meeting with a journalist who does it who I hope can give me the pointers to get started. I want to have some numbers tracking trends in right wing coverage, because I feel that would add some real value to the work I’m doing.
I say this every week, but it keeps being true: Thank you for supporting the work I’m doing. You’re what’s keeping me going, and I appreciate it greatly.
Evan
