Opinion – Eliza Mondegreen
ELIZA MONDEGREEN – 23 October 2022 – Genspect
One of the first heretical thoughts I entertained—the first time I realized young women like the young woman I was at the time were transitioning—was that we were seeing the next iteration of anorexia, a new and improved escape route for girls and young women who are uncomfortable with their changing bodies and the way the world reacts to those changes.
Years later, the parallels still strike me as both obvious and deep, becoming only more obvious and cutting ever deeper every day.
I know this terrain and I’ve written about this subject before:
There’s a lot I can’t reconjure about those hungry years. What exactly did I see when I looked in the mirror? Where did I think it would all end? What was my plan: to starve myself forever? Then what?
What I do remember:
That strange, brittle energy, like a candle burning furiously at the end of its wick. I was an immaterial being. I had crystalline thoughts.
That sense of purity and superiority I had, which was directed in particular at other girls, who lacked my discipline. Merely by filling out their bodies while I whittled mine away they proved that we had nothing in common. My self-image required their submission to what I rejected for myself. This wild idea of mine made me much lonelier than I ever should have been. I cut myself off from other girls, so their experiences couldn’t speak to me. And I remember seething when I read psychology texts that characterized anorexia as pathological compliance with beauty standards. (It’s not pathological compliance, it’s a pathological rejection! But what’s really pathological is acceptance.)
… I get it when I talk to young women who think they’ve found a new way out through transgender identification. I can recognize an escape hatch when I see one. And I know they’d hate the comparisons I draw. They’d hate to be enlisted in my arguments, recast as fresh examples of a familiar type. Doesn’t my woman’s body speak for itself, telling these young women I have nothing of any possible interest or value to say to their experience, that I’ve reconciled myself to the irreconcilable, just by eating just by calling myself a woman? I don’t have those crystalline thoughts anymore.
Medical providers tend to frame anorexia as the pathological pursuit of an (objectified) female form. I tend to see it as the opposite: a pathological rejection of objectification and sexual development. The fear isn’t becoming fat so much as becoming flesh. The anorexic persecutes the body that betrays ‘the self’ by its very existence: by its femaleness, by its soft curves and dark secrets, by blood, by the reproductive potential written into female flesh and by the things society writes on that flesh. Anorexics aspire to be pure spirit, pure intellect. They need only one food: not to violate the ‘self’ by becoming flesh.
Transition, too, scapegoats the body for its failure to faithfully represent ‘the self.’ Gender-dysphoric people talk about feeling like a ‘brain in a jar’ or a gender identity stuck in a ‘meat vehicle’ or ‘flesh suit.’ Major surgeries are spoken about with cool disregard, as though they were minor home-remodeling projects...