Spinning Out of Control
What do eating disorders, self-harm, and transition have in common?
What do eating disorders, self-harm, and transition have in common?
Control.
Disclaimer: I am speaking from my own experiences. My intention with this entry is to dive into something that I believe was a component of my own transition. I hypothesize that my experiences can be extrapolated to how others might feel, but I obviously have no authority to claim that every dysphoric person feels the same.
Considering the subject matter, content warnings apply.
I was 11 years old when I hurt myself for the first time.
Social media didn’t exist back then the way it does today, but I did spend a lot of time online, in chat rooms where everyone was about as close to anonymous as one can get. I had only a couple of friends in “real life”, and chatting online was one of the ways that I fulfilled my need for socialization.
The circumstances that led to me self-harming are almost embarrassing to recount, but I was a child — a highly emotional one, at that. Someone informed me that my role-play “boyfriend” had died. I had no way of confirming whether this was true, but my emotions got the better of me. I announced to the chat that I was going to kill myself, logged off, and found a steak knife in my kitchen.
Suddenly confronted with the reality of the situation, rather than slicing into my wrist, I used the serrated blade to slowly scrape a layer of skin off of the top of my left arm. I continued until it was raw and stinging. Then I decided against continuing and thought it would be best to inform my mom of what I had done.
The event might have been considered a precursor to what was to come. A few years after that, I began struggling with cutting — not scraping — in response to overwhelming emotions throughout my teenage years and into my twenties.
My urge to cut didn’t appear out of thin air. I learned about it online. Non-suicidal self-injury is a social contagion. 1,2
As a teenager, when I revealed to my friends that I had been self-harming, two or three of them started doing it as well. The knowledge that I might have been the catalyst for that kind of risky behaviour has weighed on me. I don’t like to think that I might have indirectly caused something harmful to happen to people that I cared about.
One of my friends sent me an article about the relationship between self-harm and control, which I immediately related to. When someone feels as though everything else in their life is spiralling out of control, one of the only things they can control is their own actions. Even if those actions are ultimately unhealthy, exerting autonomy over yourself is a pretty strong drive. (In fact, it’s one of the three intrinsic motivations mentioned in Self-Determination Theory3.)
I’ve never had an eating disorder, so I can’t speak from that point of view. However, experts have noted that control plays a big part in the development of eating disorders,4 and disordered eating is also notably a social contagion.5
I don’t think that it’s a coincidence that many of my friends who identified as transgender or nonbinary also struggled with eating disorders, self-harm, and suicide attempts.
I also don’t think it’s a coincidence that gender clinics have seen a disproportionate rise in teenage girls — the people who are most likely to fall victim to social contagions. (I think most of my readership will be familiar with a book written entirely on this topic.)6 Before the past decade, gender clinics were more likely to see males identifying as transgender than females.7
The draw of each of these is that there is a sense of relief afterwards. With cutting, it’s chemical: the release of endorphins makes us feel “good.”
When it comes to identifying as transgender, we are told (without evidence) that there is an underlying reason for that sense of relief. According to authorities (both false authorities and real ones), the alterations to our bodies and changing how other people perceive us feels “right” because we are actually a gender that our observed sex does not reflect. The treatment for gender dysphoria is meant to bring our bodies and minds into congruence with each other, and feeling “good” afterwards is attributed to righting that mismatch.
But what if that wasn’t actually the reason that I felt good at all?
What if the reason that transitioning felt right to me was because I was a young woman who had recently left relationship with an extremely controlling partner, and I was exercising autonomy over my life for the first time?
What if it felt right because, after years of my parents telling me that I wasn’t “allowed” to shop in the men’s section or that I must wear make-up to any formal event, I finally had a reason that they couldn’t refute?
What if it felt right because I stopped getting unwanted attention from strange men?
What if it felt right because all of the expectations of being a young woman in a sexist world fell away?
And why are those reasons considered to be any less likely than the idea that I had a “man’s brain”?
The idea that I was actually a man (and somehow didn’t realize it until I was 21) seems completely ridiculous to me today. But when I state what is now very obvious to me — that I was socially influenced — I am accused of being transphobic.
Once again, I think it’s shocking that psychologists seem to be immediately attributing a history of self-harm and eating disorders to struggles with “gender identity” (based on nothing more than a young person’s say-so) rather than exploring the potential for social influence.
Even worse, some are outright claiming that the social contagion theory is just a conspiracy.
There’s also a downside between these three things that I feel is very similar. What was once something we began doing in order to take control over our lives eventually becomes something that controls us instead.
With eating disorders, the compulsion to take control of your food intake becomes an obsession that runs your entire life.
With self-harm, the compulsion to hurt yourself becomes the go-to coping mechanism any time an overwhelming emotion takes a hold of you. I have scars littered up and down my arm to prove it.
With gender identity, the compulsion to alter your body to resolve your distress becomes an obsessive need to feel validated by everyone around you. Every time you are “misgendered,” even if it’s an accident, it becomes an extreme event that kicks your nervous system into fight-or-flight mode (see the viral “it’s ma’am” video for an example of what that looks like).8 It literally feels like you have been threatened.
There’s a question hanging out in the back of your mind throughout all of this: why did I take medication, endure surgeries, and change my name and sex designation just to have people fail to see me as the person I know I am? Was all of this for nothing?
It used to be that trans people wanted to transition and then quietly live their lives. The modern-day movement of self-identification without any form of safeguarding is completely different, though. It demands that everyone validate every person who claims an identity, going so far as to try and enshrine it in law.
The most dangerous lie being peddled by activists now is that it is somehow a human “right” for trans people to be treated as the gender they personally believe they are. This is the ultimate assertion of control — over every single other person in the world.
But controlling others’ perceptions is impossible, and it will only lead to a life of constant misery.
The people who are most happy with their lives today are the ones who accept the fact that no one will ever see them exactly the way they see themselves.
Jarvi S, Jackson B, Swenson L, Crawford H. The impact of social contagion on non-suicidal self-injury: a review of the literature. Arch Suicide Res. 2013;17(1):1-19. doi:10.1080/13811118.2013.748404. PMID: 23387399.
Syed, S, Kingsbury, M, Bennett, K, Manion, I, Colman, I. Adolescents’ knowledge of a peer's non-suicidal self-injury and own non-suicidal self-injury and suicidality. Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica. 2020;142(5):366-373. doi:10.1111/acps.13229
Deci, E. L., & Ryan, R. M. (2012). Self-determination theory. In P. A. M. Van Lange, A. W. Kruglanski, & E. T. Higgins (Eds.), Handbook of theories of social psychology (pp. 416–436). Sage Publications Ltd. doi:10.4135/9781446249215.n21
Froreich, F.V., Vartanian, L.R., Grisham, J.R. et al. Dimensions of control and their relation to disordered eating behaviours and obsessive-compulsive symptoms. J Eat Disord. 2016;4(14). doi:10.1186/s40337-016-0104-4
Crandall, C. S. Social contagion of binge eating. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 1988;55(4):588–598. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.55.4.588
Shrier, Abigail. Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters. 2020. Print.
Gender Health Query. Why Are So Many Females Coming Out as Trans/Non-binary? https://www.genderhq.org/increase-trans-females-nonbinary-dysphoria
“IT’S MA’AM”. Youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lb6OpRfyLFo