I Don't Know How to Feel About My Eating Disorder
Content Warning: This piece discusses eating disorders, gender dysphoria, and body dysmorphia at length
Before anything else, I feel the need to be upfront about the fact that this piece is not pro eating disorder. Eating disorders are incredibly dangerous, carrying long term physical and mental health consequences—anything you’re trying to achieve through one can and should be accomplished using alternative means. As I’m writing this I’m still not sure if I should even publish it (although if you’re reading this I guess you’ll know what conclusion I came to). But as the survivor of an eating disorder—someone who still grapples with its’ consequences on a daily basis—I have a relatively underdiscussed problem: In many ways, my eating disorder was one of the best things I ever did for myself.
Recently, I started electrolysis on my face. And while the experience has largely been great (if a bit painful), it comes with one massive downside: Before your hair can be permanently removed, it needs to be grown out. As someone who has regularly shaved her entire body since she first noticed leg hair growing in, this has been fairly challenging. But growing out my facial hair for days only to be met with barely visible stubble has forced me to re-confront a truth: My body never masculinized as much as it should have.
The first time I got my hormone levels tested near the start of my transition, I was in shock. My baseline testosterone levels were just under the top of the normal range for men. While testosterone levels don’t directly correlate with masculinity, my pre-transition body had never fully masculinized into the men in my extended family. I was undeniably a guy, but most of my features sat somewhere closer to androgyny. After I got on feminizing hormones, my body continued to stall (even after sorting out some truly horrific doses and getting my levels in check). By this point, I’d been years into transition without much physical progress, quickly losing morale. It was only after talking to other women that I was able to identify the problem: I just wasn’t eating enough.
Avoiding food had never really been a conscious decision. Like a lot of kids, I’d been a fairly picky eater. My parents attempted to get me to eat more, eat healthier, but in attempting to sneak healthier ingredients into my food they’d only succeeded in giving me trust issues around it. For the most part, I still ate a fairly healthy amount, but I couldn’t shake anxiety around eating that largely caused my diet to stagnate.
Around when I was twelve, puberty started to kick in. I’d had plenty of time beforehand to learn about the changes, and although they filled me with an existential discomfort I couldn’t help but view them as inevitable as aging. Someday, I would be an adult. Someday, I would be a man.
While I’d never consciously starved myself to prevent puberty, I can’t pretend like it didn’t play a subconscious role. As my body started to change, to grow away from myself into someone I wasn’t, I felt an increasing apathy towards it. Outside of shaving (which I became increasingly vigilant about), I started paying less and less attention to my body. When three meals a day dropped down to two, and then to one, I barely noticed. And with my body hidden underneath baggy clothes, no one else did either.
It was only when I was sixteen and my doctor threatened to refer me to a dietician that I panicked. I looked for ways to gain weight quickly—anything to avoid extra scrutiny on my body—and started downing as much milk as I could. I weighed myself every single day, making sure that I would be just over the line before my next appointment, and I was absolutely miserable. I didn’t eat anything for two days after the follow-up appointment, and hated myself for not lasting longer. We repeated the same dance the next year, and I skipped out on going to my doctor when I turned eighteen. A few months later, I started transitioning.
While my intent had never directly been about stopping my body from changing, part of me had felt an existential need to deprive myself, to buy as much time as I could. Because while many of the changes brought about by puberty are reversible, they are no less permanent: Undoing them takes more time then simply not doing them at all. And many of the changes are irreversible: My voice has dropped, my body has grown.
Part of me blames myself for not doing more, and the rest of me blames myself for even having those thoughts. Because while my eating disorder has undeniably played a major role in shaping the body I started my transition with, who am I to exonerate it? And in doing so, am I not blaming others for not doing the same thing I had done accidentally?
When I started forcing myself to eat more, even though the calories and fat were going towards the right places, I found myself facing a new set of challenges: Societal beauty standards. Society tells us that the ideal woman weighs as little as possible, and I’d already proven to myself that I was more than capable. I forced myself to eat, telling myself once again that it was only temporary. I fell back into old habits, tracking my calories and weighing myself even when I knew that the numbers were only making it harder. But the worst part is, it worked. My features shifted from leaning masculine to learning feminine. I gradually began thinking about my meals less and less, and although I began slipping back into old habits (it’s still really hard for me to notice when I’m hungry), my baseline increased enough for my body to continue to change even when I could still stand to eat some more.
For the first time, I started to become happy with my body. But it’s hard not to feel guilty about how much my self-image is anchored in the same beauty standards that have tormented me for so long. Whenever I’m feeling bad about my body, I focus on the same features to remind myself that my body never truly masculinized: My fairly narrow shoulders, my fairly small hands, my full head of hair, and my lack of beard shadow, were all the result of literally starving myself through puberty. I’ve never been able to separate my femininity from my ability to adhere to those standards: to making myself as small and smooth and skinny as humanly possible, no matter the cost. I’d like to think that I’m good about not doing the same for others, for being able to acknowledge those pressures as harmful and unrealistic. But at the same time, it’s hard to deny that I’ve found comfort in them, in the fact that I’d been doing good at playing the game well before I even knew I was doing it.
I don’t really have any great conclusions here. In an ideal world, I would have known about and been able to readily access puberty blockers as soon as I felt discomfort around my changing body, and feminizing hormones as soon as I realized why. In an ideal world, there wouldn’t be so much pressure to conform our bodies to such unrealistic standards, and the societal understanding of womanhood would have room for the full spectrum of women’s bodies. But the world we live in is far messier. While my desire to be a woman comes from within, my understanding of women is shaped by society; it’s hard to draw a clear line between where gender dysphoria ends and body dysmorphia begins. My body is still a work in progress, and it always will be. And while I don’t think I’ll ever fully divorce myself from societal beauty standards—conforming with them drastically changes how other people perceive you, and it’s incredibly difficult to give up those benefits even when you’re aware of just how artificial they are—the least I can do is continue to build healthy habits.
I face down my eating disorder every single day—every time I force myself to eat a second meal, or to try something new (turns out rice is pretty alright). And while it’s played an instrumental role in the body I have today; a body I feel pretty good about, there were better paths to achieving those same results. But it’s not my place to blame myself for not finding them, or to blame anyone else for not doing the same. Because eating disorders are a symptom of a society that fails to meet our bodies’ needs, one that needs to be addressed collectively rather than individually.