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Notes -
https://unherd.com/2023/04/is-trans-the-new-anorexia/
I’m not sure exactly how culture war-like this idea is, but I’ve never actually heard anyone else compare Anorexia with trans people before. I can see the social contagion factor in both especially for women who are much more conforming than men tend to, and because women have higher neuroticism than men. What I’m not sure about is some of the other ideas, that being trans is about self-negation and a sort of renouncing of their body.
I think a useful frame for thinking about trans identification is as a culture bound syndrome. Some conditions obviously have a plain physical aetiology but other conditions are given shape by the culture of the time. For example, hysteria was a common diagnosis of a previous era but no-one suffers from it today. Similarly while people have always starved themselves historically for various reasons, ie religious martyrs, the modern form of anorexia as self-harm among mainly female adolescents is a recent culture bound syndrome - in a sense the cultural availability of the syndrome within the medical context of the time combines with the experience of the individual to give rise to the condition. This culture bound syndrome is hen active and in the modern age can be easily exported as happened with Korea which experienced a sudden arrival of anorexia as essentially a new condition. Note this means it's still very real.
Over time the experiences and language of how people to describe their state spreads and this is what I think is happening with trans. In adolescence significant anxiety and transition to the social world from childhood create a space of confusion and sometimes extreme anxiety in the self-space. The experience of feeling different from everyone else, not fitting in, is actually really common. Additionally some people have additional challenges around sexuality or gender non-conformity, or they may have dysfunctional family or have experienced abuse. In the past, people may have experienced this as more generalised anxiety, deep depression, self-destructive behaviours etc, in more recent times it has become expressed in new modes such as anorexia and direct self-harm. Because gender has become so salient it is now being expressed as gender dysphoria - the language and experience are given to the person by the culture and this reifies their self-experience in these terms.
Combined with the social contagion of the internet and in-group cult dynamics that give short term alleviation of the sense of difference and alienation then we see how the culture bound syndrome can spread.
It's not diagnosed today. Isn't it that some elements have been shifted to other diagnoses or removed from the DSM like homosexuality?
What we called "hysteria" in the 1800s is what we would now call a mixture between straight up mental illness, psychosomatic conditions, poorly-understood bona fide autoimmune diseases, and weird neurological bullshit like complex regional pain syndrome. There's probably other shit in there that is genuine that modern medicine doesn't understand yet.
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