I recently heard Hadley Freeman on a podcast talking about her experience with anorexia, and the parallels with gender dysphoria in the same population. I plan to read her memoir, Good Girls, but I was also reminded of when I read this book in May of 2022.
From the archives, here were my prescient thoughts:
A photo essay literally depicting the eating disorders of women, only women. Some are teenagers, some young mothers, some even in their 40s and 50s. But always, and only, women. Threaded thru many of their stories is body dysmorphia, sexual abuse, control issues, anxiety and depression. I couldn't help but reflect it was a natural extension of her photo essay from 4 years earlier: Girl Culture. And it made me reflect on the cycling, seemingly contagious, self abuse that girls and women do to themselves as they try to figure out their place in the world: anorexia, bulimia, cutting, and now the newly emerging insistence that they are 'born in the wrong body'. Strangely, this latter affliction is embraced as a panacea; some magic solution to rid the depression, to erase the sexual abuse, to create the perfect body thru drugs and surgery.