Imagine, if you will, your thirteen year old daughter coming to you, out of the blue with some news. Imagine your happy, great looking, healthy, smart, successful, socially active child coming to you and saying tearfully “Mom, I’m too fat. I’m not supposed to be 105 pounds. I’m/1
supposed to be 65 pounds. I hate to look in the mirror and I hate my body this way”. Suddenly, they start wearing baggy jeans, heavy sweatshirts and oversized clothes to make themselves appear smaller. They spend hours on the internet looking at pictures of 65 pound people who/2
have successfully achieved their goal with excessive dieting and liposuction. They become obsessed with every bite of food they take, after a lifetime of loving French fries, pizza, ice cream, pasta, cooking- suddenly that passion for food has evaporated. All they think about /3
is how happy they will be when they get to be 65 pounds. You talk to the counselor at their school. She says, “Awww…talk to this person, she’s an expert”, and she hands you a business card. The person is a doctor at Children’s Hospital, and she has an Eating Disorder clinic/4
that is world famous. You call and explain your situation to her social worker. The social worker says that you kid can come in and be put on a liquid diet of 500 calories a day and will reach her goal weight of 65 pounds in a few months. They can then do liposuction on the/5
areas that didn’t thin out they way they should have. You pause, certain you misheard her and say, “Excuse me? She’s supposed to be 105 pounds. That’s a healthy weight”, & the social worker says, ”Well, you need to accept that you now have a 65 pound child. The suicide rate for/6
kids with this issue is 40%. Do you want a 65 pound kid or a dead kid?” You obviously want your kid alive so you ask about therapy. The social worker says “We don’t find mental health evaluations useful. These kids just know who they are and once they realize this about/7
themselves, parents need to step out of the way and let them take this journey. If we have to involve the law to get parents on the right side of this, we will. That’s a last resort, but it happens.I do have a therapist who is also 65 pounds, and they can talk to your kid about/8
how the process works”. You say thank you and hang up. Something doesn’t feel right. You call a few other therapists and they either don’t work with kids or they have a very limited knowledge of this particular Eating Disorder. A few say they specialize in this issue have had/8
several patients that have eventually all gotten to 65 pounds. “Nobody in my practice has ever not gone down the road”, they say, “They just know what’s right for them”. In the following weeks, your kid stops eating and develops depression, anxiety and spends too much time/9
looking at emaciated people on Instagram. Every conversation is about food or weight-loss, every meal is excruciating.Any attempts to use logic like, “65 pounds is not a healthy weight and impossible to maintain that long term without serious health effects” is met with anger/10
and accusations of invalidating her authentic self. You research more and find that the consensus of all of the major medical organizations- Pediatric Endocrine Society, American Academy of Pediatrics, American Medial Association-is that once your kid decides they are supposed/11
to be 65 pounds, there’s nothing anyone can do. They just know, and you need to support them. Simply having the thought is enough to proceed with the liquid diet and liposuction. Any attempt to reason with them or convince them to nourish themselves is considered child abuse/12
conversion therapy and laws are enacted to prevent therapists who might be concerned about their mental well being from addressing it. You come across several websites created by kids who did this exact thing- who are now older and their bodies are permanently destroyed from /13
adverse effects of long term starvation.Their brains, organs and metabolic system is out of whack and it will never be the same. No matter how much they try to regulate it, they will never be able to get back their once healthy body. They wish they’d been given an alternative /14
immediate affirmation of their misconception that they were overweight. They wish the doctors had told them no. Now replace “65 pounds” with “trans”. That’s what this feels like.
