Gender Identity and Eating Disorders

Someone left me a comment on my Topics page about sexual identity:

Sexual orientation. I’d like to know if you think it and eating disorders are linked. I’ve come across a few people struggling with both – and I have yet to find decent information about it.

To put it out there, I am bisexual.  I think I knew this from the time I was in Junior High/High School, but where I grew up, people rarely used the words gay, lesbian, or homosexual, so of course trans or bisexual were never talked about.

As for me, I’d say that my eating disorder definitely affected my sexual orientation or, should I say, affected the degree to which I let myself experience that orientation.  Because of the childhood trauma, there was a significant period of time where I would not allow myself to look at men in any type of sexual way or even say whether or not a certain man was attractive.  That threatened my own feeling of safety.  As I recovered, I did more work in this area, and explored my feelings for the opposite sex more.  Healed them more.  I still think I lean more towards the female in terms of attraction, and I know I feel less threatened if a female is attracted to me than if a male is attracted to me.

I do believe that eating disorders can affect how an individual views his or her sexuality or comes to terms with it.  Especially for females, a significant reason some females maintain the asexual frame is to avoid attracting sexual attention and to avoid sexual interaction or intimacy.  I don’t really think of this in term of the stereotypical “eating disorder patients are just afraid to grow up” belief, but I do think that sexuality-which tends to be more of an “adult thing”-scares of a lot of us with eating disorders.  It’s a phase of maturing that we can’t control, except by denying it completely.

As for gender identity, people struggling with gender identity issues have to approach this from so many different angles–body image and sexual attraction being only two of them.  I think eating disorders complicate this process of self-discovery, as eating disorders complicate everything in an individual’s life.

The old belief was that eating disorders affected white, middle-to-upper class females, generally in their teens and early twenties.  I’ve been hospitalized with patients as young as 12 and as old as 60.  Men and Women.  Gay and straight and bi.  I can’t say all ethnicities, but Christians (both Catholic and Protestant), Muslims, Jewish men and women, Palestinians, African Americans, Indians, and a whole bunch of others.  And I know that the eating disorder affected the way we identified ourselves within these groups, so I have no doubt that having an eating disorder affects how you identify yourself if you are also struggling with gender identity issues.