Transgenderism enables anorexia

The ideological blind spot that took Vanessa's life.

Two weeks ago, the tragic story of Vanessa’s short life was told in an article by Ruth Hill on RNZ. Vanessa had died of starvation, alone, in emergency accommodation after her long-diagnosed anorexia nervosa was overlooked and ignored by the State agencies tasked to care for her. Meanwhile, her other delusional mental illness -gender dysphoria - was focussed on, affirmed, and fully-supported without question by the very same agencies. Vanessa had left home and been under complete State care for the nine months before her death.

While hundreds of people responded to the story humanely, by expressing their shock and sympathy, trans activists swiftly and unconscionably attacked Vanessa’s parents, suggesting perhaps that their bigotry and 'transphobia' was the root cause of her death.

All of the ensuing accusations, demands, and complaints amply illustrate the main point of Ruth Hill’s article, say Vanessa’s parents:

“There was a complete and total focus on the 'gender identity' issue to the detriment of all of Vanessa’s other psychological needs, while she lived. And now, even after her death, these 'activists' perpetuate the same dialogue by elevating her 'gender dysphoria delusion' over that of the 'starvation is ok delusion'. They see what they want to see in their obstinacy, and appear blind to reason, reality and alternative viewpoints.”

Keen to avoid looking in the mirror at their own culpability, trans activists have studiously ignored the fact that Vanessa had a raft of other serious mental illnesses; OCD, ODD, autism and the well-documented and long-standing anorexia. It was only towards the very end of her short life that gender dysphoria manifested itself.

Autism plus anorexia

Vanessa had struggled with anorexia since late 2017, before she was 12. Her parents managed to keep her alive for five years in which she was hospitalised multiple times having been put under a Compulsory Treatment court order in 2019. Those five years were characterised by escalating conflict with, and violence towards, her parents.

“Police call-outs were common. We were constantly trying to get her to eat normally. She would never eat of her own volition. It was a huge challenge. Vanessa, with the black-and-white thinking typical of autism, was determined not to budge. She suddenly became 'vegetarian', then she became 'vegan', then she would eat nothing but canned tuna. Any and every strategy was tried to lower her calories,” report her parents.

During this period, all the medical professionals involved in Vanessa’s care were on the same page as her parents: they agreed that Vanessa was severely unwell, and the Compulsory Treatment order that was needed for her own good was renewed in the Family Court several times over.

Vanessa could argue with her parents as much as she liked but the necessity of eating was reinforced by every professional she met.

Transgenderism - a new weapon

At the start of secondary school, that professional solidarity evaporated. On her first day at her co-ed school, the students were asked their pronouns. There were trans flags and posters all around the school and a ‘Queer/Straight Alliance’ club. Some of the senior boys were wearing dresses and high heels.

On the classroom walls of an Auckland secondary school

Soon, Vanessa was identifying as non-binary and wanted to be called ‘they’.

“Every time we said ‘she’, Vanessa corrected us with ‘they’,” say her parents. “Now, instead of arguments just about eating, there were repetitive daily arguments about her identity.”

“Things became even worse in late 2021 when Vanessa decided she was really a boy. Believing she was a boy was one thing but asserting this as a biological fact was quite another. We gently pointed out the bitter truth - that being a boy was a biological and physiological impossibility.”

“In one small window of sanity, her psychiatrist advised that the gender dysphoria was likely a shield or distraction that gave Vanessa a degree of control over the anorexia debate. Sound advice which we endorsed. Unfortunately, almost every professional in her life from thereon immediately affirmed Vanessa’s adopted identity and sided with her. In so doing, they were undermining our authority and influence.”

Vanessa had found an extremely effective tool with which to hold her parents at bay - trans identification.

Online too, Vanessa found multiple videos and articles from ‘influencers’ and health professionals that said she was right and her parents were wrong. She was encouraged to believe that they were ‘transphobes’ and bigots and deserved to be cut out of her life.

In March 2022, exhausted by the violent outbursts, the constant conflict, and the almost total lack of support from teachers, counsellors, and other professionals, her parents acceded when Vanessa decided to leave home.

For five years they had struggled to keep her alive while she was in the grip of a controlling mental illness. Now, another delusional, incoherent yet powerful ideology had succeeded in alienating their daughter from them and the safety net they provided. Without warning, the Compulsory Treatment Order - the only thing preventing Vanessa from starving herself - was abruptly revoked.

After successfully staving off Vanessa’s death for five years, her parents were now banished from her care and Vanessa’s disordered thinking about eating went unchallenged. It took only nine months to reach the awful, inevitable, conclusion - Vanessa died of starvation in January 2023.

A perfect storm

The cohort of children born in New Zealand from about 2005 have been horrifically failed by our society. Just as they reached puberty, our culture lost its mind to everything ‘trans’ and vulnerable teenagers became collateral damage to a cruel ideology.

Everywhere teenagers look now there are trans flags and posters, children of celebrities ‘coming out’ as trans, schools and major corporations celebrating Pride, and libraries hosting Drag Queen story times.

People who say they are literally the opposite sex are heralded as “stunning and brave” and anyone who disagrees is accused of hatred and bigotry. Parents are cruelly excluded from their children’s lives and adolescents are coached online to treat them as expendable.

Therapist, Sasha Ayed, describes a pattern, “Adult children—many of whom were previously close to their parents—are now cutting off contact. They come to believe they’d been abused, neglected or traumatized. Not because of overt cruelty, but because of misattunements, missteps, or generational misunderstandings. The rupture is often sudden, shattering, and non-negotiable. And it’s driven by a narrative that treats cutting-off your family as necessary self-care.”

In a perfect storm for her family, Vanessa turned twelve in the midst of all this hype. Already grappling with OCD, ODD, autism and anorexia, transgender ideation became the cherry on the top. When Vanessa adopted a ‘boy’ identity, her parents tried desperately to maintain her hold on reality but nearly everyone else stopped paying attention to Vanessa’s anorexia and focussed instead on taking her side in the family conflict.

What Vanessa wanted most of all was to stop her parents from overseeing her eating. Transgenderism granted her that wish.

Two sides of the same coin

A 2024 paper reported here by SEGM found a number of important similarities between anorexia and transgender ideation.

Both anorexia nervosa and gender dysphoria involve body image disorders where aggression is "turned against one’s own self, inward, but also outward, against important others."

In the paper, written by two psychiatrists and published in the journal of the German Society for Sexual Medicine, Sexual Therapy and Sexual Science, the authors say, “The development of a stable female identity in adolescence is highly complex, demanding, susceptible to disruption and accompanied by crises.”

When an adolescent girl fails to negotiate these challenges successfully, serious disorders, including anorexia and gender dysphoria, may arise, with psychological conflicts projecting onto the body. Either disorder may serve as an “exit strategy” employed when a girl cannot find a way to accept her developing female body. However, the diagnosis of "gender dysphoria" can offer several societal advantages in the current cultural moment:

"... the trendy diagnosis of gender dysphoria or self-identification as trans offers two decisive advantages over anorexia and bulimia nervosa: first, in comparison to eating disorders, the projection surface for gender incongruence is more diverse, and the boundaries are not only sought, but crossed in a very concrete, not just symbolic way. Secondly, gender incongruence and “being trans” are currently extremely socially and politically legitimized and have been defined as a matter of human rights in recent years, which is also reflected in the planned “law of self-determination”. As a result, those affected experience strong external validation and positive reinforcement in their disorder – which, according to the proponents of a transaffirmative care, should no longer be described as such."

The authors, Doctors Korte and Gille, observe that trans identification in adolescent girls may reflect the desire to circumvent the challenges of female adolescence rather than a deep identification with maleness. They note that “although there is pronounced rejection of the female body and/or the female gender role," there is frequently no pronounced desire for the primary or even secondary physical characteristics of the opposite sex.

The paper suggests multiple pathways for the development of trans identity in adolescents, including delayed maturation, non-conformity to gender roles, sexuality problems, and psychiatric conditions such as autism, trauma or personality disorders.

Korte and Gille criticise the "trans-affirmative" (gender-affirming) model of care for adolescents, which is focused on the provision of physical body modifications, as inconsistent with the principles of adolescent development. They highlight the need for tailored interventions that address underlying conflicts and promote adaptive coping strategies.

True love

Vanessa’s story could have had a happy ending if she had been born in an earlier time, before people were hypnotised by transgender slogans. A time when medical professionals explored the underlying causes of mental illness instead of affirming ideology. When teachers consulted parents about the best care for their child. When it was unthinkable for professionals and activists to collude in alienating a very unwell teenager from her family.

• Vanessa’s story is about parents who cherished their daughter and did their very best to protect her from her own disordered mind.

• It is about how a transgender identity was allowed to overshadow an embedded pre-existing condition and no-one entrusted with her care after she left home took action to make sure she was eating.

• And it is also about the reaction to a journalist empathetically telling the compelling story of parents undermined and betrayed by the State, in their own words. In an effort to ‘shoot the messenger’, trans activists have busied themselves making outlandish demands and complaints about the journalist, without pausing for a moment to express sympathy to the parents or to reflect on the harm their favoured ideology has inflicted on this family.

Vanessa did not die, as trans-ideologues would have it, from a lack of gender affirmation. She died because her anorexia was shrouded by an ideological blind spot. Vanessa’s online ‘friends’ saw her messages as she was dying, saying she was falling in and out of consciousness and could no longer think straight. As her parents say:

“Vanessa's description of her own deterioration is heart-breaking. So many of these 'individuals' must have read with macabre fascination, but none, not one, acted.

Those faceless supporters failed her miserably. Constantly online (in real time) up to the last moments, at least one of them might have taken actions that could have saved her life. Her death approached, came and went...but her pro-whatever 'supporters' did nothing.

Where were they over those several weeks of decline? Where were they as her laptop fell silent?

Several days passed before Vanessa's dead and decaying body was found. Who raised the alarm? It was not any official of 'the State' overseeing her welfare, it was no-one in her environs, it was not a member of the faceless online pro-anorexia/pro-gender issues community. Vanessa's corpse was only found following an instinctual and frantic call (at first impeded) to the motel.

This call was instigated by the one person who loved her the most. Her mother.”

“For Vanessa, the influence of these 'groups' was narcotic, complete, and fatal.”

By Fern Hickson with distressing personal accounts from Vanessa’s parents.