Eating Disorders as DIY Medical Transition

An interview with Kai Schweizer

Anorexia, Woman (Photo By BSIP/UIG Via Getty Images)

Kai Schweizer is an educator I encountered one evening while scrolling TikTok.

On their TikTok, they’d mentioned a study they were conducting about eating disorders among ‘gender diverse populations’ (a term that was previously unfamiliar to me).

This is a topic that pops up every now and then—my friend Grace at HormoneHangover recently wrote an excellent piece on it—but it’s not something I’ve ever explored in depth.

I wondered: What does eating disorder treatment look like within the trans community? How are GNC-identified individuals navigating this issue themselves? What does the current research say?

One of my biggest problems with the current conversation about gender is that many of the people who speak the most about it do a very bad job of representing the diversity of perspectives that exist.

It’s too rigid. People whose experiences/research contradict or challenge what’s orthodox get shutdown all the time. There’s no freedom to question or explore what any of this means—what real impact it has on people—because it’s so heavily politicized. And this goes for both sides of the fence, the gender critical included.

I hope you find this conversation on what’s an extraordinarily complicated topic refreshing, especially in the amount of respect and forthrightness displayed.

Testosterone therapy stops periods. But if you're not able to access that, then a lot of people who have either not fully understood their gender yet or don't have access to hormones are stopping their own puberty, stopping their own periods through restrictive eating behaviors. If you are sending someone to treatment to get to a higher weight level where they will start having periods again, then they're very likely to be incredibly resistant and not wanting to experience the dysphoria and distress that comes from their body doing things that feels wrong for them.