Barbie is one of the most perceptive depictions of female puberty that I have ever encountered.
As a child in the girl power culture of the 1990s, I knew that the time had come for girls to rule the world. I even had a notebook bearing the legend, “Girls rule, boys drool!” We could be anything we wanted to be: vets, astronauts, mermaids. All we had to do was dream hard enough. Our time had come.
But in the very success of Barbieland’s message of empowerment lies the seeds of its own destruction: its one-dimensional positivity cannot survive an encounter with the Real World. Henceforth, it can never be the innocent, sexless place it once was. Barbie struggles with who she should become in order to cope: airheaded bimbo serving the Kens? Depressed adult plagued by Irrepressible Thoughts of Death? Remain an eternal child rejected by her former childhood world? Fight to make everyone else change so she can stay the same?
Don’t worry – Barbie manages to find a way to live in a fallen world without compromising her bubblegum essence. Phew, right?
But what if you don’t have a Weird Barbie spirit guide to point you in the right direction when fantasy meets reality? What if you get stuck believing that if only you were good enough, you could live in Barbieland forever? And if only you dreamed hard enough, you could be anything – reality be damned?
When I was at school, the fashionable way to deal with the shock of the Real World was to stop eating. Anorexia, bulimia, body dysmorphia… Periods, curves and the subsequent male attention could be dealt with by “dieting”, which meant anything from eating lettuce in public and Mars bars in secret, to eating nothing at all. Our bodies were out of control but we could fix them – flatten them – wish them away entirely. Now, I see the same desire to obliterate embodied womanhood in the unprecedented number of teenage girls declaring themselves to be “trans” or “nonbinary”.
The similarities are startling and painful. Information is spread online, tips on breast binding replacing “thinspiration”. And these tips often focus on deceiving the out-of-touch adults who try to care for you – hiding your weight loss in baggy clothes, or socially transitioning at school only. Once one girl has been inducted into the club, all her friends suddenly start showing symptoms too – though it particularly affects those with comorbid diagnoses like autism.
It is a profound rejection of the pornified Barbie physique men are supposed to like, and can be a response to trauma – particularly female-focused trauma like sexual assault. It is composed of a pathway of small steps, each one providing brief happiness and relief (whether it be losing another pound or starting puberty blockers), but ultimately funnelling you further into the illness and the agony of trying to solve a real problem with the wrong tools. As Thomas à Kempis said, “Wherever you go” – and however much you try to bludgeon your body into being something different – “you will bear yourself about with you.” And once you’ve slipped far enough down the slope, it’s almost impossible to scrabble your way back up again.
The blame is so often laid at the feet of the parents, the “refrigerator mothers” of the 21st Century. They should just make their child eat, or affirm their daughter as a son, and then the problem will go away. If not? Death. Anorexia weakens your body until your heart gives up altogether. You’ll be told that “trans” teens are supposed to commit suicide at alarming rates. Do you want a dead daughter or a living son? How can any parent answer that question? In memoirs of anorexia, you often find the entire family’s mealtimes, routines and conversations revolving around the unwell daughter, terrified of mis-stepping and triggering a relapse. Now well-meaning parents are told that if they “misgender” their daughter they will cause her to kill herself.
Two decades ago, people struggled to treat anorexia. Refeeding programmes, in-patient if necessary, brought girls up to a target weight and then released them to relapse almost instantly. Yo-yo dieting was replaced by yo-yo hospital admissions. Treating the physical symptoms was necessary as an emergency measure but it didn’t work. You can’t fix a psychological illness by treating the body – neither the doctors trying to treat the illness nor the anorexic herself trying to treat her body dysmorphia by changing the body instead of the dysmorphia.
The treatments that did stand a chance were psychological: helping the girls to view their bodies differently, to let go of the intense self-loathing and fear they felt about their very selves. Girls were trying to get their physical body to align with their mental view of themselves. Treatment was to get their self-perception to align with their bodily reality, and to give them a sense of agency that wasn’t focused solely on food and weight or on what others thought of them.
What no one ever suggested was affirming the body dysmorphia – helping them to reach their goal weight. Therapists did not offer dieting tips, prescribe weight loss jabs or sign their patients up to Weightwatchers groups so they could meet other “fat” people. Anyone fitting a gastric band or offering liposuction to someone with a BMI of 15 would have been imprisoned. Girls thought they were fat and thought that being thin would make them happy, but they were wrong. Anorexia is, of course, complex and not just about being thin. But it is a psychological disorder with a physical manifestation, not a disorder with a physical solution – like gender dysphoria.
However, although the girls were wrong about being fat, their distress was still real. Body dysmorphia, gender dysphoria – these girls are suffering tremendously through feeling that their developing body is wrong and wanting to reject the social consequences of those changes. Just because girls cannot be boys does not mean that their femaleness is not causing them enormous pain. “Just don’t transition” is like saying “just eat”.
Acknowledging the role of social contagion or self-diagnosis prompted by Reddit is not the same as “you’re making it up”. Anorexics were accused of making it up for attention too, but it didn’t help anyone to figure out a way to treat their pain. No doubt there are different levels of distress and seriousness, but if we choose to see it as a cry for help then we must listen to that cry. Saying that no one is actually “trans” is not the same as saying that everyone just needs to pull their socks up and snap out of it. Rather, it is saying that physical treatment does not work for psychological issues.
We can hate the sin but love the sinner. We can affirm the distress without affirming the self-diagnosis of being “fat” or “trans”. From the perspective of a thirteen-year-old girl, today as much as when I was at school, mainstream womanhood still looks miserable enough to cause her to try to escape it altogether – even at the cost of rejecting herself along with it. I pray that I can show my daughters another way to be, where whoever they are inside is not incompatible with being the woman God made them.
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