Why Anorexia is Just Like Gender Dysphoria...? A Conversation with Deanne Jade
30 July 2026
With Deanne Jade
UK
Psychologist Deanne Jade, founder of the National Centre for Eating Disorders, brings decades of clinical experience to bear on a striking parallel: both anorexia and gender dysphoria involve overvalued beliefs, social reinforcement and a drive to alter the body. Her analysis draws on established eating disorder research to ask whether the clinical caution standard in that field is being applied with equal rigour to gender dysphoria in young people across Europe.
Deanne Jade is a psychologist with decades of specialist experience and the founder of the National Centre for Eating Disorders in the UK. She is also a member of Thoughtful Therapists, a network of clinicians who have expressed concern about affirmation-only approaches to gender dysphoria. Her clinical background gives her a distinctive comparative lens: she has spent her career treating conditions that, she argues, share structural features with gender dysphoria that the field has not yet fully reckoned with. The concept she places at the centre of this conversation is that of overvalued beliefs — a recognised term in psychiatric literature for fixed, egosyntonic convictions that patients experience not as symptoms but as truths about themselves. In both anorexia and gender dysphoria, this self-defining quality makes direct clinical challenge counterproductive; the belief must be worked around gradually rather than confronted head-on. Jade argues that eating disorder clinicians have spent decades developing assessment and therapeutic models that take this seriously, and that those models are directly relevant to gender dysphoria — yet the two fields have largely operated in isolation from one another. Social reinforcement is a second thread running through the episode. Eating disorder research has long documented how peer environments, online communities and cultural scripts can intensify and sustain disordered presentations. Jade draws an explicit parallel to the social contexts in which gender dysphoria is increasingly arising among young people. Systematic reviews of anorexia have shown that social contagion effects are real and clinically significant; the question she raises is whether gender dysphoria guidance has taken this evidence seriously enough, or whether prevailing frameworks have instead treated social identification with a trans identity as categorically different from other socially reinforced beliefs. The connection between autism, ARFID and gender dysphoria also receives attention. Avoidant/Restrictive Food Intake Disorder frequently co-occurs with autism, and elevated rates of autism have been consistently documented in young people presenting at gender clinics — a pattern flagged in the Cass Review's final report as grounds for greater clinical caution. Autistic individuals may be especially susceptible to rigid, identity-organising beliefs, and Jade's experience with neurodevelopmental complexity in eating disorder presentations informs her view that similar care must be taken throughout gender dysphoria assessment. The broader implication of the conversation is a challenge to the asymmetry that has developed between these two clinical fields. Eating disorder treatment is built on the principle that the clinician must maintain a perspective the patient may not share — that the insistence itself can be part of the disorder. Gender dysphoria guidance across much of Europe moved in the opposite direction for a decade, treating expressed identity as authoritative and sustained assessment as harmful gatekeeping. Countries including Sweden, Finland, Denmark and the UK have since revised their guidance in precisely this direction. Jade's analysis suggests that the eating disorder evidence base offers a principled, empirically grounded foundation for understanding why that revision was both necessary and overdue.
