Welcome to Food Psych, a podcast about intuitive eating, health at every size, and body liberation.

I'm your host, Kristi Harrison, and I'm an anti-diet registered dietitian and certified intuitive eating counselor, offering online courses and programs to help people all over the world make peace with food.

Join me here every week as I talk with interesting people from all walks of life about their relationships with food and their bodies.

Hey there, welcome to episode 141 of Food Psych. I'm your host, Kristi Harrison, and today I'm talking with Don Sarah, a body-positive sex therapist and fellow podcast host.

We talked about how weight discrimination affects people in larger bodies, thin privilege, the good fatty, bad fatty dichotomy, her work in sexuality, and how it intersects with fat activism, and so much more.

It's a really wonderful conversation, and I can't wait to share it with you in just a few minutes.

But first I'll answer this week's listener question, which is from a listener named Kay who writes,

Kristi, I'm a masculine of center gender queer person assigned female at birth. I've reached a point of deeply committing to not restrict my food and to let my body find its way.

What's arising is this gender dysphoria as my body has gained weight and I look more feminine.

I see how much of my restriction has been my effort to keep a more masculine body less curvy that feels more in line with my gender identity.

I haven't found many people writing or talking about the intersections of trans identities, disordered eating, body image, and body acceptance.

Do you have any insight into navigating what feels like a bind between identity and trusting my body?

So thanks Kay, that's such a great question.

And before I answer, I'm just going to give my standard disclaimer that these answers are for informational and educational purposes only, an artist substitute for individual, medical or mental health advice.

So first things first, I want to acknowledge that I'm a cisgender woman, and so my first hand experience of struggling with body image, you know, in relation to my gender identity is limited.

But the information that I'm going to share is information that I've gathered over the years from scientific research and my clinical work, as well as from some really wonderful trans resources that are out there, including trans folks fighting eating disorders, and the work of activists like Caleb Luna and Sam Dylan Finch.

So I definitely recommend checking out their work for more on their experience with gender dysphoria, eating disorders related to attempts at controlling your body and conforming to gender expectations.

Body image struggles from a trans perspective, they're really wonderful resources, and we'll link to all of those websites in the show notes for this episode, which you can then find at christieherson.com slash 141.

And we'll also have some gender nonconforming folks coming on the podcast very soon, and I'm always on the lookout for more trans folks and gender nonconforming folks to talk to.

So look out for that, and if you know of anyone you'd like to recommend for the podcast as well, please let me know anyone who's listening.

But for K for your question from the scientific research, we know that trans folks actually have a significantly higher risk of developing eating disorders than cisgender people.

And that's in part because of the reason that you mentioned, you know, that exact thing of the intentional use of dieting or other disorder eating behaviors to change the body in order to conform more closely to the body expectations.

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