I Could Have Died of Anorexia. Today, Girls Are Being Pushed Toward Something Worse.

What My Struggle with Anorexia Taught Me About Transgender Hormone Therapy

I love to eat. I eat more than my 6’3” fiancé and as much as my friend who benches 400 pounds. You can be jealous of my workout ethic and good genetics, but part of the reason I eat so much now is because I realized the hard way that eating is good for you.

When I was a freshman in high school, I developed a nasty eating disorder. To this day, I am not sure what precisely went through my head, but I suspect that a combination of factors led the poor fourteen-year-old Liza down a route that, in a less fortunate scenario, could have easily taken her life.

I started to go through puberty at the age of 10 and got my first period weeks before my 12th birthday. My feet grew to size 10 in the fifth grade, and I got a growth spurt that made me 5’6” by 11. Early in middle school, I felt like an uncouth ogre compared to the girls around me, who still did not wear bras and were relatively petite in size. I put on some normal puberty weight, but because none of the other girls around me looked like me yet—and because eleven-year-old girls are devilish—I was constantly bullied by my peers and no one wanted to be my friend. Instead, I soon found solidarity among the boys in my class, setting me on a lifelong path of male companionship (turns out twenty-seven-year old girls are also devilish). To top it all off, I never developed an interest in typical pre-teen activities, preferring reading to nail polish and building castles with my dad to hanging out at the mall.

I was large, somewhat antisocial, and nerdy. I felt like a boy.

The last straw might have been my yearly checkup in the seventh grade, where a pediatrician told me that I was at risk for developing diabetes because my BMI was too high for age 12.

This, of course, was complete drivel–-I was only several pounds overweight—but I could not have known any better and came home in tears. I felt that I needed to do something to make a change in my life—to live a future life with friends and without diabetes. Young and impressionable, feeling hopeless because of everything I was being told by my peers and superiors alike, I succumbed to the societal plague of the early 2010s: anorexia nervosa.

I do not wish to detail my several-year struggle with anorexia because it reminds me of a dark time in my life that I would rather forget. But I wish to talk about its immediate aftereffects today because the most recent generation has thought up a similar plague that now affects young teenage girls—and it may be far worse than anorexia.

To this day, I thank God that everything in my condition was reversible—that I did not permanently destroy the functions of my body and that the people in my life who loved me intervened before it was too late—but early on in high school, I battled all sorts of undesirable medical conditions. Because I was not eating, my hormones went completely out of whack. My testosterone levels spiked and my estrogen levels diminished, leading me to start growing hairs around my chin area, break out in a severe case of acne, develop amenorrhea (the loss of my period), and even show early signs of osteoporosis. These are not insignificant medical conditions. I had to get bone scans and take calcium supplements for almost the next ten years of my life until, thankfully, my bones recovered their normal density midway through college. I started birth control at the age of 14 to stabilize my estrogen levels and restore my period, and I went on Accutane to clear up my face. All of this unnecessary medical intervention just because, as a young woman in the most crucial stages of her development, my body was producing excess testosterone and not enough estrogen.

If this sounds familiar to you, it is because today, many young girls face similar hormonal imbalances. But these are not the side effects of another underlying condition. They are willfully administered.

I am talking, of course, of transgender therapy in young girls—a topic I was reluctant to form an opinion on for a long time because I believed that medical professionals knew best. But my childhood experiences have proven that that can’t be the case—the medical system had failed me, and I was at no greater a risk of developing diabetes than any healthy child in the early stages of puberty. And I did not think that I had enough information about teen transgender therapy or gender dysphoria—a condition that had never personally affected me—until I watched an interview with eighteen-year-old detransitioner Chloe Cole and Jordan Peterson. Several minutes into their chat, Chloe describes how she went through puberty earlier than all the other girls. How this caused her to be bullied by the other girls in her class and how she was deeply insecure about her body and did not wish to have breasts. How she related to the boys her age and preferred traditionally “male” activities. How she went to a doctor and heard some life-changing information—not that she was at risk of developing diabetes but that she was probably a boy.

And then I realized that had I been born some ten years later, that would have been me.

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In 2012, I succumbed to the plague of the times—the eating disorder. Today, many young teenagers succumb to the plague of the most recent generation—the transgender craze. In her 2020 book Irreversible Damage, Abigail Shrier makes note of this very parallel: the same girls diagnosed with gender dysphoria today would have developed anorexia ten years back. Gender dysphoria is simply the new craze of the times.

Told that they don’t reflect the typical definition of "girlhood," young teenage girls are increasingly looking to puberty blockers and hormone therapy just to fit in. The number of adolescents aged 6-17 who have been prescribed hormone therapy rose from 1,905 in 2017 to 4,231 in 2021, a 122.1 percent increase in just four years. As NPR tells us, many of these girls will also have an autism diagnosis, and while "researchers" are supposedly attempting to “understand the connection,” any sane person who has ever interacted with children on the spectrum will tell you that these are children who have trouble fitting in. Many of these young people will therefore seek mental health treatment and, in their early teenage years, have difficulty connecting with members of their own sex. Teens who receive gender dysphoria diagnoses are also likely to identify as gay and cope with depression and anxiety disorders from an early age—conditions that are often the direct consequences of early puberty. But these are not girls who struggle with gender dysphoria at all. These are girls who are depressed because they face the embarrassment of early puberty, discomfort with their sexuality, and the difficulty of navigating teenage life with autism—and are often misdiagnosed. And while there is another subset of young girls who do genuinely struggle with gender dysphoria, medical intervention is often not the answer.

Recent studies have revealed disturbing trends around individuals who receive so-called “gender-affirming” care. Girls receiving testosterone “therapy” presented with the same set of symptoms that I faced as a teenager with a serious, life-threatening disorder: many girls experience a severe influx of testosterone-induced acne, which doctors claim can be treated with even more medical intervention (through a course of Accutane, a controversial medication that has been pulled several times from the U.S. market for its severe side effects; these girls will lose their periods to testosterone-induced amenorrhea, about whose long-term effects “little is known” as of April 2024; and these same girls will, yes, face alarming and often irreversible threats to their bone health and development.

It’s been over ten years since I recovered from anorexia and was fortunate enough to stabilize my hormones and my bone health. Not a single person I spoke to throughout my recovery was ever under the delusion that I was doing anything remotely good to my body by purposely harming it in this way. I have been very vocal about anorexia in the past and continue to encounter a variety of communities that seek to save young girls from the plague of the eating disorder. But if we are so adamant about fighting anorexia, why do we willfully make girls ill in almost the exact same way with so-called transgender “care”—which presents them with the same set of disturbing threats to their health and more? Why do we suppress negative studies on puberty blockers and continue to insist that girls who do not fit in with other girls will be happier as boys? Young girls need to go through puberty and face the natural—and in many cases uncomfortable—changes that come with the process. Playing roulette with their hormones will not lead to any sort of long-term developmental good, especially when several studies have confirmed that, if left to their own devices, the vast majority of teenagers with gender dysphoria simply turn out to be gay.

I am not a medical professional, and maybe this is not my battle to fight. But I went through hell as a teenager, battling medical problems that I created for myself—partially because the medical system failed me and partially because I was too young and impressionable to know any better. And having gone through the perils of hormonal imbalances, I do not understand why anyone would want to impose such a condition upon themselves and face its many serious consequences—or willingly cause such harm to another human being. And while we might surmise that, perhaps, many adults are unaware of the ills of hormone therapy in developing children, it breaks my heart that we continually willfully suppress conversations around this topic—such as the famous attack on

Abigail Shrier

’s 2020 book Irreversible Damage—that would allow more mothers, educators, and medical professionals to become informed about the dangers of so-called gender affirming care.

My heart goes out to all young girls struggling with body image issues, depression, anxiety, autism, and any other condition that can typically be resolved with good therapy and a lot of love. I almost lost my life to teenage stupidity and have since become a strong advocate for supporting young girls through their most difficult years. With the recent shift of the societal Overton window, I am glad that we can now have these conversations without the fear of being labeled “transphobic.” I believe vehemently against medical experimentation on developing children and want nothing more to protect young girls from the same fate I once brought upon myself. So perhaps it is time we stop subjecting our girls to such vanity—and instead help them better deal with the natural struggles of early womanhood by letting their hormones be.

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