June 12, 2024 - 1:00pm

Over the last few years, media consumers have been treated to a run of feel-good, human-interest stories about people discovering their “true selves” during the Covid-19 pandemic — from high-profile celebrities such as Elliot Page and Dylan Mulvaney, who both came out as transgender in 2020, to ordinary adolescents and young adults.

In the United Kingdom, the Independent described the relationship between pandemic lockdowns and transgender revelations as “a mass egg-cracking event without precedent in history” — before cautioning readers not to draw the wrong conclusions about potential social contagion.

But a new report casts these stories in a rather different light. New healthcare data reveals a “surge” in mental health diagnoses, with patients seeking help for symptoms related to stress, anxiety and depression. Adolescents and young adults have been especially hard hit. Although the report did not track gender dysphoria diagnoses among adults, diagnoses rose by 133% among children and adolescents between 2019 and 2023. Other mental health conditions, such as eating disorders, spiked too. The researchers note that, “[a]lthough the peak of the pandemic is over, it seems to be having a persistent impact on people’s mental well-being, exhibited by the continued uptick in depression and anxiety.”

To what extent is the increase in gender dysphoria diagnoses detachable from these other trends? Do we blame stress, uncertainty, and isolation for the emergence of new depression, anxiety, and eating disorders, while crediting social acceptance and awareness-raising for the simultaneous spike in gender dysphoria diagnoses?

The side-by-side rise in disordered eating and gender distress is a point of particular interest and concern. What we know about the former may tell us something about the latter. Eating disorders are often rooted in an attempt to exert control over the body and may emerge when patients feel out of control in the rest of their lives, when adolescence strikes or — in this case — when the world shuts down, the future looks uncertain, and life moves online where “idealised and altered bodies” reign. Similar dynamics may be in play with the attempt to exert control over the appearance and function of one’s body through transition.

Even the positive stories and too-credulous reporting that circulated during the first year or two of the pandemic drop hints that the spike in gender dysphoria is more complicated than reporters and their subjects would like to admit. A Washington Post piece from 2021 cheerily presents one uncomfortable observation and anecdote after another. For example, there is the wife who found it “unnerving” when she discovered her spouse had “tried on most of the clothes in her closet, including her lingerie” or the 30-year-old who picked a new name “after three hours of conversation” with online strangers — a milestone followed closely by an appointment at Planned Parenthood to start oestrogen.

Despite the upbeat tones journalists favour when reporting from the front lines of gender-identity experimentation, we don’t know what kind of stories these are yet. As we learn more about the fallout from the pandemic, we may recompose these narratives of self-discovery in a more sombre key.


Eliza Mondegreen is a researcher and freelance writer.

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