Body dissatisfaction plays a prominent role in gender dysphoria. In some individuals body dissatisfaction appears to manifest disordered eating in order to suppress bodily features of natal gender and accentuate features of gender identity. To date, there has been no systematic review of the literature pertaining to body dissatisfaction and disordered eating in trans individuals. Such a review may highlight important implications for clinicians working with trans people. Therefore, the aim was to critically and systematically review the available literature examining body dissatisfaction or disordered eating in a trans population, and also the literature pertaining to how body dissatisfaction and disordered eating are related in trans people. This review found three studies that explored disordered eating in trans people, five studies that explored body image and disordered eating in trans people, and 18 studies that explored body image in trans people. The findings from this review suggest that body dissatisfaction is core to the distress trans people experience and that this dissatisfaction may also put some individuals at risk of developing disordered eating. Additionally, the findings appear to suggest that gender dysphoria treatment is successful at increasing body satisfaction and improving body image. The clinical implications are discussed.
History
School
Sport, Exercise and Health Sciences
Published in
International Review of Psychiatry
Volume
28
Issue
1
Pages
81-94
Citation
JONES, B.A. ...et al., 2016. Body dissatisfaction and disordered eating in trans people: A systematic review of the literature. International Review of Psychiatry, 28(1), pp.81-94.
This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
Acceptance date
2015-08-27
Publication date
2015-11-30
Copyright date
2016
Notes
This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in International Review of Psychiatry on 30th Nov 2015, available online: http://dx.doi.org/10.3109/09540261.2015.1089217