Deanne Jade
Founder, National Centre for Eating Disorders
With decades spent treating eating disorders at the UK's National Centre for Eating Disorders, Deanne Jade brings a clinically grounded lens to a question troubling European practitioners: why do anorexia and gender dysphoria so often appear together, and why do both conditions so fiercely resist resolution?
Deanne Jade is a psychologist and the founder of the National Centre for Eating Disorders (NCED), one of the United Kingdom's leading specialist organisations for training clinicians and treating patients across the full spectrum of disordered eating. Over several decades she has developed expertise not only in the clinical presentation of these conditions but in the psychological and social forces that sustain them — and that make them so resistant to conventional treatment.
In the Beyond Gender episode "Why Anorexia is Just Like Gender Dysphoria...? A Conversation with Deanne Jade" (30 July 2026), she joins hosts Stella O'Malley, Mia Hughes, and Dr Bret Alderman to examine a parallel that will resonate with clinicians from Gothenburg to Ghent: that both anorexia and gender dysphoria can function as socially reinforced, identity-anchoring behaviours that resist improvement precisely because resolution would require relinquishing a sense of self built around the condition itself.
This framing carries particular weight for European clinicians. Gender services in Sweden, Finland, and the Netherlands have moved to limit or review medical pathways for minors, leaving practitioners with both more time and more obligation to explore the psychological layers beneath a presentation. Jade's concept of ego-syntonic conditions — where a patient experiences the diagnosis not as illness but as authentic identity — offers a clinical vocabulary that is compassionate, non-stigmatising, and practically useful for exactly this kind of exploratory therapeutic work.
Her conversation with Beyond Gender is essential listening for European clinicians navigating overlapping presentations in young patients, and for the parents, schools, and policymakers across the continent who are grappling with what the evidence now shows about the social and psychological dimensions of both disorders.
