Deanne Jade
Psychologist and eating disorders specialist
Deanne Jade has spent decades on the clinical front line of eating disorders, and she brings that hard-won perspective to a conversation that challenges easy assumptions about gender dysphoria. When she sits down with Stella O'Malley, Mia Hughes, and Dr Bret Alderman, the result is one of the podcast's most clinically rigorous and thought-provoking exchanges.
Deanne Jade is a psychologist and the founder of the National Centre for Eating Disorders (NCFED), one of the UK's leading specialist bodies for the training of therapists and counsellors working with eating disorders. Over a career spanning several decades, she has developed and refined clinical approaches to conditions like anorexia — treating them not simply as illnesses to be managed but as patterns of belief and behaviour that can, with the right therapeutic framework, be challenged and changed.
In Why Anorexia is Just Like Gender Dysphoria...? A Conversation with Deanne Jade, she joins hosts Stella O'Malley, Mia Hughes, and Dr Bret Alderman to draw a striking clinical parallel. Her argument — rooted in long front-line experience — is that both anorexia and gender dysphoria can function as socially reinforced, overvalued beliefs: convictions so central to a person's identity that they actively resist treatment and, left unchallenged, cause serious harm. It is a framework that shifts the conversation away from ideology and towards the kind of careful, patient-centred thinking that has shaped eating disorder practice for years.
What makes the exchange particularly valuable is that Deanne arrives not as a polemicist but as a clinician — someone who has sat with patients through denial and resistance and developed practical tools to help them. That grounding gives the parallel she draws its weight, and it adds rigour to the Beyond Gender podcast's broader examination of what it means to take young people's distress genuinely seriously.
For anyone trying to understand the clinical arguments being made — and too often missed — in the gender medicine debate, this episode is essential listening.
