Why the BIPOC Eating Disorders Conference Matters
I have been presenting on eating disorders and marginalized communities since 2012. Over the years, I've watched the field make genuine progress—but I've also witnessed moments that revealed just how far we still have to go.
One experience has stayed with me.
In 2016, I was invited to present at one of the field's premier eating disorders conferences. I was thrilled my proposal had been accepted. My presentation was placed into a “TED Talk” session, which entailed compressing months of work into just 20 minutes, with two other presenters.
Our session was scheduled for Friday at 4pm—the final presentation of the entire conference. We were the only three presenters of color on the program. At exactly the same time, the conference launched its closing happy hour in the banquet room next door. As we spoke about health inequities, racism, and eating disorders, our voices competed with music, laughter, and hundreds of attendees gathering for drinks.
The symbolism was difficult to ignore. Conversations about marginalized communities were literally drowned out by the party.
Years later, after giving a plenary lecture at another conference, I described persistent injustices in the field. I cited research showing that not a single transgender participant in one landmark study reported a positive experience in residential eating disorder treatment. I read passages from Harriet A. Washington’s 2006 book, Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present, to illustrate the long history of medical racism in the United States.
After the conference, I received evaluations of my talk. One participant described me as “strident,” “divisive,” and “angry,” without engaging the evidence I had presented.
Experiences like these help explain why the BIPOC Eating Disorders Conference, held July 16-18, 2026, is so important.
Founded by Dr. Whitney Trotter and Angela Goens, the conference begins with a simple truth: Black, Brown, and Indigenous People of Color have often been excluded from eating disorder treatment, employment, advocacy, and research.
Unlike many traditional conferences, this one doesn't merely add a diversity panel or invite one or two speakers from marginalized communities. It centers the voices that have too often been excluded. The result is not only a more inclusive conference—it is a more accurate picture of eating disorders themselves.
Throughout the meeting, speaker after speaker demonstrated how race, culture, gender identity, body size, immigration, poverty, and structural inequality shape who develops eating disorders, how those disorders are diagnosed, and whether people ever receive appropriate care.
Writer Roxane Gay described seeking medical care while “waiting for them to practice some medicine,” as clinicians remained unable to see beyond her body size and focused almost exclusively on weight loss. Dietitian Jessica Wilson challenged the “Make America Healthy Again” movement, arguing that its rhetoric, though presented as public health, risks fueling eating disorders by reinforcing fear of fatness and moralizing food and bodies.
Psychologist Kathrina Cann invited attendees to reconsider dissociative identity disorder not simply as pathology, but as an adaptive response to profound trauma. She also questioned why BIPOC patients are so often diagnosed with schizophrenia or oppositional defiant disorder instead of trauma-related conditions.
Marvin Hughes explored a topic almost entirely absent from mainstream eating disorder conferences: sexuality. Recovery, he argued, should not treat pleasure as a reward waiting at the end of treatment; clinicians need to be comfortable discussing intimacy and sexual well-being as part of healing itself.
A panel on treatment access described the exhausting reality of what participants called “access fatigue”—the endless cycle of advocating, appealing insurance denials, defending diagnoses, and fighting for care that disproportionately burdens patients, families, and clinicians serving higher-weight and marginalized communities.
Taken together, these conversations challenged far more than outdated stereotypes that eating disorders primarily affect thin, affluent white women. They questioned how diagnoses are made, how research is conducted, how treatment programs are designed, and how public policy can unintentionally contribute to eating disorders.
That is why this conference matters.
It isn't simply about representation, though representation matters deeply. It is about improving science, strengthening clinical care, and expanding our understanding of human suffering. When the people most affected by inequities are finally centered rather than sidelined, the entire field becomes more compassionate, more rigorous, and ultimately more effective.
The future of eating disorder treatment depends on conferences like this—not because they speak only to BIPOC communities, but because they challenge all of us to build a field that truly serves everyone.