Just give her the RIGHT binder
This is horrifying. I mean really horrifying, as in you feel fear and horror.
Some replies:
- This sounds like medical malpractice. The patient is in clear physical discomfort. A responsible doctor would tell them to stop and let their body repair itself. Does the @gmcuk have a view on this?
- Would this “doctor” give an anorexic teenager tips on how to starve herself further? This is shocking.
- I’m not sure how to express what the current output from you make me feel, but I do know the overarching reaction is terror. What are you doing? Why are you promoting this? Please direct me to somewhere in your output where you tell young people there are alternatives, to pause
- I want this woman to know that butch lesbians are beautiful – to be celebrated and lifted up and that she can have the freedom to be one. Please stop mutilating vulnerable teens & kids!!
What’s all the fuss about an occasional rib “popping out”? And not being able to breathe or run, and constant pain, yes yes, but why all the fuss?
The “doctor “ is laughing like it’s a hilarious joke. That’s what struck me. “Your ribs were popping out and you were bent over and couldn’t breath? Like, WOW! Hahaha!”
What the serious f.
I know. It’s hideous.
That was a doctor?
Well the BBC calls her a doctor…
There’s information about her here:
https://www.independent-360.com/presenters/ronke-ikharia/
She seems admirable in many ways, but…not in this instance.
Women suffered pain, disability and even death from the tight lacings of corsets in previous centuries to conform to a male ideal of attractiveness. And here we are, changing women’s bodies again to make them fit into a society designed by and operated for men.
Sure, but do butch feminists usually have pink hair and dangly earrings? I’m not sure that fits what they’re going for (slightly effeminate straight man?).
To me it again looks like the desire for attention (“I’m special! Please call me ‘they’!”) coupled with the desire to be a heroic survivor (“I can barely move because my ribs keep popping out, but I just keep on pushing!”).
Remember, kids: You’re not a hero if you’re only overcoming something stupid that’s of your own doing. You don’t get a medal for surviving the binder you put on. Just stop wearing it.
The “Unshockable” Dr. Ronx sure seemed shocked at multiple points in that short piece. But I was most struck by the exchange beginning at 2:11:
“September, how do you feel about me showing on you how to do it, and then you can do it on Frankie? … With Frankie, just by their kind of posture and kind of the way they look down just really into themselves that you can really see that they are not comfortable with their chest, and they probably don’t want to show me. So to try it on September makes sense in my brain because all I want to do is make Frankie comfortable, and Frankie is not comfortable showing me their breasts.”
That of course is a good practice for a doctor dealing with someone in a vulnerable position, and I don’t find fault with that… I just can’t help but notice that this is exactly the same rationale behind keeping women’s rape shelters female-only. Yet the rationale is considered bad when employed in the protection of women (==> female humans).
Hmm. Removing people that are sources of upset is good when the person is trans and the person being removed is not trans, but not good enough the other way around.
I kind of agree with Skeletor! I don’t know whether Frankie considers themselves butch, or merely non-conforming. But I’ve met and known many lesbians and she presents very middle of the road, neither butch nor lipstick. She does come across rather like several large breasted straight women I’ve known who have hated their breasts every since puberty. Their breasts attracted unwanted attention that they weren’t equipped to deal with, in addition to being painful and ruining their balance and athletic ability. But really, who knows what’s going on in Frankie’s head. Which is why it’s so futile for us to try to anticipate that.
Is there any way to estimate how often anorexia is an expression of female self-erasure? Not every starving girl is trying to look like a runway model. How many are trying to eradicate normal female shape?
@John the Drunkard
Anorexia nervosa is wrongly attributed to social pressures. For the most part, there seem to be genetic, neurological, psychiatric and hormonal factors. Social factors are pretty far down the list. That’s not to say models working in the industry do not become anorexic due to intense pressure from above, but we don’t know for sure that it’s not the other way around, that girls who are predisposed to become anorexic correlate with those who are recruited. The ability to tightly control your body weight in the first place in the face of tremendous hormonal pressures could be a confounder.
The highest risk periods for women is puberty/onset of menarche and perimenopause/menopause. Which suggests a large effect size of changing estrogen levels. For others with the disorder, there are correlations with autism, OCD and other psychiatric disorders of obsession and compulsion.
I don’t remember where I saw it, but I once ran across a study on transgenderism and the brain which found that people who identified as transgender had MRIs which resembled those done on cutters and anorexics. There was a particular area of the brain which looked similar in all 3.
I agree with Skeletor too!
(And not in the I agree with PollyO sense.)
That. I’ve ALways been glad I got off lightly. I see why some women get breast reduction surgery (implants, not so much). Some women have back pain from all that weight.
@Ophelia
I am one of those so “blessed”. Getting decent fitting bras is a nightmare and I’ve yet to find a solution that doesn’t dig into my shoulders. Racerback helps with back pain though, it distributes the weight better. My sports bras are very good in that the girls don’t move at all, a fact that astonishes my trainer. They’re not all that comfortable but having them bounce around is worse.
@Sastra Functional MRI’s are… problematic. They only discovered a gigantic problem buried deep in the math a couple of years ago and I don’t think many people retrospectively reanalyzed their data. Let’s just say I don’t believe most of the research that associates parts of the brain with complex phenotypes.
@Claire:
Fair enough. I’ve heard similar cautions, particularly from neurologists rebutting the latest amazing scientific confirmation that yes, indeed, gender identity is embedded in the brain because trans women and women both have areas of the brain that match! That’s probably why I didn’t bother to save any links to that study. It’s just interesting to turn it around on them.
Plus, of course, it seemed plausible (a bad sign.)
I’ve also been cursed with an ample bosom, which has been getting more and more ample as I do. I’ve actually wondered if the trans craze for breast reduction might have made such operations easier, with new techniques. I’d love to get back down to an F.
@Sastra I get mad about it because it plays into the whole male brain vs female brain bollocks which inevitably then proceed to a bunch of outdated stereotypes. I’ve been told I have a male brain more than once, mainly because I do math/stat/computation for a living, am a decent navigator and can parallel park a car like a wizard. It’s stupid.
Functional MRI suffers from a serious lack of data problem too. Access to MRI machines is difficult because they’re so expensive and often you have to buy time from a hospital. Small datasets = magnification of error. And most of the data is on young college-age men. Plus, even if you only cared about that one subset of humanity, you’re talking about a few men at each site. Data harmonization becomes a real bear. One day most of the early datasets will be tossed in the bin because the data is garbage.
OK, I’m going to stop there. I could write a long-form essay on all of the reasons why fMRI is crap. But I have a knotty error to debug, which is much more fun (for relative values of fun).
Holms #8
I noticed something else about that part, but only as I was reading your comment. Frankie is presumed to be far too vulnerable to even be asked about their preference for learning how to put the binder on. So what to do? Breezily suggest that September whips her top off instead because of course she doesn’t mind doing that. “To try it on September makes sense because all I want to do is make Frankie comfortable”. Yeah, that attitude is what some of us keep objecting to.
Fun fact: Autocorrect changed “breezily” to “creepily”. Good call, autocorrect, good call.
If the doctor really wanted to make Frankie comfortable… convincing her to stop it with this boob-binding bullshit would be the key, no?