Binder pride
Apologies for reposting this from Facebook (thus boring anyone who’s already seen it) but I discovered it’s not unique so I wanted to share.
I took the bus to a park on another bit of Puget Sound, because today is the nicest the weather is going to be until the other side of the approaching heat wave. It was indeed a perfect day for it – bright, warm but not hot, a cool breeze, interesting clouds.
Across the aisle of the bus from me was a teenage girl or young woman wearing a binder as if it were an item of clothing, like a tube top – but it was a binder. It’s quite a disconcerting sight, especially if you’ve read a lot about how painful they are and the damage they do. At the top edge the tops of the breasts were visible – but then there was this vicious edge, and below it all was flat. Breasts? What breasts? No breasts here…except for those odd swellings up above.
That’s GOT to hurt, and do damage.
End of Facebook post. Comments on the post spurred me to see if wearing binders like tops is a thing and of course it is.
Endlessly versatile, the binder-as-shirt look can be deployed in many ways. … “Most people don’t notice a difference between a binder and a crop top,” explains Fallon. “But I’ll get nods or winks of approval from passing queer people from time to time.” Like any good flag, those who are meant to get it, get it.
Aug 29, 2019
Aw yeah. Wink wink nod nod – good on you, babe, crushing your breasts for the flag. So awesomely queer!
There’s an article. Of course there is.
TRANS PEOPLE ARE PROUDLY WEARING THEIR CHEST BINDERS AS STYLISH OUTERWEAR
Why proudly? What’s to be proud of? Smashing your own twits? Showing the world how stupid you are? Hating your own body so much that you torture it? Doesn’t that sound more like shame than pride?
Of course it does, but the ideology suppresses all awareness of that.
And while I’m choosing to frame my 24/7 white T-shirt policy as “A Style Choice” instead of “Being Lazy,” I’m also hyper-aware that there’s an undershirt-forward summer style much more powerful than my bum-ass James Dean impression: Binders as a shirt.
Powerful? Wearing a binder is powerful?
It isn’t you know.
I invite you to run a quick Twitter search for the phrase “binder as a shirt,” or its equally powerful relative, “binder as a crop top.” Both searches result in dozens and dozens of pictures of trans, non-binary or otherwise gender-expansive people sporting chest binders as the central part of their ensemble. And while this isn’t an exclusively warm-weather phenomenon, the summertime definitely increases the frequency with which folks who regularly bind opt to shed their topmost layers in favor of displaying the minimum-effective amount of clothing required to appear in public.
Like a bathing suit top or a bra but painful. Progress!
That binders are typically used to minimize unwanted contours, or feelings about said contours, makes people wearing them as a statement all the more wonderful. “Why yes, I am wearing this chest-concealing tank top” is a terrific, counterintuitive gesture, one that can transform something often done covertly into a symbol of pride — or at least an obvious marker of membership in the tribe of People Who Bind. In any case, it’s much cooler than my white T-shirt thing.
Dear god these people are pathetic.
If the purpose of wearing a binder is to hide the fact that you have breasts, then the purpose of advertising that you’re hiding the fact that you have breasts seems to me that you’re advertising that you’re not flat chested and have to wear a binder because you’re a woman.
Correct me if I’m wrong on any part of this.
Sighhhhh. I wonder if the next apex species that arises in a few millennia will be as crazy as humans?
@1: I think the point is to advertise that you’re Trans. If you wear no binder at all, people will think that you’re a woman, and you know that that’s not cool. If you cover your binder, people will think that you’re a cis man, and we all know that that’s boring. But if you advertise that you’re wearing a binder, that shows that your’re Trans, all sparkly and cool.
But also a woman. I think it’s probably having it both ways. Queer but a woman but queer but a woman but
etc
Why would a “queer” person want to show that she’s a woman? Society hates women.
Yeah, that’s what I was thinking. It’s exhibitionism, to show off your Trans status so you’ll be one of the cool kids. Yes, they are so marginalized they can advertise their status in the most flamboyant of ways (pink bows and heels don’t work for a trans man, they have to find something other than just looking like a man, as GW said). And have people praise them on Facebook and Twitter and Tik Tok and Instragram and YouTube and in the New York Times…I don’t think I need to go on.
They are putting on a show for us lesser beings, rubbing it in our faces if you like, hoping to make us feel uncomfortable so someone says something and they can feel so, so, so marginalized.
Seems like the sort of thing to wear in 100 degree heat if you want to get rashes and yeast infections…
What’s next? The exo-girdle?
@8: What’s that?
A girdle you wear on the outside.
There have to be more comfortable ways to get rashes and yeast infections.
Will we see packing on the outside too? It’s another of way advertising you don’t want to be a woman.
Remember this couple? Anything is better than being perceived to be a boring old cis person.
“There have to be more comfortable ways to get rashes and yeast infections.” – That was an excellent morning laugh, thank you.
Holms – I’d forgotten that couple. God almighty.
But hey how dare we say this is at all social and cultural influence, how dare we say it’s a fad and there’s a lot of bandwagon-jumping going on, how dare we point out that people are calling themselves “queer” when from the outside they’re just another straight couple, and that they’re doing it for stupid vain self-admiring reasons, that they’re doing it for extra attention and the right to pretend they’re more special than thou?
@13+15 So they can call all of us ordinary non-special people “cis” of course. Inclusion via divisiveness.
Fuck it, I’m going to wear a binder as a shirt. I’m a man, but that shouldn’t stop me, right? If I say I’m a woman I should be at perfect ideological liberty to smash my own non-existent breasts to bits, right? No Tru Believer could tell me off for appropriating…. no, whatever I’d be appropriating is too convoluted for even me to bother unpacking. But they couldn’t, tell me off, right?
Unless I said was a man, of course. But what if I were trans but just in boy mode, that day? Could I switch to girl mode in the middle of getting thrown out and claim harassment? Or could I continue to be a man being harassed for wearing a binder as a shirt, but claim extra minority status as the only man in the world being harassed for wearing a binder for a shirt and therefore even more super-oppressed than boring trans people?
Fun to speculate about, but it wouldn’t fly, of course. For the same reason that people got so upset at Graham Linehan’s Her stunt: everyone knows that he was following the same rules as everyone else and knows that he was taking the piss, but there’s no way to distinguish the piss-takers. Which was Graham’s whole point, of course. You can’t have overt piss-takers because then they’d have to admit that there are men on there who are obviously trying to coerce lesbians to have sex with them. They’d have to admit that there’s no way to define the set of people who are women and trans women, while excluding men (all their terminology, not mine). They’d have to admit that women’s spaces, sports, careers… need gatekeeping if you’re going to let men in, and the entire ideology falls apart. Because some fat cripple wore a binder for a shirt.
Maybe I should do it after all…
Latslot: My mind is struggling with the arcane awesomeness of your post!
Yes. You should do it.
latsot,
You can claim that you’re a trans man trapped in a cis-man’s body. That should get you extra credit.
Circumgender. But when that went around a few years ago (I think it was women claiming to be transwomen trapped in ciswomen’s bodies), the trans lobby got really, really angry: “You’re just cis-women. HOW COULD YOU POSSIBLY KNOW WHAT IT FEELS LIKE TO BE A TRANS WOMAN?”
I suppose I wouldn’t get too het up about any other body-hurting fashion like platform shoes or stiletto heels. Nor ones that are shocking like punk bondage trousers. They will grow out of it unless they go for the full monty mastectomy.
There was a cult of Cybele whose devotees would castrate themselves in a religious frenzy. Catullus wrote a poem about it – Attis castrates himself and then bitterly regrets the loss of his manhood and that he must stay for ever as a terrified handmaiden to Cybele.
https://global.oup.com/us/companion.websites/9780195397703/student/archives/catullus/
I on the other hand get very het up about foot-binding shoes, largely because it’s only women who wear them, it’s only women they’re marketed to, it’s only women who are hobbled by them.
Binders full of women!
Re #24
I was thinking, given the circus that is transgender ideology, they should have three-ring binders. But I like your joke better.
Ah, the days when Romney was the bad guy. Kinder, simpler times. I miss them.