Careful with the baggage
The Guardian insults women yet again.
For many trans and non-binary people, top surgery – the process of removing breast tissue to get a flatter or masculinized chest – is not an elective procedure. It’s essential to them feeling at home in their bodies.
Wrong. Sorry. “Feeling at home in their bodies” is indeed elective. Removing breasts to feel at home in one’s body is like removing a leg to feel at home in one’s body. Both are elective because they are not physically necessary. Emotionally necessary is elective territory. If you had to triage patients waiting to have their breasts removed you wouldn’t (one hopes) put the “at home in my body” ones ahead of the breast cancer ones.
To put it another way, feeling at home in your body is a luxury, not a medical necessity.
Top surgery is a form of gender-affirming healthcare that can be used to treat dysphoria, the sense of deep unease one feels when their identity or appearance doesn’t match up with the gender they were assigned at birth.
Luxury. That right there is luxury.
The number of gender-affirming surgeries rose steeply in the US between 2016 and 2019.
Why? It couldn’t possibly be because it’s a fad, could it?
Despite the baggage that can come with one’s scars, they can also become symbols of pride and resilience.
Baggage? Scars and baggage? What kind of baggage? A duffel bag, a backpack, a 5-piece leather set?
But seriously, people really do need to learn the difference between necessary and elective.
I have never felt at home in my body; I manage to survive.
I notice that the article’s explanations are apparently meant for readers who are unaware of what “top surgeries” and “dysphoria” are, but that it doesn’t bother explaining what is meant by “gender.”
Resilience my ass. Cutting off your breasts because they remind you of your womanhood is about as “resilient and prideful” as undergoing FGM. It’s all about making sure women fit in with the cultural roles they’re assigned. Far too many people see it as pitiful to be a girl or woman who feels ill-at-ease with her prescribed social role; the better for all concerned that we just fix the misfits and then focus our attention elsewhere. Well, at least it’s better for those who want such a pesky issue to be pushed off their task list as swiftly as possible, or else we all might be forced to clean up the mess we’ve been collectively avoiding for so long. Society has treated women’s rights like a junk drawer: a place to dump its odds and ends. Crossdressing men? Oh, that’s a “women and gender studies” thing. Butch lesbians not getting treated fairly in society? The Internet is exacerbating teen girls’ body issues? Extreme porn online is fucking up young men’s minds? Throw all that stuff in the drawer with the Scotch tape, and the AAA batteries, and the half-used Barnes and Noble gift card with a $3.41 credit left on it, and the pesos from that vacation in Cancun from twenty years ago, and the remote for the old DVD player that desn’t even work anymore.
The drawer’s overflowing to the point that now it’s more like a closetful of junk ready to burst through the door. We can’t keep ignoring it forever. It’s eventually gonna come to us, even if we don’t go to it.
Pfft. Compression packing cubes.
This excellent article is relevant:
Why ‘Gender Dysphoria’ is a lie.
“Gender Dysphoria itself is not real. It has no clinical or evidentiary basis. It is a false construct, created ex nihilo…”
“Furthermore, Gender Dysphoria is the ONLY clinical symptom in the DSM-5 whose treatment involves, (or even requires) surgical intervention! Mia Hughes thus rightly describes Gender Dysphoria as “the most dangerous” classification in the DSM-5.”
https://x.com/Psychgirl211/article/1808825717204922755
This article also ignores multiple studies showing no improvement in mental health outcomes with surgery. So…
That phrase “breast tissue” sets my teeth on edge. No, it’s whole organs, not mere tissue. Voluntary mastectomy.
I have a writing student who is undergoing conversion to being a trans man. Already presents as a convincing 15-year-old boy (I’d guess she’s around 19). Testosterone has made her voice passably masculine. She’s scheduled for “top surgery.” I look on in fascination, curiosity, and horror.
Argh.
Ophelia, I’ll keep you posted. She’s scheduled to read a nonfiction piece to the class. If I write about it, I will do so in such a way as to grant her utmost anonymity. This is an opportunity I simply cannot pass by.
Scars from “top surgery” are not symbols of resilience. Like so much of Genderism (and Wokeness more generally), they’re in fact the opposite thing. Resilience would mean the ability to recognize and accept ourself despite the pressures of restrictive and toxic norms. Weakness is not resilience. War is not peace. Ignorance is not strength.
Indeed.
No worries about the anonymity. There are zero clues.
.
More like tokens of commitment to the ideology, or devotion to the “journey”, a way of showing you have “skin in the game.” It demonstrates a profound distrust of, and distaste with the “lies” of the physical body, in favour of some greater “truth” supposedly buried inside it. It’s a variation on the mortification of the flesh, even though it tries to pass itself off as secular and “scientific.” Like stigmata, or the scars from the Lakota sun dance, they can be seen as the outward signs of a spiritual change or transformation, too. You might be able to twist it into “resilience” if you spin it as “Look what I’ve endured and put myself through to follow this path.” The scars seem to be paraded like war wounds, but the war is against their own bodies, and all the wounds are essentially self-inflicted.
I still believe that the conditions that drive young women to feel that they have to do this to themselves are quite different than those that are in play with trans identified males. One looks like an attempt to escape; the other an attempt to colonize and take over. (Part of this might be a consequence of TiMs carrying their unreconstructed male entitlement into their supposed “womanhood.”) Lumping both sets of experiences and motivations under the homogenizing label of the remarkably elastic “trans umbrella” would be an instance of forced teaming within trans activism.
There’s an African ’tradition’ called ‘breast ironing’, damaging young girls breasts by pressing them with hot stones.
The Crown Prosecutor Service in the UK rightly treats it as child abuse.
https://www.cps.gov.uk/cps/news/breast-ironing-recognised-child-cruelty-and-assault-cps
At the same time, a school in Scotland decided to run a fundraiser to buy girls ‘breast binders’. Indeed, many LGBTQABCDEFG groups promote them, see Sonewall and Mermaids.
They are the same thing as ‘breast ironing’ sans hot stones
Boo to breast ironing! It’s a barbaric form of child abuse.
Yay to breast binders! They affirm young girls delusions about their bodies.
An even bigger hooray to double mastectomies for disturbed young women.
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/charity-inquiry-mermaids/charity-inquiry-mermaids
https://www.thetimes.com/uk/scotland/article/chest-binder-fundraiser-glasgow-school-jnk85s57kA