Cut all the tits off
The BBC solemnly reports on “Elliot” Page’s conversation with Oprah Winfrey.
Elliot Page says having transition surgery has been a “life-saving” experience.
So what the BBC is doing here is promoting the idea that getting your healthy breasts cut off can be life-saving. That is, the BBC is encouraging girls and women to think it can be good to get your healthy breasts cut off. Why is the BBC doing that?
The Canadian-born actor, 34, said having top surgery had allowed him to “feel comfortable in my body for probably the first time”.
And why is the BBC calling it “top surgery”? Why is the BBC, a grown-up institution, using baby talk for amputation of healthy breasts? There’s no such thing as “top surgery”; that’s political slang for removing healthy body parts, an act usually seen as a sign of mental illness.
Top surgery involves the removal of the breast tissue to create a masculine chest.
Healthy breast amputation involves the removal of the healthy breasts so that the owner can pretend to have a “masculine chest.”
Page said the surgery had given him a new energy, “because it is such a freeing, freeing experience”.
And she said it while looking as wan and low-energy and pallid and profoundly miserable as it’s possible to look.
Page also used the interview to criticise moves by some US states banning transgender athletes from competing in girls sports teams.
Yet another respectable news organization repeats the lie.
“If you’re not gonna allow trans kids to play sports, children will die,” Page said. “And it really is that simple.”
Baby talk all the way down.
Thank you, I’ve been feeling alone in my distaste for the terms “top surgery” and “bottom surgery”. Glad to know someone else thinks they are childish…and designed to hide what is really happening.
You’re far from alone in your distaste, iknklast. They refuse to call it a mastectomy because that’s too clinical-sounding and has immediate connotations to disease. I’m actually surprised that they use the word ‘surgery’ at all. I’d have thought they’d have taken a less medicalised, more user-friendly approach and gone for top/bottom ‘adjustment’ instead.
I would seriously like to see the working-out behind that blanket statement.
I can’t speak from personal experience, but my wife had a mastectomy a few years ago because of breast cancer. It was not a trivial operation and her recovery was quite long and painful. Calling it ‘top surgery’ trivialises the operation, its risks and the recovery.
My wife then had reconstruction surgery. This was a more serious operation still. The risks were consequently greater and the recovery time and pain also much greater. The surgery was successful and everyone involved agrees that a very good job was done, but the scarring is significant and the match is not perfect. The reconstruction is designed to look symmetrical in a bra, not to look, feel and move exactly as it did before. She also has next to no feeling in that breast, which is typical with this type of reconstruction. Don’t get me wrong, she’s very happy with the cancer treatment, including the mastectomy and reconstruction. It saved her life.
But I’ve seen it said (and it widely seems to be assumed) that if a woman later changes her mind about a needless mastectomy, she can just have reconstruction surgery later. She might, but it is risky, painful, has a long recovery time and the results might not be at all what they expect.
Trivialising, diminishing and infantilising these major, life-changing surgeries is disgusting.
Yes, if Page had wanted an arm or a leg amputated, the BBC would not have been promoting this fact, and she would have ended up being interviewed by a psychiatrist, not Oprah. But since breasts are just a bit of costume that “signifies” “woman,” it can be dispensed with, and doffed like some unfashionable garment.
Then somehow, somewhere along the line, people around her failed her horribly. I know that ultimately, it’s her own decision, but I don’t see her ending up being happy in the long run. Even if her transition is an escape from the demands and expectations that our culture (and Hollywood in particular) places upon young women, it is still a tragic failure. She should have “stopped” at lesbian. I have little doubt that she will soon feel the same.
It continues to amaze me how much trans activism is dependent upon dishonesty, and obfuscation. Truth and clarity of speech are a real danger to their agenda. Unfortunately, captured institutions (like the BBC) seem to be more than happy to contribute to the lies, obscuration, and euphemism.
They’re already treating puberty, or at least the “wrong” puberty, as a disease, so that’s actually not far off the mark. Womanhood is not yet considered synonymous with cancer, but I could see it so compared. Trans activism is already comfortable enough with illogic, and contradiction, that I could see it unabashedly embracing the concept of “cancerous” womanhood, while simultaneously cheering on TIMs usurpation of womanhood, because they would be better at it than plain, old, boring natal women.
Jeezus! Don’t give them any ideas!
That’s actually one of the unintended consequences of pointing out the flaws in their bullshit that often concerns me. It might be a positive in the long-run, though, because having to re-define their stance every time we point and laugh at the latest piece of illogic is resulting in such a confused and confusing ideology that it surely can’t be too long before even its supporters give up trying to understand it and start to distance themselves.
One can hope, right?
Breasts are an emblem of the relentless objectification and forced sexualization that are now accepted as ‘normal’ parts of puberty. Girls who’ve never even thought of masturbating, are developing eating disorders years before adolescence. ‘Top surgery’ is going to be easily promoted to millions of girls who aren’t even thinking about changing gender/sex. Just in the hope of having a moment’s peace.
John the Drunkard, Page has looked like an anorexic to me for years. Starving breasts away didn’t work so surgery became the next option.
Everyone thought the days of pagan Greece and Rome were long gone never to return. The Greek myth of the offspring of Hermes and Aphrodite was celebrated by men dressing as woman, and woman dressing as men, the social and family roles were reversed during this pagan celebration.
Then you have the divine androgyne of mystics Eliphas Levi, and Aleister Crowley that was symbolised by the he/she goat of baphomet. The androgyne is the main ideology of Levi. He prophesied that the days when the earth would end would be filled with cross dressing homos. I see more to the story than just a minority of 2% seeking “equality”. Sorry if this sounds conspiratorial, but sodomy has always been the hidden vice of the aristocrats according to Aleister Crowley himself, ” and the middle class better do the same if they wish to be smart”.