Body positivity through amputation
Hmmm. Something doesn’t add up here.
There’s this show on Channel 4 in the UK:
Channel 4 is known for pushing the boundaries and kickstarting conversations with its shows – and Naked Education is no exception.
Fronted by Anna Richardson, the six-part series – co-hosted by Yinka Bokinni and former Love Island star Doctor Alex George – aims to break taboos and aid body positivity with frank discussions and a whole load of nudity.
One pair we meet in episode three is Finlay Games and Lucian Main, two transgender men who get candid about coming out, transitioning, surgery, and navigating life as trans people.
In a truly powerful moment, the guys bare all, with Lucian showing his scars from top surgery, which he had six months prior.
Wait wait wait wait. The show promotes body positivity…and Lucian shows his scars from top surgery. Well which is it? News flash: it’s not body positivity to amputate healthy parts of the body. Getting healthy breasts cut off is about as body negative as it gets.
Meanwhile, Finn has also had top surgery, as well as bottom surgery, (phalloplasty) to create a penis and urethra using tissue from his forearm.
His forearm would like everyone to know that it does not consider it body positivity to make a mess of one’s own forearm. That’s quite a useful bit of body, which has better things to do than hand over a lot of tissue to make a pretend-penis.
The host is proud of the work but is oddly offended by the words “vaginoplasty” and “phalloplasty,” or perhaps it’s “uterus” and “ovaries” that are so obscene.
Educate? Or promote?
Say goodbye to your forearms, girls.
I recall how Michael Jackson’s series of rhinoplasty operations made him transracial, and how that it didn’t make him happy in the end. Appearances can indeed be deceiving.
Reminds me of a remarkable thread by an obesity-denialist nonbinary doctor, with people trying themselves into knots over how it’s terrible and bad to buy special underwear that squashes down your belly to make you look less fat, but stunning and brave to buy special underwear that squashes down your breasts to make you look less busty.
https://twitter.com/thefatdoctoruk/status/1642856684422037504
Such rank dishonesty is telling.
I have heard a certainly apocryphal story about the origin of the V sign with the archers of Agincourt, who demonstrated their defiance to the dastardly French, also demonstrating that they could still pluck yew.
I suggest that a similar salute could be made by women to trans rights activists; they need only make a fist and clasp their forearm to demonstrate their bodily integrity.
Isn’t it the upper arm you’re supposed to clasp along with making a fist? That’s how I was taught it.
Body positivity isn’t a bad concept, though sometimes goes too far, like skinny anorexic girls being told they’re not skinny, just be positive. Etc.
But like you said, this isn’t body positivity. Perhaps if they understood their own mission, they would realize the body positivity approach for people who believe they are the opposite sex is to help them work through that mistaken idea to begin to feel comfortable in their own body.
I’ve spent decades trying to come to grips with my body, because it doesn’t seem like me, but never once did anyone suggest that the way to deal with it is to cut bits off. My current therapist is working with me to try to feel like I and my body are the same. Intellectually I know that…
Slightly off topic but I’ve lost count of the number of trans activists – often but not always quite young ones – who seem to genuinely believe that the flesh removed from the arm or leg for phalloplasty will grow back.
They’re absolutely adamant about it, they scoff at people, including medical doctors, who tell them it will not.
Education? Where?
I suppose they’re thinking of minor cuts and scrapes that do heal with a small scar or no scar? But you’d think they’d want to…you know…look into it a little more.
As I remember it, the notion of body positivity arose – or gained a lot of public traction – thanks to campaigns examining the treatment of overweight people. Those anti-fatphobia efforts were focused on increasing the acceptance of people whatever their weight, but that was in service to the goal: getting people to accept themselves whatever their weight. There’s no need for them to get liposuction or a gastric sleeve operation to be accepted, because the problem was not their fat body, it was societal treatment of fat bodies.
I’ll grant that the movement had some excesses – there’s no way all body shapes are equally healthy for instance – but the goal was good. But this new version is a complete about-face, unrecognisable to anyone familiar with that earlier incarnation. Suddenly the body is the problem, it needs to be changed drastically and irreversibly, and anything less than urgent movement in that direction is liable to make the person commit suicide. Suggesting that the person might come to accept their body as it is is the new blasphemy, supposedly because the person is no longer trans if they are able to accept their body without extensive invasive procedures.
We may as well call it trans body positivity: something that identifies as body positivity but isn’t.
Also, now that I’ve had a look at the footage in that twitter thread… that is an uncanny penis and scrotum.
Groins and genitals are almost always slightly or strongly darker than the rest of your skin. That person’s groin followed the usual pattern, but then the penis is startlingly bright and pale by comparison – because its skin comes from the arm. And the scrotum was just weird.
Despite her own experience, Finn has become a recruiter. It must be hard to admit you’ve made a mistake when you’ve gone so far down the wrong path, but to encourage others to follow? Luring people to do to themselves what you did to yourself isn’t going to make your own pain any less. It might be a twisted way to defend and justify what you’ve done but it’s still twisted and will only cause pain and confusion to those who heedlessly emulate your example.
When in doubt, use more magical thinking. How long before informed consent is condemned as “conversion therapy?” “Stop using transphobic facts! How dare you kill their Trans Joy!? They have a RIGHT to constant Euphoria! You’re standing in the way of their only chance at happiness! You just want to see them SUFFER and DIE you MONSTER!!!”
Glitter-rainbow unicorns for the win*!
*For certain values of “winning” best left unspecified.