By David Futrelle
So-called “Gender Critical feminists” — aka. TERFs — are constantly coming up with new excuses to be mad at trans women. The most ingenious effort I’ve seen of late comes from a Gender Crit Redditor who has managed to convince herself that she’s being oppressed — and “erased” — by trans women getting breast implants.
“Top surgery erases women with small breasts,” Brrrontosaurus declares in a rant recently posted to the Gender Crit subreddit that so far has gotten well over 200 upvotes.
If you’re having trouble parsing that declaration — as I did at first —
Brrrontosaurus explains, sort of, what she meant:
[T]he idea that if you “identify as a woman” you need breasts in order for your body to align with that feeling implies that flat chested women are somehow less valid [as] women.
Well, not really, not any more than any cis woman getting breast implants or reconstructive surgery does. Are women — cis or trans — who grow their hair long “erasing” short-haired women? Are women who wear heels and makeup thereby declaring that women who wear neither are really men?
Somehow Brrrontosaurus never gets around to asking these sorts of questions, nor does she stop to wonder why it’s only trans women who get her “so pissed off” (as she puts it) for getting implants.
Female beauty standards are a large and complicated issue, but they weren’t created by trans women — and generally speaking it doesn’t seem terribly feminist to rage at women (cis or trans) for conforming in various ways to conventional ideas of femininity (or, in many cases, twisting them around into something empowering).
Gender critical women know this, of course, and will defend their own use of lipstick and other accoutrements of femininity — even if they often feel uneasy about it. But when it comes to trans women getting implants — or wearing lipstick, for that matter — they have no sympathy.
Trans women didn’t invent the idea that small breasts are somehow inferior or unfeminine; they’re subject to the same pressures to conform to beauty standards as cis women, thought for them the stakes are higher.
And of course the Gender Crits know this as well. The thread inspired by Brrrontosaurus is full of stories from small-breasted women describing how they were teased and bullied over their “mosquito bites” when they were teenagers.
“I was crying a lot when all of my friends in middle school were developing breasts,” reports someone called popttartopine.
I felt so disgusting and unlovable because I learned early that boys liked breasts and that you had to look a certain way to be a woman, it was horrible, I wanted to kill myself because I wasn’t like the other girls and students were talking about me and laughing, calling my breast”raisin” or “mosquito bites”.
Carmine-Warrior also had issues with bullies:
[W]hen I was growing up, I was consistently bullied by boys and girls about my small size. It started at 11 when the boys would walk up to me and ask, “Why is your chest as flat as your back??” I definitely had thoughts over the years about if augmentation would make my life easier even though I am accepting and satisfied now.
Terf_fret had a similar story:
I had no breast growth as a teen and it distressed me so much. I would literally dream of growing breasts. I spent so much effort trying to find the perfect padded bra that wouldn’t show through my clothes because I didn’t want to be harassed. Isn’t it crazy?? My distress came 100% from patriarchal messages.
None of those telling these stories report ever being bullied about their small breasts by trans women; the culprits are school bullies and the occasional rude lingerie saleswoman. But the Gender Crits take the rage they clearly and justifiably still feel about the bullying they endured (and the patriarchy itself) and direct it at trans women instead. And so the bullied become the bullies, attacking trans women regardless of whether they’re trying to live up to beauty standards or defying them.
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Gender Crits: ‘Trans women are stealing my oxygen by breathing’….
One would think if they had the tiniest shred of compassion they’d be able to empathize with trans* women. It seems a lot of these women have struggled with the way society disrespects small breasted women and maybe they could understand that trans* women deal with the same disrespect.
Somehow, the people who are always arguing that trans* people reinforce stereotypes like this are the same ones insisting that we must “live in gender” (read: be gender conforming in every way) to get treatment. It’s a no win situation.
Short haired ladies, I am sorry if I have inadvertently been erasing you. I fully support other people having short hair, I just like growing my own hair long. It makes me feel less dysphoric and makes me feel better about myself.
Ugh. Even though I have huge boobs now, I was a late bloomer and pretty flat until age 15. So, I’ve experienced the teasing and the feeling like I’m never going to get womanly curves. You know what? I still am not going to begrudge trans women for doing what they need to do to get the boobs that’ll make them feel comfortable with their bodies. What the fuck does people teasing you about your body have to do with trans women getting top surgery?
Also, you can bet your ass that cis women who developed larger breasts early got teased too. It’s almost like there’s no correct way to have a female body under patriarchy. Taking out your insecurities on trans women isn’t going to do a single thing about that, ffs.
All of this, but especially the bold bits.
It’s also just plain anti-feminist to blame the victim. Get a fucking analysis, TERFs.
For some reason I’m reminded of listening to various trans women talk about how the ways in which they are allowed/required to perform femininity in order to prove they were “valid” was often much more narrowly defined than it was for cis women. I feel like this might factor into this particular topic in ways I’m not qualified to comment on.
More cis women get “top surgery” than trans women. (Scare quotes cause I never hear cis women have it called that. They just get boob jobs or breast augmentation. When/if we do it we get a weird term)
I don’t know about other countries, but I’ve found it a bit odd that the only truly legal forms of body restructuring (I’m using that term instead of “modification” because I’m specifically excluding purely surface things like tattooing and piercing) are “conventional beauty standards” and “beach ball boobs”.
@Bakunin
And I don’t hear TERFs going after them (though I wouldn’t put it past them). If you ask me, people should be allowed to get their bodies modified however they want, as that’s the definition of bodily autonomy. This whole thing sounds vaguely reminiscent of that post a while ago where MGTOWs were complaining about cis women appearing to have bigger breasts than they naturally did by using special bras or padding.
I‘ve mostly heard the term “top surgery” referring to trans* masc folx getting mastectomies. I can see how it could also apply to trans* women getting breast augmentation, but it still seems odd when there already are terms used for cis women.
@Snowberry
AFAIK in the US it’s legal to get subdermal implants in areas other than breasts/butts (for example, some people have gotten horns on their heads), it’s just not common. A few people (notably Zoë Quinn) have also gotten RFID implants.
Being harassed for having small breasts can be damaging. It’s not fair to load that sort of pressure on a kid. It can be very hard to get past it.
But some people do. I had a friend who was completely flat-chested except for her nipples, which were quite large. easily aroused and poked out quite a bit. She had decided by the time I met her, at 17, that anyone so shallow as to worry about how big breasts were didn’t deserve her time and attention. She proved that being flat-chested didn’t keep you from using those breasts for what nature intended. In fact, when her baby was about 2 months old, a friend had a baby but was too ill to nurse her at first, so my friend acted as wet nurse for several months, feeding both babies with her flat breasts.
Also? If you have large breasts as a young woman, you get harassed, too. It’s different harassment, but trust me, it’s harassment. It doesn’t feel better because the harassment is people liking the size of your breasts. it’s scary and humiliating.
As for trans women wanting good-sized breasts, do you really blame them?
ETA:
I want to make it plain that my friend was rather unique and that having trouble getting over the harassment and bullying doesn’t make you less of a person. We all have things we can’t get over easily and trust me, my friend had her share, just not about boobs.
@Naglfar: It’s not illegal to have those things, yeah. But if cosmetic surgeons are doing horn implants without losing their licenses, and it’s no longer exclusively being done by rogue medical practitioners working underground, then that’s news to me.
@ snowberry
There was some controversy here back in 2000 when it was revealed a surgeon had carried out amputations on patients with apotemnophilia (had to google that).
There were queries about the ethics of such procedures; but no-one seemed to question the legality. The principle here being it’s generally for doctors to decide what’s medically necessary, not the courts.
… Mostly off topic, but do you know what I think would be really great? Spinal augmentation. Make spines near unbreakable, more flexible, maybe add some prominent spinal ridges for those who are into that (I would be, I find it weirdly sexy), and maybe better at supporting more weight up top if that’s reasonable in terms of physics (not actually certain) and someone’s into that as well. Hell, replacing the whole thing with something lighter than bone could maybe change the center of balance just enough could make it easier to float on one’s back, reducing drownings (not sure about that either). While we’re at it maybe put minor brain function augmentations there instead of in the skull… I’m on a bit of a sci-fi kick right now I guess.
@ snowberry
I’ve always thought I’d rock a sagittal crest. I do have a bit of a one. Maybe everyone does and it’s just more obvious on me because I shave my head?
But something like this would suit me nicely. It’s like a permanent mohawk.
As I’m sure you know it appears we do process a few things in our spine. The flinch from hot reflex I believe is one. And don’t some other animals have nerve clusters that act as mini brains? Something about brontosauruses?
For things where timing isn’t urgent then the spine would be a pretty good place for ancillary cognition/info storage.
Do my 100 percent organic, completely natural average-size breasts erase women with small breasts?
Didn’t we just hear that trans women are single-handedly responsible for cramming flat-chested representation into female video game characters?
@Lumipuna
Clearly transwomen are the heads of the Titty Committee.
Oops, I goofed. You want the back to be slightly heavier, not lighter, to help insure that it stays downward in water, but that wouldn’t help much with not drowning unless you also lightened the front a little, or just did that instead. I was thinking average density reduction = more floaty and kind of jumped into that without fully thinking it through.
@Alan Robertshaw:
Depending on the design of the crest, one could look like a Next-Generation era Klingon. That would be something to see. or someone could design one in such a way to make it easy and comfortable to attach head decorations to it that wouldn’t work well on a regular head. Lots of possibilities there.
Yes, some kinds of ornisthrichian dinos had that, but I was mostly thinking frogs, which offload their most basic reflexes and psychosomatic functions to their spinal cords. They can survive and sort-but-not-really of function for weeks without a brain.
At the very minimum, one could probably dump most of the physical-oriented rote memory (I’m blanking on the technical term, but I’m not referring to muscle memory) down there, making it slightly faster to access in some cases, possibly improving reflexes (?) while freeing up brain space for more intellectual uses. With the caveat that, assuming spines are easily reparable by that point, if your harder-to-break augmented spine breaks anyway, you’ll have more skills to relearn than if a natural one broke. Or… depending on how it works, one could maybe add a port and make occasional backups just in case, though if enough people are doing that it comes with the risk of bodyjacking.
Though getting it slightly back on topic, I wonder if there’s any research going on with the concept of ultra-lightweight breast/body implants. That would obviate the need for spine and/or back enhancement in the case of the larger-sized ones, and allow people to be more creative with their appearance in general without having to deal with weight issues. Again, incidentally reducing average body density could help with reducing drownings, depending on how they shift the center of gravity. Not “center of balance”, which was another case of slight oopsy above.
“Look at all these trans* women with these breast augmentations that I totally see every single day and are a fair portion of them, probably”
– TERF
In reality, many of us don’t have the money, opportunity, health, time to recover or in general, or a myriad of other factors that prevent us from changing our bodies to the way we want. It would be nice to look exactly the way we’d like with a flick of a finger, though I think we can all assume that’s a universal desire not limited to just us trans* folk.
This is just hatred, plain and simple. It’s the same kind of churlish attitude that comes from the rando incel that ‘remembers that time a mean girl called him smelly’ and stoked that bitterness, looking for reasons to hate large swathes of people with no intent on growing beyond the negative experience.
Snowberry:
Presumably, having air-filled implants in both your breasts and braincase would help both float the body and orient it face up. Wood would also be lighter than water.
(I’m reminded of a certain comical line in Finnish literature, which involves a tough guy talking random shit, parodying biblical language: “Blessed are the blockheads, for they shall not drown”)
Note that, as far as I can tell, flat chests are considered attractive by a lot of people, but saying that is widely reproved by a mix of toxic masculinity and fear of looking like a pedophile.
Generally speaking, beauty standards seem significantly more used for bullying and standard masculinity signaling than for choosing mates. Which explain why in my experience there is much more women who are bullied on their appareance but still find love than women who are considered okay but don’t find love.
…Well, that was a bust (pun intended). Some research and quick calculations suggests that while there are some significant physical benefits to lightweight implants, the difference in average body density would be trivial unless they were excessively large and filled with something like aerogel… and you could get similar results just by gaining whole a lot of body fat. There might still be a center-of-gravity thing, but that would take too much work to figure out.
Note that conventional implants have a density of anywhere from 0.99-1.08, breast tissue has a density of 0.97, and lightweight implants (invented in 2014) have a density of around 0.75 (specific figures were hard to find), if anyone’s curious. I wasn’t able to find any indication of current research towards even lighter designs, but I didn’t spend much time looking.
Also, I will now abandon this line of thinking to avoid derailing the conversation any further and nerd-sniping myself, so… who cares if it undermines the basis of the gender-crits’ identity politics, bodily self-determination for everyone!
Here in the US, as long as you are a legally competent adult, give your informed consent, and have the money to pay, you can get any plastic surgery you want. Surgeons in a capitalist for-profit fee-for-service system simply see themselves making money by satisfying their customers. As long as your desired procedure is surgically feasible, you can find someone to do it if you look hard enough.
I saw a TV documentary a while ago about incels and plastic surgery. Apparently a lot of European incels have difficulty obtaining multiple surgeries because many European surgeons realize these guys have seriously unhealthy body image issues and refuse to operate. So these incels come to the US for surgery for the reasons listed above.
The program followed a couple incels coming to the US. One was from the Netherlands; this young man lived with his parents who were rather wealthy. After a few surgeries in Europe, he couldn’t find a surgeon because this guy is obviously screwed up. So he goes to an Iowa surgeon who is well-known in the incel world as someone who will perform any surgery as long as he is paid.
Dutch guy eventually has about 25 plastic surgeries in total, most of which by the Iowa doctor. Dutch guy can afford multiple trips to the US, multiple hotel stays, and of course all the procedures and aftercare. The procedures were ridiculous – getting a chin implant, then having it removed a few months later, then a nose job, then another nose job, facelifts, eyelifts – all of which he claimed would make him into a Chad. The program showed his before photo. Prior to his self-mutilations he was an average-looking guy; nothing was wrong with his appearance. However, his after photos were terrible. He no longer looked like a real person.
The program interviewed the Iowa surgeon about why he repeatedly operated on Dutch guy. Didn’t doc realize that the incel is mentally unhealthy, and that he might have some body dysmorphia? Iowa doc said that he doesn’t judge any of his patients and doesn’t really care why they want these surgeries. His job is providing a service, period.
So these gender crits complain about trans people getting plastic surgery, but not incels?
Smh
i wonder whether i, a trans woman with natural and fairly large breasts, am also erasing small breasted cis women. hmmmm.
I sarcastically like the fact that if you don’t have breasts, you are automatically flat-chested, like bodies don’t come in all shapes and so on. That and the apparent interchangeability of “small breasts” and “flat-chested”.
@Ginger
There are also cis women who have a lot of plastic surgery. I suppose that wouldn’t chime with the “trans* women are the worst ever” narrative.
Thoug, in the name of equal-opportunity bigotry, I’ve also seen a lot of transphobes go on and on about how binding your chest will just about kill you because it’s so horrible and binders are modern-day corsets (because apparently corsets no longer exist?) that are trying to erase and/or modify the female body out of existence, so I guess you can’t win.
@Alan Robertshaw
You could get some transdermal steel implants for a crest-like effect, though I feel like that might make shaving a bit harder and would make hat shopping much harder.
IIRC the secondary brain thing was disproven, we used to think that but not anymore.
@Snowberry
One difficulty with replacing the spine would be somehow removing the vertebrae without damaging the spinal cord itself, seeing as we don’t have the level of cybernetic technology to replace that. Any replacement would also need to be flexible enough to allow people to bend it like a natural spine but firm enough to be able to stand still. For now, it’s probably best to stick with what we’ve got.
@Ginger
Probably because incels are cis and TERFs could find a lot of common ground with them.
@Masse_mysteria
This also shows that TERFs don’t know much about corsets. Most corsets are made to compress the waist, not the breasts (note: I am not an expert in corsetry, please correct me if I’m leaving anything out).