Quality of life
This is not something news organizations should be doing. It’s not news and it’s not truth, and it’s extremely harmful.
Top surgery drastically improves quality of life for young transgender people, study finds
The quality of life of young transmasculine people dramatically improves after receiving top surgery — a mastectomy procedure that removes breast tissue — according to a study by Northwestern Medicine.
What are “transmasculine people”? What is CBS doing talking silly political drivel like that?
The study, published in peer-reviewed journal JAMA Pediatrics on Monday, is the first to show that top surgery is “associated with significant improvement in chest dysphoria, gender congruence, and body image in transmasculine and nonbinary teens and young adults,” Northwestern Medicine said in a press release.
The study compared two groups of patients ranging in ages from 14 to 24: one group of 36 patients received top surgery, and a control group of 34 patients received gender-affirming care, but did not get top surgery. Three months after surgery, the patients who had the procedure experienced significantly less chest dysphoria than they had prior to surgery, while patients in the control group experienced around the same levels of chest dysphoria as they had at the start of their care.
“Top surgery” “chest dysphoria” – you’d think it was a student newspaper, or else Private Eye.
The girls in the study were happy with their mastectomies, and the girls in the study who didn’t get mastectomies remained unhappy with their breasts. Here’s a funny thing though: a lot of girls don’t enjoy getting breasts, and find them annoying in various ways for varying lengths of time. Mostly, though, they get used to them. Some of them end up using them to feed a baby or several babies. Cutting them off young girls is a drastic step that the girls may come to regret in five or ten years. I’m not a bit sure CBS and JAMA Pediatrics are being helpful by encouraging girls to get their tits sliced off.
Yeah, satisfaction three months out when a lot of these girls and women are going to have to live with the results for several decades isn’t terribly convincing. Let’s see how they feel in five years, or ten, or thirty.
Also, they’re running these experiments on 14-year-old girls? Would they do that with FGM if the girls really wanted it?
If it were presented as “gender-affirming” then yes.
My impression is that aside from ‘gender dysphoria’ some women find large breasts a nuisance & get breast reduction surgery. I’m not sure if that interferes with things like breast feeding.
Opinions from the women here?
Every headline including the phrase Study Finds should be presumptively hyperlinked to The Daily Mash. Professor Henry Brubaker of the Institute for Studies merits the same immortality as Doctor Heinz Kiosk.
Yeah, drawing strong conclusions from any one study is never a good idea, no matter how well-designed.
Almost every woman I know with large breasts wants smaller breasts. Almost every woman I know with small breasts wants larger breasts. Body image in women is usually bad, because everybody is telling us what we should look like, and that we aren’t worth anything if we don’t. (I was discussing this with my therapist just this week!)
I am in a weird position myself. I am a woman with large breasts…who was told most of my life that I had small breasts. Why? Who knows? My mother told me when I was nine that I was ugly. My ex implied that I was fat. No one ever told me my body was okay – until I met my current husband. He’s great, but I didn’t meet him until I was 40. By that time, I had a lot of odd ideas about body.
I don’t trust anything a teenage girl feels about her breasts, because, as you said, we all feel that way. No matter what our breasts are, or aren’t, we can always be compared with someone with “nicer” breasts. Fourteen is probably one of the worst ages. Most girls have breasts by then, large or small doesn’t matter, they are breasts. A lot of boys will spend a lot of time trying to grab them, or brush against them, or will joke about them or make lascivious comments. Fourteen is HARD.
I always buy clothes at least one size larger than my size. I have done this most of my life, to hide my breasts from the male gaze. (This might be why people told me I had small breasts…) Would I have jumped at the idea of cutting them off? Probably not. But what if I were growing up in the toxic stew of the internet? I might have decided I didn’t want them anymore (I decided that many times in my life, but it went no further). I suspect my parents would not have permitted me to do something so stupid at fourteen…or sixteen…once I was eighteen, though, my mother was happy to turn my life over to me so she had one less kid to deal with.
So the “control” group were still being encouraged to think of themselves as trans but denied the surgery to reflect that?
What would be far more interesting would be to add a group that were not “affirmed” as trans and, instead, were given psychiatric care/counselling for their alleged dysphoria.
The following is not an attempt to mitigate, denigrate, or “me too” about iknklast’s post above.
This is also present in males. I have a very small flaccid penis, but an around the average erection. It caused me shame and withdrawal from anything that required communal changing at school. I avoided PE and sports. I have a “shy bladder” when using a urinal.
And yet – I have fathered two children, I have had quite a number of female partners and not one has complained about my “lack of size”. Maybe I am more comfortable with women than men so my discomfort goes away, or maybe women are more aware of and less likely to body shame.
The best thing we could do for men, women, and dysmorphic children would to burn all the “fashion” magazines to the ground and stop telling others how they should look.
PS – as to breast size, I have had partners with almost Dolly Partonesque breasts to almost washboard flat. None of that mattered, because it wasn’t the breast tissue that attracted me, it was the whole package, but especially intelligence and conversation.
Jim @ 3 – I was thinking about that while writing this post. I was thinking about the fact girls struggling with puberty who develop large breasts have a genuine problem. Some girls and women love having them of course but some hate it, and I certainly would have. They’re hard on the body, just for one thing, and they must be torture in mixed high schools. I don’t disapprove of breast reduction, for all those reasons, and because it’s just reduction, not removal. I don’t think that’s faddish or nuts or Munchausen’s-like.
Colin@7: This was my thought, too. The structure of the test has the bias built in.
I think simply not having to deal with those “things” anymore accounts for a lot. When you live in an extremely misogynist and pornified society, it seems like an understandable reaction to just get rid of the things that boys ogle or even touch. Or, if you are an athlete, they are just in the way. Being a teenage girl sucks. It has probably always sucked, but it must be worse now.
Well up to a point, yes, but a double mastectomy isn’t a very appealing prospect either.
Mind you I saw some PBS documentary about a girl [trans boy] who did it and afterward was surprised to be experiencing pain. Sigh. It was horribly depressing.
Breast cancer survivors who’ve have double mastectomies have trauma to deal with in losing their breasts, even though it is a lifesaving procedure. The idea that this procedure is a happy event should raise skeptical questions from everyone who knows a breast cancer survivor. I suspect these women and girls are still in a state of denial, even if they believe such surgery saved their lives.
My wife has large breasts, and Ophelia is absolutely right, they are no picnic for her. Totally apart from any body image and social issues, the weight imbalance can cause back pain and buying properly fitting bras is very difficult without going to specialized online sellers. They especially caused a problem with nursing our daughters: not only is the sheer size of the breast overwhelming to the infant, but the nipples can end up flattened, either by being stretched out or because they’re squashed flat inside a bra that may be a little too small. We had terrible issues with latching on, and don’t even get me started on La Leche League (or as I came to call them, “the breast Nazis”) and their seeming refusal to acknowledge that breast feeding does not come naturally to everyone and just may not work out in some cases. We have considered breast reduction surgery for years but never got around to it; I don’t know whether that would have affected her ability to nurse.
La Leche League (peace be upon them). I hoped I wouldn’t ever hear of them again after my experience with child birth classes. The hospital wouldn’t let my husband in the operating room with me unless we went to the classes, so we had to sit through a lot of woo and nonsense just to be allowed to do what should be a given. (My doctor agreed, but he couldn’t change hospital policy on his own).
Some of the women in that class lambasted me because I couldn’t breast feed (it never occurred to me it might be my large breasts). They lambasted me because I had a saddle block. They lambasted me because I had episiotomy (sp? too lazy to look it up). In spite of having it, I tore enough that I needed numerous stitches. He was almost too big for me to deliver, and he weighed six pounds.
I have to admit to some serious schadenfreude when the loudest proclaimer of all things woo – she would NEVER have any of that – required a Caesarean. I got over my unpleasant revenge, but it was enjoyable for a minute.