Janice Turner on girls and those bumps:

Female puberty is like being bundled into a runaway car. Let’s put aside periods, the shock of blood, the tsunami of emotions. Let’s concentrate on a girl of 12 or so, who until now has wandered the world thinking little about her body, suddenly acquiring breasts.

At the same time, though, she is suddenly acquiring periods, the shock of blood, the blurghy achy feeling every month, the mess and tedium of it all, the risk of showing – all this and tits. It’s way too much. It’s too much and too early – the brain and the emotions are nowhere near adult. Honestly there ought to be a law. It’s widely agreed that children shouldn’t get married; it stands to reason that children also shouldn’t go through puberty. Later, please! In that sense I kind of understand the idea of putting puberty on hold for a few years, but unfortunately it can’t really be done.

This week — finally — the charity commission announced it will investigate Mermaids’ “approach to safeguarding young people” over its practice of covertly sending out chest binders to girls as young as 13 without parental consent.

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A binder is a spandex corset that compresses the breasts along with the ribs and lungs. It’s hard to breathe in a binder: you feel dizzy, get headaches. You shouldn’t wear one during exercise: indeed trans lobby groups advise schools to excuse girls who bind from games. Binders damage developing breast tissue, cause chafing, skin infection, muscle wastage and even fractured ribs. 

This is why putting puberty on hold can’t really be done – there are side effects, bad ones.

For many girls binding is a passing craze, discovered via friends or YouTube influencers. (It recalls the Victorian tight-lacing fashion where girls competing to have the tiniest waist had to recline on “fainting couches”.)

Not to mention foot-binding. It’s funny how there are fashions for making women smaller, while men are exhorted to expand those biceps.

In 2019, a serious data breach by Mermaids, for which it was fined £25,000, gave a glimpse into its residential weekends for parents and children. “Huge respect to the guys who showed us (upon request) their top surgery scars,” said one post, “saved a lot of dodgy Google searches.” Girls, who are taught at such camps how to bind, are introduced to those who’ve graduated to double mastectomies — they even pass down their old binders.

In fact you don’t need “dodgy Google searches” to witness this horror. Just search #topsurgery on Instagram and find thousands of short-haired waifs displaying livid lateral scars, their nipples cut off to be sewn or tattooed on later. Some pose with grinning surgeons. One doctor appears with jars of breast tissue in formaldehyde, a rainbow flag Frankenstein. Another in Miami boasts about cutting off 40 pairs of breasts a week or, as she glibly puts it, “deleting the teets”.

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Where are the voices in sex education saying entering womanhood can feel like walking through fire, that bodily discomfort is a logical response both to the strange rhythms of biology and daunting expectations? Studies show girls’ confidence, compared with boys, plummets around the age of 12. Rachel Rooney’s book My Body Is Me!, which encouraged young children to delight in their glorious human form, was cancelled as transphobic, yet a teenage version is urgently needed.

But if one is written and published it will be instantly deluged with righteous rage.