Today’s TERF outrage is the NY Times itself, daring to hint ever so gently that binders might not be all that beneficial to the people who wear them.
Binders are not classified as medical devices, but some doctors and parents have concerns about their safety. (Common-sense binding guidelines include: Don’t use Ace bandages or duct tape, don’t bind at night, limit a binder to eight to 10 hours a day, don’t shower in it, don’t wear two, and don’t wear one that is too small.)
Hmm. Doesn’t all that, taken together, make it appear that wearing them at all isn’t a particularly good idea?
For transgender or gender-nonconforming teens who cannot afford binders, which start at around $30, there are free binder programs. FTM Essentials runs an application and lottery for those age 24 and under. Point of Pride, a transgender nonprofit based in Eugene, Ore., ships binders free to people of any age who express need and has sent over 4,000 nationally and internationally.
Does anybody ship Jimmy Choo shoes to people who express need?
A 17-year-old in Phoenix who binds daily and asked to be identified only by the initials J.M. said he started binding at 13. To maximize the compression, he bought a binder one size too small and wore it at night. “My arms and hands would feel numb and tingly off and on,” he emailed, “from how tight the material was around that area.” When he removed the binder, he found his skin “severely chafed and raw.”
He added: “The divots left behind from those times took months to heal. In all honesty, I couldn’t have cared less about the damage being created, just that my chest was flat.”
Healthy? Empowering? Liberating?
Though there have been no studies on binding and adolescent health, because of ethical concerns about research on minors, a 2017 study by students at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, the Boston University School of Medicine, and the Boston University School of Public Health looked at 1,800 transmasculine adults with a median age of 23. Seventy-eight percent of respondents said they had bound for over a year, over half bound an average of seven days a week, and 66.6 percent were interested in top surgery. An additional 13.1 percent had already had the surgery.
Participants reported a statistically significant improvement in mood after binding. They also reported decreased gender dysphoria, anxiety and depression. As for physical effects, 97.2 percent of the group that bound reported at least one negative physical symptom, such as back pain, overheating, chest pain and shortness of breath. Other symptoms included numbness, bad posture and lightheadedness.
I wonder if there’s any chance at all that a statistically significant improvement in mood could be achieved by explaining that breasts don’t determine personality.
The American Academy of Pediatrics does not have an official position on binding. But in a policy statement last year on care of transgender and gender-diverse children and adolescents, it advocated a “gender-affirmative care model,” where providers convey that “variations in gender identity and expression are normal aspects of human diversity.”
But some worry that parental efforts to affirm a young person’s identity by supporting binding may contribute to self-hate. Jane Wheeler, a co-founder of an organization called Rethink Identity Medicine Ethics, which examines standards of care for gender-variant children and youth, said binding “feeds into a normalization of body hatred, that some forms of body hatred are O.K.”
Like for instance the kind that interferes with breathing and physical activity.
Brie Jontry is the spokeswoman for 4thWaveNow, which describes itself as “a community of parents and others concerned about the medicalization of gender atypical youth.” Her daughter, now 15, told Ms. Jontry that she was trans at 11 and wanted a binder. Ms. Jontry bought her a running bra, but her daughter felt it was not constricting enough, refusing to leave the house until she got a binder.
The first one she tried, at age 12, was too tight, Ms. Jontry thought, so they returned it and ordered a larger one. Her daughter, who was home-schooled, bound at home and every time she went out. She stopped running, rock-climbing, backpacking and swimming.
“We would go for our evening walk and she would get winded and dizzy,” Ms. Jontry said. “She stopped climbing trees. She stopped doing things where any degree of upper-body flexibility was important.”
Just like all those Victorian women in the tight corsets! So very affirmative.
Comments
18 responses to “She stopped climbing trees”
Or maybe if men quit staring at them, or considering them indicative of our personalities. I am large chested, and have hated that most of my life. It’s mostly because if you are, that becomes the feature of your person that is first noted. Those first impressions – I once had a man describe me as 5 feet of leg and 10 inches of breast. He thought that was clever. I wanted to sink into the earth.
There was an article in the WaPo a few months back about a woman who teaches self-massage for women who bind. What struck me most was the t-shirt she was wearing.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/social-issues/chest-binding-can-lead-to-chronic-pain-this-genderqueer-massage-therapist-wants-to-help/2018/12/26/cfadf6cc-0493-11e9-9122-82e98f91ee6f_story.html?utm_term=.4d1f9b55f92b
(For those who can’t see past the paywall, the t-shirt reads “Body Positive. Shame Negative.”)
Does anyone know where I can find more info on Rethink Identity Medicine Ethics? Can’t find anything about them online.
Wait. Wouldn’t binding be the epitome of negative responses to body shaming?
Oh, wait, I’m trying to apply logic again. I need to quit doing that. It’s starting to hurt.
Even though they aren’t medical devices, they might be unsafe? Huh?
Vari @ 3 – interesting question. I don’t see anything either.
I’m amazed–and very glad–that the New York Times has actually published an article that isn’t a mouthpiece for transgenderism. With a mention of 4th Wave Now, no less!
@iknklast,
I was thinking the same thing. Must be the asthma—one too many attacks cut off the oxygen to our brains and we can’t handle the sophisticated thinking.
Do any advocates for this lunacy take a moment to think of all the constricting/deforming gear that has been used to reinforce ‘femaleness?’ Expert Opinion treated corsets as required for the functioning of fragile womanhood. Brassieres have been ratcheted up to deforming levels. Not to mention the ‘girdles’ of various sorts that were considered quasi-medical devices.
John, I’d add one of the most-used phrases in the pages of the Daily Mail: “going braless”. You’ll find it in 90% of those clickbait articles down the RHS of the fail’s site. A woman not having a bra on is simultaneously terrible and awesome: terrible for the woman because it means she is a slut, awesome for onlookers because we might be able to see an impression of her nipples.
There is an actual (derogatory) phrase, “going braless” as though it is an automatic insult or de facto crime not to wear one.
latsot, has ‘going braless’ replaced the creepy ‘look who’s all grown up’ that was the sidebar-of-shame’s code for ‘it’s now legal to perv at this child actor/singer ‘cos she’s 16 today’?
@AoS:
“legal”. So that’s OK.
Bunding? Pitching voices higher (or lower)? Learning how to comport oneself properly to pass as the other gender? Seems a lot of effort and work (and discomfort and torture) to be true to one’s “authentic” self.
And on a side note in the philosophy department: isn’t this gender identity stuff rather redolent of mind/body dualism? I thought that wasn’t a thing anymore in philosophical circles. How does gender identity get a Cartesian hall pass to tread the halls of materialist modernity?
Yes, it is. The dualism thing has been much pointed out in philosophical circles.
Thanks, O!
Welcome!
I feel compelled to expand on the post title –
The cruel irony is that this young girl had somehow been made to feel so ashamed of the physical female characteristics of her body that she felt compelled to take actions to render herself unable to perform the (somewhat) gender-atypical activities she apparently had previously enjoyed.