Laura Dodsworth at The Critic - The false euphoria of dysphoria:
"Joy”, “amazing”, “happiness”, “wholesome”, “freedom”, “light at the end of the tunnel”, “greatest day of my life”, “euphoria” and “bliss of fairy dust” — what do these words describe?
The answer is “top surgery” in a new Snapchat video called “What is Top Surgery Like For Trans Guys”, created by Pink News.
If you don’t know what that is, according to the video it is “a procedure that trans men and trans masculine people can choose to have, where breast tissue is removed and the chest is sculpted to have a more masculine appearance”. Put more simply, it is a bilateral mastectomy, given to women as a treatment for gender dysphoria.
The video paints an uncritical picture of top surgery, as you might expect from the first episode of a series entitled “Pure Trans Joy”. I am sure its positivity will be welcomed by trans men, which is clearly its purpose.
It's basically a commercial on the joys of a double mastectomy, aimed at troubled young girls. It's breathtakingly irresponsible.
However, it made me uncomfortable. This is partly because I photographed and interviewed women for a feature in the Sunday Times who thought they were transgender, had “top surgery”, then went on to change their mind and detransition.
But although they reverted their names, pronouns and passports, flesh cannot be returned after a double mastectomy. The effects of testosterone cannot be undone, nor the removal of the uterus and ovaries, which some of these detransitioners also had, leaving them sterile, on hormone replacement therapy for life, and traumatised.
Lucy had been anorexic and had body dysmorphia. In addition, she was a lesbian and had experienced homophobia, which she internalised. At the age of just 23, she could not comprehend how doctors could remove her breasts, uterus and ovaries. “I feel mutilated,” she said.
Susana was sexually abused, which was compounded by the shock of discovering online porn at a young age, and also internalised lesbophobia. She was left feeling ashamed of her body: “For me, transition was a kind of self harm. I was trying to destroy the person I was.”
Sinead wished that the psychiatrist at the Gender Identity Clinic had given her a proper assessment for co-morbid conditions. “I’ve tried to talk about background issues with therapists, but because I was trans, gender dysphoria was seen as the cause of my problems, and not a symptom of them,” she told me. “Actually, I think my gender issues came out of mental health, not the other way around.”
The idea of having all my female anatomy removed mistakenly and then wanting it back, creates a horrifically unnerving sensation — nothing like euphoria and the “bliss of fairy dust”....
The trans men in “What is Top Surgery Like For Trans Guys” evoke a freedom that some young girls might be seeking. They are open-shirted, shirt-free, and repeatedly use the words “free” and “freedom”. The excision of female flesh renders their bodies free from the sexual expectations conveyed upon young girls’ bodies, even if what they seek to convey is freedom in their new gender.
As Dr Jessica Taylor said to me, “girls are sexualised in our culture from a young age. It would make sense that they seek to escape from their sexuality and femininity, and this offers a legitimate medical escape hatch.”
“When I hear psychotherapists saying that if a girl wants her breasts removed it is a sign of her gender dysphoria I wonder if they know anything about sexual trauma, because you hear it all the time in sexual trauma,” said Taylor. “The video made me really uncomfortable. It almost looks like a marketing video. It deliberately glosses over pain, infection risk, the recovery period. No one says anything about what it feels like to have a mastectomy. It positions life changing and high risk surgery to healthy young women as euphoric and sensationalist and that it will solve their problems.”
She posits in her book that as girls grow up in a society that frequently sexualises, objectifies and traumatises them, a trauma-informed perspective would argue that it is rational for girls to wish to escape femininity, and their female bodies. It would make sense that they feel safer if they present to the world as non-binary or masculine.
According to the Advertising Standards Authority, bilateral mastectomy is likely to fall under the definition of cosmetic intervention under new rules that prohibit the targeting of cosmetic intervention ads towards under 18s. These rules, which come into force this month, are aligned with the GMC’s own guidance for doctors who provide cosmetic interventions, which also contain a provision on targeting cosmetic interventions advertising at children and young people.
The Pink News video is editorial, not marketing, and does not fall under these rules. But its situation on Snapchat is a key concern. Girls aged between 13 and 17 years old are the biggest demographic group on the platform, accounting for 12 per cent of the total audience. Overall, its audience is young and female....
The Pink News video is the latest in a plethora of social media content affirming the benefit, the “euphoria”, of gender transition. Content about eating disorders and self harm is banned on Snapchat, but the transgender counter culture is both welcomed by the social media platforms, and welcoming to the gender dysphoric. This video, like other transgender social media content, contains no balance, caveats, words of caution or warning. There is no doubt. Only joy and certainty. And that seems dangerous.
I caught up with Sinead. She told me she still has stubble and “a baldy bit” on her head, but says that if she makes “an effort I am taken for a woman, and I never thought that would happen”.
“For a long time I couldn’t shower without a T shirt because of the mastectomy scars. I wish it hadn’t happened, but I don’t hate my body anymore,” she told me. “But for the rest of my life I will always be bewildered that this was allowed to happen. I was dealing with unaddressed trauma from sexual abuse. I needed therapy and help, not a bilateral mastectomy.”
We discussed “What is Top Surgery Like For Trans Guys”. “That was a fucking train wreck,” she said:
The thing that sticks out to me was they glitter up the language. It’s deceptive. It’s a bilateral double mastectomy. They don’t keep it clinical and factual, they make it seem like the best thing you can do for yourself. They have chosen a platform which is full of young, vulnerable girls. Even if it’s not meant to be malicious it is irresponsible. At the very end it says with top surgery you are not going to be stuck feeling uncomfortable for the rest of your life That is such a dangerous thing to say to a teenage girl because it means if you don’t do it you will be unhappy with who you are for the rest of your life.
It's a disgrace. Pink News is encouraging vulnerable young women to mutilate themselves irreversibly, when there's abundant evidence that for many - for the overwhelming majority - what's needed is not body mutilation but time, counselling, sensible advice. What's more a sizeable number of these girls would normally grow up to be lesbians if left alone, so if nothing else the whole thing stinks of homophobia. But Pink News, set up to support the gay community, are so far down the gender rabbit hole they just can't see it. I hope down the line there's a flood of legal claims against the bastards.
This ties in with the latest Glinner article from Eliza Mondegreen - Why does gender dysphoria get worse when you realize you're 'trans'?
That't the problem with growing up, you have to take responsibility for your own actions.
Posted by: Vatsmith | May 03, 2022 at 12:25 PM
A problem is a problem but it helps to have some "perspective". This is worth a read.
"One in three hundred Canadians identify as transgender or non-binary. Or to be precise, of the nearly 30.5 million people in Canada aged 15 and over living in a private household, 59,460 were transgender and another 41,335 were non-binary. The data comes from a new census which Statistics Canada claims to be a world first to report on transgender and non-binary people."
https://unherd.com/thepost/canada-census-reveals-how-many-people-are-trans/
UK population 65 million, so double these Canadian figures for the UK?! It would also be interesting to know what it was, say, 100 years ago!
Posted by: Alan | May 03, 2022 at 04:08 PM