Why Is It Always About The Boobs?
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Dear readers, I do not mean to alarm you, but in order to proceed with tonight’s newsletter, I must announce: I am the owner of an adult pair of breasts.
Which means, like perhaps roughly 50% of you reading this, I have spent way over half of my life housing and clothing, measuring, assessing, being acutely aware of, and dodging probing questions/eyes/advances about this particular part of my body. They are a pain in the chest, to be honest.
And, like, I’ll be honest: I can completely understand not wanting to deal with them.
When I was in seventh grade, my teacher (who was fired that year, bless) would literally speak directly into my chest during class—so much so, that other kids noticed and teased me about it. It started a lifelong habit of crossing my arms when I have something important to say.
In high school, if I forgot a sports bra to a field hockey game, I simply couldn’t play.
Today, when my doorbell rings and I’m not dressed, I have to do a whole entire bra dance before I answer it.
Fortunately for me, I am (fairly, unobtrusively) comfortable identifying with the gender I was assigned at birth. Yet, as someone who has undergone pretty extensive cosmetic adjustments to make myself feel more like myself, it’s not a stretch for me to imagine wanting them gone. Now imagine if my boobs were ground zero of the disconnect between how I was perceived and how I actually belonged. They wouldn’t just be an annoyance or a site of frustration, but something that caused a tremendous amount of undue stress and sadness.
Yet, for a certain part of America, anyone voluntarily removing their breasts because of utter discomfort (despite having possibly endured years of horror and embarrassment from, say, your seventh grade teacher) is beyond the pale, much worse than rhinoplasty or breast enhancements/reductions or liposuction or tummy tucks or Brazilian butt lifts or any other procedure that we have, for some reason, deemed socially acceptable.
But that part of America isn’t interested in why womanhood is reduced to body parts or reproductive apparatuses. They just wanna get angry.
Last week, in an eerie reprisal of the entire Dylan Mulvaney sitch, Doc Martens shared an image of a professional artist reinterpreting its classic boot that featured a person with a mastectomy scar. Mind you, didn’t put into production, didn’t use in a marketing campaign, didn’t knock on your door and force you to wear them to a bar mitzvah…simply shared their existence. And the Daily Mail was on it! Transphobic commentators, Fox News, and weird British broadcasters threw a fit about an image of a shoe that is categorically queer as hell.
The main argument espoused is this: “Women” who cut off their breasts are engaging in mutilation supported by trans ideology. We should no more encourage this kind of sickness than we would encourage, say, an anorexic getting stomach bypass surgery, and it is as non-sensical as “cutting off a healthy limb.”
Note: If you cannot intellectually differentiate between a limb and a breast, I don’t know what I can say in the length of a newsletter to change your mind.
In fact, comparing boobs to limbs is a regular occurrence in this discourse, using “the removal of perfectly healthy limbs” as analogy. (Comparing breasts to limbs is actually a hilarious image. Like, a boob being used to frolic across the floor or fling a baseball or put on shoes.) I’ve accrued some of my favorite responses below, but I am keeping the text small so you have to zoom—warning, it is extremely upsetting language.
It is entirely reasonable, given the emphasis and obsession with breasts in our culture, to feel completely discordant with their existence, as if they are a central tenet to your being. And if *I* feel that way, imagine how that incongruence is multiplied if you are transgender.
It took me a while to figure out what about this Doc Martens outburst bothered me so much, other than it’s another great example of rage farming in the guise of “just asking questions.” Why is this boycott somehow more stupid than all the other fruitless boycotts around brands mentioning trans folks existing?
The reason is, I suppose, is each of those Tweets (X’s? Ugh.) above are trying to convince you that they are hoping to protect “perfectly healthy women” and that being trans can be cured. When I pull back and examine the overwhelming concerns that are leveraged at the trans community, the vast majority1 are on the behalf of women. Specifically, about what trans people might do to cis women.
In fact, a great deal of hand-wringing around the transgender agenda is under the guise of protecting women: Protecting women in sports, protecting women in jails, protecting women in bathrooms, in single-sex changing rooms, in domestic violence shelters, from mutilating their otherwise healthy bodies. These are the catalysts that get anti-trans people frothing at the mouth: the transes are coming for your wifes. And when you—or at least when I —think about it, all of those concerns have roots firmly in misogyny2, as if women need sanctioned patriarchal establishments to enshrine their very wellbeing.
As if women, we who have built networks and supported each other through mutual aid since the dawn of time, need to be protected from the “mounting contagion” of becoming trans. Or that our body parts, those “healthy limbs”, are so precious that a person assigned female at birth who removes them becomes lost and incomprehensible. Or that womanhood is some sort of territory that needs sports organizations, carceral systems, predominantly male lawmakers, governors, and institutions built by white men to defend it from the encroaching threat of the other.
As if, merely by being female or assigned female at birth, we are prey, we are vulnerable, weak, womanly, and we automatically need the protection of structures who never cared about inequality until we brought gender identity to the forefront.
I do not want external power structures, ones that have been historically complicit in the oppression of women, to “protect” me. I do not want laws preventing trans women from competing in sports, I want equal pay for athletes. I do not want policies separating trans and cis prisoners, I want prison reform, or at the very least an acknowledgement of the vast sexual assault networks in jails. I do not want someone legislating whether or not someone born with my genes can remove their breasts of their own volition—I want freaking health care. I don’t trust patriarchal figures to protect me when my own seventh grade teacher couldn’t stop ogling my tits.
Catharine MacKinnon, a feminist legal scholar who can write one hell of a barn-burner—though don’t love her take on sex work—writes:
Honestly, seeing “women” as a turf to be defended, as opposed to a set of imperatives and limitations to be criticized, challenged, changed, or transcended, has been pretty startling.
The rage that people felt after seeing those mastectomy scars on a pair of Doc Martens (as if mastectomies only belonged to trans men, and women like Angelina Jolie don’t get them3) is absolutely misogynist in nature, point blank: We must protect these trans men easily swayed girls from destroying what we deem valuable about their bodies. We need to protect them from “…These people (who are) evil for promoting confused little girls to cut off their breast on a whim.” There is a citation here, via this link. Don’t click it.
[Quickly, for due diligence, much is made about the rising number of voluntary mastectomies in teens under 18. To clarify, from 2016 to 2019, there have been 829 reported gender-confirming chest surgeries in youth 13-17, and 44% of those belonged to 17 year olds. That is .28% of the entire population of youth who identify as gender non-conforming, and also doesn’t delineate boys suffering from gynaecomastia. That is, suffice to say, an extremely small number—much smaller than the amount of teens who get breast augmentations. This is not an epidemic, as headlines might make you believe.]
Have you ever met someone who has received top surgery? This is anecdotal of course, but the people I’ve encountered describe themselves as feeling both lighter and more whole, like a weight has been lifted off, um, their chest. They also have very low rates of regret, though like many expensive, life-altering decisions4, the regret rate is not zero. They love seeing themselves with their shirt off—an experience that is frankly foreign to me.
Remember: So many treatments are gender affirming. Face injections are gender affirming, making women feel more feminine. Hair transplants make men more secure. There is an extremely profitable cosmetic industry that makes modern humans feel at peace with their bodies, which is the definition of gender affirmation. And, like, while you might not agree with it, it’s generally acceptable practice, one that doesn’t send Fox News into apoplectic shock every twenty seconds.
This hand-wringing and concern trolling, the backlash and the boycotts, are all allegedly done on behalf of cis women, a group apparently in need of institutions to come and protect them from the perils of threatening gender ideology.
None of these institutions, the ones criticizing gender expression, are interested in radical or revolutionary work around gender, race, class. No one upset about top surgery has the best interest of women in mind. No one furious about a trans woman using a bathroom considers that most abuse happens in the home, not in the unisex airplane loo. No institution established to uphold and affirm what society has told us is white-approved “femininity” is actually interested in protecting any type of woman.
“Discrimination against trans people is discrimination on the basis of sex, that is gender, the social meaning of sex,” writes MacKinnon. “It does not, contrary to anti-trans self-identified feminists, endanger women or feminism, including what some in this group call ‘women’s sex-based rights’.” Let me be clear: anyone upset about various representations of gender are more concerned with policing other people’s bodies than any sort of protection.
Leave boobs alone, unless you have them. And even if you do have them, maybe just worry about what yours are up to. And as long as you aren’t watching any scuttle around like the “healthy limbs” they are, keep your concerns about other people’s to your damn self.
The conversation has since shifted to children as well, but women and children are often lumped together as helpless entities that need protection by the powerful establishments that are often work against both groups.
And white supremacy, as so many of these arguments echo tactics used from the Reconstruction era all to Emmett Till and beyond.
She also got a boob job afterwards to make her “normal” again, so, um, that’s cool.
Though I think things like, say, marriage or home buying (other expensive life-altering decisions) have higher regret rates, generally.