Cutting Your Breasts off Is Disgusting, but Making Them Bigger Is Beautiful?
Liv Hewson of Yellowjackets speaks against transphobia.
Top surgeries are so revolting. Unless they’re boob jobs, right? Policing people’s bodies has no grounds in common sense!
It’s nothing new, it’s just one more facet of the hyper-hypocrisy that has taken the world by storm in the past few years. Drooling over breast enlargements but turning your face away from top surgeries is a low form of hypocrisies that many are guilty of.
Even without being transphobes.
In a recent interview with Teen Vogue, Liv Hewson, who plays Van on Yellowjackets, described in detail the inappropriate reaction of disgust that many transphobes have to trans and nonbinary people having gender-affirming surgeries.
Like the one Liv had. Liv is non-binary and had the top surgery they’ve been dreaming of since 2012.
Of course, along with the surgery to reduce her breasts to a more manly type chest came the backlash. Big, ugly, hate-spewing backlash.
It’s a disgust reaction, and I do not take disgust into account as a legitimate point of discourse. I don’t have to entertain it and I’m not going to. It’s a waste of everybody’s time, it’s knee-jerk, it’s not grounded in reality, and it’s not useful.
The bigger the painfully-won freedoms of an underprivileged group, the bigger the craze among those who want those freedoms taken away.
Enter top surgery! This is a particularly nauseating one, that inspires a lot of crazy reactions, and a lot of people to recoil in disgust and turn their heads.
Top surgery is surgery performed on the chest as part of gender reassignment, especially to remove breast tissue and produce a masculine appearance of the chest in female-to-male surgery.
And for some, it’s a huge problem. Especially when we’re talking about people with breasts who want to become people without breasts.
That is considered a capital sin. If you’re lucky enough to have breasts on your body, you should keep them, they say.
Who are they? Well, pretty much the same category of people who are against you doing anything that doesn’t fit their ideology.
Even if it doesn’t impact them or anybody else in any way. Nobody is getting hurt except their narrow ideas of what you (and your body and actions) should look like.
Top surgery is a much bigger stomach-turner than most, apparently. Because cutting off your breasts is (in their eyes) a complete rejection of the most feminine part of you. And you’re not allowed to do that.
Let’s step in their shoes for a second, though.
If you consider that somebody is willingly chopping off perfectly healthy parts of their body for an idea, it does seem a bit creepy. Especially if you’ve seen photos with the results of the surgery and you know the fatty breast tissue is cut off and the chest is left with 2 long scars where the breasts should be.
I know there’s a lot more to unpack here, but let’s keep it at this stage for a second, because this is the stage the critics are at.
‘OMG, what a beautiful woman and she decided to chop off her boobs, and leave scars instead. Isn’t that gruesome mutilation?’
Well, let’s humor them for a second and consider it is mutilation.
But if that’s mutilation… why aren’t the same people horrified by breast enhancements?
Breast enhancement surgeries cut a hole underneath the breast, and forcefully shove inside it a bag of silicone. The surgery is violent and gruesome, and people who have breast enhancement have a myriad of complications (cancer being one of them). Also, you are left with scars on your chest too.
Why isn’t there a huge backlash against it? It’s just as gruesome and as mutilating, with much more severe and debilitating long-term effects.
Why isn’t that a problem?
South Park nailed it exactly one decade ago when one of the little girl characters in the series goes to the plastic surgeon to get her breasts reduced and she is met with huge disapproval from the doctor.
“Making breasts larger is a beautiful and wonderful thing. Making them smaller is…insane.”
And though you might think it’s just a comedy show, it actually voices the views of a huge chunk of society.
Who decides what’s wrong or right? Who decided the same surgery is ok for some reasons and not for others?
The very reason behind it. Breast augmentations are done to attract men. Breast reductions have nothing to do with men.
And in a deeply misogynistic society, that’s a problem. How dare you not exist for male entertainment? How dare you decide for your own body instead of making it a shrine to male desire?
How dare you, even if you had breast cancer, take out the diseased breast tissue and not do reconstructive surgery afterward?
Yes, it goes as far as that. Women who went through breast reduction surgery because of breast cancer are a target of bullying because they no longer have breasts. The part that it’s because of a possibly deadly disease is irrelevant to the bullies.
If we are to truly define this for what it is, top surgery has nothing to do with mutilation and trying to protect people from its supposedly awful results.
If that were the case, they’d be screaming against breast enhancements too, which are much more dangerous and with severe consequences.
Opposing the trans community is not protecting anybody, but punishing anyone who dares to deviate from the norm.
If you’re not cisgender and hetero, you need to be punished for the audacity of wanting to be different, feeling different, and bothering everyone around you with your difference.
There is only one way to be: either male or female (but preferably male), blatantly straight, and if at all possible, white.
Sure, some have learned to tolerate females and non-whites, but it hasn’t been an easy process and there’s still a long way to go and a lot of pullback.
It’s a situation that has a lot of other consequences that go beyond the trans community and permeates every level of society.
I remember a conversation I had in May with a friend. We were on a private beach in Cuba, enjoying a beautiful sunset and the gentle breeze over the ocean, perched up on our cozy chaise lounges, when she suddenly put her hand over her right breast and sighed:
‘I wish I could cut these off.’
I looked at her hand and had no idea what she was talking about.
Was it her swimming suit? My first thought was that she might be talking about going topless and just as I was about to open my mouth and encourage her to do that, I had to close it back down.
‘My breasts always hurt’, she said. ‘All the time, ever since I got my first period. Constant pain. Sometimes they are so tender I can’t even stand the blouse touching them. I hate them. I want them off my body.’
I couldn’t say I felt the same way.
My breasts have never hurt, I don’t even know what that feels like. But if I had a body part that gave me constant pain, I’d want to cut it off too.
She doesn’t have large breasts, so a mere reduction wouldn’t solve the problem. And she doesn’t want to have children, so her breasts are practically useless, considering that their only practical function is to feed a baby.
The only reason she keeps them is because, without them, she’d be regarded as an amputee. As if she mutilated herself, regardless of the reason.
Would her boyfriend leave her? Would she be able to find another? She’s only 30 years old and is not ready to let go of them despite the huge constant pain they put her through.
And although that is highly unfair, it’s also understandable.
It’s natural for people to have certain desires. It’s ok to want a woman with breasts and even have preferences on their size or shape and you are allowed to look for somebody who fits into that mold.
What’s not ok though is to be an entitled know-it-all who requires everybody to fit that mold and react like a toddler having a meltdown when they don’t.
Liv Hewson said it best:
It’s just control: “I want you to make decisions based on my level of comfort with your existence.” That is completely irrational.
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