Chestfeeding

How are so many young women not seeing the misogyny of this? It’s basically “Stop talking about anything your bodies do as being linked to your sex, do you think you’re SPECIAL or something.”

I've always thought of the chest as more like the container (like other uses of chest) for rib cage, lungs etc, and breast the external part. But agree language has shifted so that we tend to use chest and breast to distinguish m/f - so "bare-chested" for men to distinguish from the connotation of "bare-breasted". If it's actual breast tissue we're talking about, then as Anna had it, breast does make more sense....

^Hyperion arose, and on the stars
Lifted his curved lids, and kept them wide
Until it ceas'd; and still he kept them wide:
And still they were the same bright, patient stars.
Then with a slow incline of his broad breast,
Like to a diver in the pearly seas,
Forward he stoop'd over the airy shore,
And plung'd all noiseless into the deep night. ^

Keats

If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun Shakespeare

As from my soul, which in thy breast doth lie Shakespeare

a. The superior ventral surface of the human body, extending from the neck to the abdomen. A dictionary

It does both mean breast tissue, but also 'chest'

No, breast means actual bits of breast tissue. Which men have too. Proper XY men. And when they get cancer in it, which rarely they do, for years they have been treated for breast cancer.

Which is really fucking hard for them. But at no point have any of the amazing men I have met with breast cancer asked for it to be called chest cancer because it was upsetting them. They were too busy with real issues, like being a man dying of breast cancer.

'Robin red breast'

Also, it's going to be a cold day in hell when I'm fine about being called my children's 'Gestational parent'

Fuck off with reducing me to one of my functions.

100% with you Golden.

Here's a question:

'Breast' just means 'chest' I thought (eg. Robin read breast, breastplate) - that's what I first learned it as, and fount the word 'Breasts' for my boobs to be a bit weird, this usage is a bit archaic, but not totally out of use.

It seems to me, that breastfeeding should be fine for everyone, although if transmen don't want to use it, that's fine because they're talking about their own bodies, but transwomen really don't have a leg to stand on regarding it - because the word 'breast' also means chest, and we all have those.

You know, I don't really care if a transman refers to 'chestfeeding' if they don't think of their 'milky bits' as breasts or feminine. They can use whatever words they wish to express their experience.

And, to be quite honest, I don't care if a transwoman feels excluded because it's a part of the female experience they can't ever share, or it reminds them that they have a man's body or whatever.

But I have been a pregnant woman on more than one occasion; I am a mother to 2 children. I did take maternity leave for each of them and I did breastfeed them for 18 months each.

If some people don't feel that language describes their experience, then fine, but I believe that they do describe mine. And I shall continue to use them to do so.

I've been following the AA thread. Lots of people feeling like their language to talk about themselves is being taken away from them, a couple of particular commenters asking questions of the handmaidens that have popped up along the "but what is a man/woman"/"sex isn't gender tho" lines - no straight answers though, shockingly enough.